Folks,
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/9961300/
This piece appeared in the Rolling Stone last Friday. It considers,
without immediately jumping to its conclusion, whether GWB may be what
the title suggests. (For our international readers, that's "Worst US
President", of course -- I'm sure that Brazil, Australia and wherever
else we hail from have had their own Boneheads of State.)
He's up against the likes of the corrupt but apparently likable Warren
G. Harding and the corrupt and eminently unlikable Richard M. Nixon.
It's a longish piece, but has some interesting moments.
After reviewing a 2004 survey of 415 historians, of whom 81% rated
Bush's administration "a failure" (and of the remaining 19%, a tenth
only considered him to be the best president "since Bill Clinton"), he
goes on to say:
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone
pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are
generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely
divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about
being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we
make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or
even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the
evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys,
conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as
liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and
worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than
the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers
have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently
biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more
about "the current crop of history professors" than about
Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians
were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias,
they might be expected to call Bush the worst president
since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more
than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of
those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before
Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as
Bush.
Dave "Heckuva Job, Georgie" Land
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