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A recent unscientific survey of 109 historians says “Yes!” 

61% rated George W. Bush as worst president ever, and 35% put him in the bottom third.

98.2% of respondents rated his presidency as a failure.

A recent Pew Research Center poll showed Bush’s approval rating at a new all-time low of 28%

A few comments from historians who participated:

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

“When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of area: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.”

“His domestic policies have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”

“Bush does only two things well,” said one of the most distinguished historians.  “He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for fucking up everything else he even approaches.  His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.”

Read the whole article by Robert S. McElvaine on the History News Network website.

While out on the campaign trail in January of 2000 Bush asked, “Is our children learning?”

Seven years later the more relevant question is:  “Is our president learning?”  Apparently not:

“The United States will not avert our eyes from a crisis that challenges the conscience of the world.” – W at the White House, May 29, 2007

And Gerald Ford also had something to say from beyond the grave:

Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction.  And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.

And the most recent condemnation from a living president:

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Jimmy Carter, May 19, 2007

Agreed.  Now what are we going to do about it?

Rudy Giuliani speaking to supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire on Tuesday:

“If any Republican is elected president — and I think, obviously, I would be the best at this — we will remain on offense and will anticipate what (the terrorists) will do and try to stop them before they do it,” Giuliani said.

…

[He] said Tuesday night that America would ultimately defeat terrorism no matter which party gains the White House.

“But the question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have,” Giuliani said. “If we are on defense (with a Democratic president), we will have more losses and it will go on longer.”

“I listen a little to the Democrats, and if one of them gets elected, we are going on defense,” Giuliani continued. “We will wave the white flag on Iraq. We will cut back on the Patriot Act, electronic surveillance, interrogation and we will be back to our pre-Sept. 11 attitude of defense.”

Judging from Giuliani’s remarks, you’d think that it was a Democratic President vacationing in Texas when he was handed a memo titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

I read this in a column by E.J. Dionne today:

The old conservatism is in crisis, Bush Republicanism (of the son’s variety but not the father’s) is a tainted brand, and no candidate has emerged as the Next New Thing that the party wants or needs.

That reminded me of another article that I had read about a month ago by Ross Douthat in The Atlantic Monthly.  Douthat suggests that the “working class conservatism” of Reagan and now George W. Bush will continue to “dominate American politics.”  I nearly spewed beer all over my magazine when I read that.  I wondered what the hell this guy was thinking and read on.  He wrote:

Since the Republicans’ stinging defeat in the 2006 midterm elections, Bush’s distinctive ideological cocktail—social conservatism and an accommodation with big government at home, and a moralistic interventionism abroad—has similarly been derided by many as political poison. The various ingredients of “Bushism,” it’s been argued, have alienated fiscal hawks and foreign-policy realists, Catholics and libertarians—in short, everyone but the party’s evangelical base.

But someone must have forgotten to tell the GOP presidential field. If you consider how the nation’s most ambitious Republicans are positioning themselves for 2008, Bushism looks like it could have surprising staying power.

…

And although Brownback is the only candidate in the field so far with Bush’s personal connection to the party’s religious conservatives, everyone—even McCain, even Giuliani—is actively courting them. This is partly because without evangelical Christians, there would essentially be no Republican Party anymore: Evangelicals provided more votes to the Republicans in last year’s midterms than African Americans and union members combined gave to the Democrats. Their influence within the party more or less requires that primary candidates endorse Bush-style moralism, not only on gay marriage and abortion but in foreign policy as well—which means continued support for Israel, a continued drift toward confrontation with Iran, and further ventures in conservative humanitarianism, along the lines of Bush’s AIDS-in-Africa initiative.
…

Keeping the party’s socially conservative base happy without losing the country’s religious middle is a challenge, but Bush met it successfully across three election cycles.

…

While journalists and historians debate where Bush went wrong, Republicans are likely to spend the next decade trying to imitate his successes.

Right there is where I just about lost it again.  What successes?  George Bush hasn’t succeeded at anything but somehow managing to make it into the White House with the help of his dad’s buddy Jim Baker and the Supreme Court, and then getting re-elected in 2004 even though none of his policies succeeded as planned.  Pretty amazing when you think about it, and I do every day.  How did this incompetent, dishonest, drunken, born-again little frat boy become our president?  Why would anybody embrace “Bushism” as Douthat calls it?  None of it has worked.  Everything he’s done has been a total failure.

A “tainted brand” as Dionne says is an understatement.  Republican candidates should avoid “Bushism” like they would a two-day-old opened bottle of Two-Buck Chuck.  It’s swill!  Stay away from it!

