Bush: Only the Fifth Worst President Of All Time?
Michael Lind has an article in the Washington Post claiming that George W. Bush is only the fifth-worst President of all time. I don’t know if I buy it, though.
Lind says that the worst was James Buchanan:
In office when Lincoln’s election in 1860 triggered the secession of one Southern state after another, Buchanan sat by as the country crumbled. In his December 1860 message to Congress, three months before Lincoln was inaugurated, he declared that the states had no right to secede, but that the federal government had no right to stop them. By the time he left office, seven states had left the Union, and the Confederates had looted the arsenals in the South. If Buchanan had exercised his powers as commander in chief, the rebels might have been stopped at far less than the eventual cost of the Civil War — more than half a million American dead and the ruin of the South for generations.
Yeah, ok, I can go along with that. Causing the Civil War through his inaction which led to 500,000 dead Americans, that’s pretty bad. Dubya still has a lot of Americans to go before he reaches those kinds of numbers.
But I’m not so sure that Lind’s pick for second worst President of all time is really worse than Bush.
[Andrew] Johnson, Lincoln’s vice president and successor, a Tennessean who vetoed civil rights acts and blocked the 14th Amendment because he didn’t like blacks…. Johnson’s policies led to his impeachment and forced the Republicans in Congress to create a quasi-parliamentary system marginalizing the president.
I don’t know, that doesn’t sound that bad. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still pretty bad, and he doesn’t sound like a very good President at all, but compared to everything that Bush has done, that doesn’t seem that terrible. Can you really put Bush’s worst actions up against that and say that Johnson trying to fight against civil rights was worse than Bush? That doesn’t sound right to me.
I guess I can go along with Richard Nixon and James Madison (for the War of 1812), though. Which means that I really just think that Johnson is ranked too high (or is that low) on the list, which would bump Bush up to the fourth worst American President in history, in my opinion.
Lind has a pretty good summary of why Bush deserves to be on the list, in case there’s anybody who hasn’t been watching the news during the past six years:
The fact that Bush followed the invasion of Afghanistan, which had sheltered al-Qaeda, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, will puzzle historians for centuries. It is as though, after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR had asked Congress to declare war on Argentina.
Why did Bush do it? Did he really believe that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction? Was it about oil? Israel? Revenge for Hussein’s alleged attempt on Bush’s father’s life? The war will join the sinking of the USS Maine and the grassy knoll among the topics to exercise conspiracy theorists for generations, and the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib will join images of the napalmed Vietnamese girl and executed Filipino rebels in the gallery of U.S. atrocities.
And don’t forget, he still has 25 months to go. That’s a hell of a long time to do even more damage to America and the rest of the world. And then who knows what kind of buried secrets future historians and Congressional inquiries will uncover once he’s out of the White House; I have faith—Bush would love my faith, wouldn’t he?—that Bush still has a chance at climbing even higher up that list.
Go Bush, go!