But Douthat goes on to say how it’s not the policy that has failed, it’s Bush who has failed.

Indeed, as in the Nixon era, it’s possible that what has made the last six years so polarizing isn’t the president’s ideology but the president himself—his tongue-tied speeches and lack of interest in policy detail, his mix of incompetence and abrasive self-assurance, his cronyism and disdain for compromise. Once Bush has been ushered offstage, a Republican Party fashioned in his image could actually help unite the country, as Bush-the-candidate famously promised to do, rather than divide it.

So what he’s saying is that the Republicans can continue to push forward their agenda of privatizing government, rewarding big business instead of the average American, shifting the tax burden from the rich to the poor, gutting social programs, ignoring environmental concerns, bullying the rest of the world, and starting wars any damn time they please.

I don’t care who’s pushing that agenda.  I don’t think the American people want anything close to four more years of that shit.

Democrats!  This coming presidential election is yours for the taking.  Don’t screw it up again.

Let’s get one thing straight:  President George W Bush will not pull American forces out of Iraq.  It doesn’t matter what the Iraq Study Group, or the Democrats, or the talking heads on TV, or the editorial pages of major newspapers or anyone else says.  Or what the American people want. Bush is not looking for a graceful exit.  He will cling to one aim: victory.  Absent a definable success he will leave the mess in Iraq to his successor.

We should not mistake this obduracy for the more positive traits of steadfastness or resolve.  It is, rather, a stubbornness born of desperation, pure and simple.  He may be the most hopeless president of the modern era, but he knows beyond doubt that his incumbency in that office is bound inextricably with the Iraq War.  If he can salvage something resembling success (like a functioning government able to exert and maintain authority over and deliver services to the people – you know, the thing they had before we invaded) then, in his mind, he may yet be vindicated in the eyes of history.  He therefore lacks any incentive to pull American troops out before “victory” is achieved.  And since “victory” in any recognisable form is unlikely ever, let alone by the time he leaves office at the end of 2008, American soldiers and marines will assuredly still be in Iraq in numbers not far off their present level. 

Assuming the United States forces continue to actively confront the insurgency and try to ameliorate the sectarian violence in Baghdad, we will likely have lost another 2000 troops killed and 14,000 wounded by the end of 2008. 

For Bush and many on the right, withdrawal is a four-letter word for retreat, whether it’s phased over a year or starts next week.  He may evoke the wrath, even contempt of the country and the world if he leaves office with Iraq in unchanging chaos whilst American forces remain caught in the maelstrom; however, nobody will be able to say he “lost” Iraq.  Either his Democratic successor will win that distinction – certainly if the right wing media and Republicans have anything to do with it – or, if it’s John McCain, the US will remain in Iraq for at least another eight years and so, depending on the outcome, the blame or credit will, at worst, be shared. 

So forget diplomacy, engagement, multi-lateral conferences, Israeli-Palestinian solutions, Iran and Syria, rethinking our Middle-East strategy, reduction of US forces by early 2008, Iraq Study Group and all the rest.  Bush will have none of it (no matter what he says publicly) and since he has no election to face before his term of office is up, he doesn’t have to worry about public opinion.  About the only thing in the ISG report he may embrace is a boost in the number of troops of 20-50,000 – an insufficient number to make any appreciable difference even for a year.

Ironically, he will be aided in this by the military brass whose prestige has taken a tremendous hammering thanks to the ineptitude of their performance in Iraq – as distinct from the soldiers and marines themselves, who have been nothing short of magnificent.  The Pentagon brass fear defeat even more than the continuing degradation of the military’s ground forces from the Iraq conflict.  They vowed never to fight another Vietnam-style insurgency and having neglected to prepare for one, are now faced with the prospect of a similar humiliation.  They will want to “stay the course” too, until the country’s leaders say otherwise.

Bush bullied the Congress and hoodwinked most of the American people into supporting the folly that was the invasion of Iraq.  He has committed the greatest strategic foreign policy blunder in modern American history and we are well and truly mired.  He has set us up for the very defeat he warns us against almost daily and his only contribution from here on out will be to ensure that he is not in the White House when the reality of it can no longer be denied.  

Mr Bush needs a reality check.  Unfortunately, so do the rest of us.

Karl Rove is no idiot. When he promises an ‘October Surprise‘, he delivers.  So, if he promised an ‘October Surprise‘ back in September, he knew what he was delivering.  I have pondered this topic in a few other posts(here, here, and here), but never found his special gift to the world.

But what is it???

I think his ‘October Surprise’ is a gift that keeps on giving, for at least the next 18 months or so.

The Republicans took a dive in the midterms.

Before we look at the possibility of the Republicans taking a dive, I want to state that I wholeheartedly believe that voters overwhelmingly wanted Republicans out of office and a change of direction for the nation. But, perhaps Karl Rove did not use all the tricks (ex. electronic voting manipulation, caging lists, etc.) which are accessible to him, allowing the Democrats to take control.

Basically, the Republicans could benefit greatly from taking a dive, letting the shit hit the fan with Democrats in power, then in 2008 come in to clean up the mess. I know, the mess is the Republican’s mess, but remember, these guys operate at a 5th grade mentality.

If you don’t believe me about their mentality, check out this passage from an article in Rolling Stone that I mentioned previously:

According to the rules, conferences have to include at least one public, open meeting…amazingly, the Republicans sneak off to hold the real conference, forcing the Democrats to turn amateur detective and go searching the Capitol grounds for the meeting. “More often than not, we’re trying to figure out where the conference is,” says one House aide.

In one legendary incident, Rep. Charles Rangel went searching for a secret conference being held by Thomas. When he found the room where Republicans closeted themselves, he knocked and knocked on the door, but no one answered. A House aide compares the scene to the famous “Land Shark” skit from Saturday Night Live, with everyone hiding behind the door afraid to make a sound. “Rangel was the land shark, I guess,” the aide jokes. But the real punch line came when Thomas finally opened the door. “This meeting,” he informed Rangel, “is only open to the coalition of the willing.”

So, now that I’ve illustrated the maturity of the Republicans, let’s regress to childhood for a moment and role play…

You are a child in a room. There is one other person in the room. There is a table. On the table is a jar filled with your favorite candy. It isn’t your candy, but you love the candy. You eat a piece, yummmmmmm. You eat another and another. Pretty soon the jar is empty. You hear someone coming.

You have two options. One is to stick around and take responsibility for eating all of the candy. The other option is to go out the back door and avoid any confrontation as to who ate the candy. You know that if you leave, the other person will be held responsible for your actions.

So, what would you do as a child? Not just any child, but the type of child who holds ‘public’ meetings in secret?

Not the best analogy, but hopefully it makes the point. I think that Karl Rove had the Republicans take a dive so that in 2008 they could come back to ‘fix’ the results of the growing mess that the Republicans made in the past 6 years.

The list of the current mess is long and I am tired, but how about Iraq, corruption, a housing bubble about to burst, the growing deficit, and on and on…

The electorate has an amazingly short memory and I predict that the next 2 years will be a period of Republicans turning these into Democrat failures.

Looks like the Neocons may be losing control of the president. Apparently, he is going to be reprogrammed to remove the Neocon agenda.
Maureen Dowd of the NY Times discusses this today on NBC’s Meet the Press:

Transcript:

MR. RUSSERT: Maureen Dowd, here’s the cover of Newsweek magazine. “Father Knows Best.” With Bush 41, Bush 43, and it’s subtitled “With Congress Lost, Iraq in Chaos, Bush Calls In His Dad’s Team. Can James, James Baker and Company Save the Son’s Presidency?” Very similar to a column you wrote on Thursday. You think there’s truth to that?

MS. DOWD: Well, I think the best way for me to describe it is that, remember when parents would have their teenagers kidnapped by a Moony cult, and they would try and, and get him back, and deprogram him? That’s what’s—the, the 41 group is doing. They’re trying to get W back away from the cult of the neocons, as they see it, and reprogram him in the family tradition of internationalism, diplomacy, nuance. And Baker’s the deprogrammer.

Looks like the Iraq Survey Group will start the process of reprogramming on Monday when they meet with the President to offer their preliminary advice.

A message from George Bush…

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A ‘One Finger Victory Salute’? We’ll see about that tomorrow night when the midterm results come in.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to give George Bush a ‘One Finger Victory Salute’ when he visited Seattle (quite cathartic). He was probably afraid to look out the window of his limo, as it passed the large group of protestors, and unfortunately missed my ’salute’…

Check out Electoral-Vote.com for the latest poll numbers. It looks like the house is going to flip parties and the Senate will likely do so too.

Any other result should be considered highly suspect.  As mentioned previously, the electronic voting machines are easily manipulated. If the Republicans some how maintain control, all eyes should focus on Karl Rove (the Architect) and the voting machines.

Via The Guardian