Without a doubt, George W. Bush leaves office at noon on Tuesday forever marked as the worst president in United States history to date - his terms in office marked by two failed wars; America's global reputation in tatters; her financial house in ruin, with record-setting debt that will cripple future generations for decades to come; and let's not forget the lawlessness with which Mr. Bush and his administration ruled the country, essentially using the Constitution as toilet paper before shredding it to pieces.Many would argue that other chief executives deserve the distinction of "worst president" much more than Mr. Bush: James Buchanan for his unwillingness to confront southern states who threatened to secede from the Union following the election of Abraham Lincoln...Herbert Hoover for his paralysis during the early years of the Great Depression...Lyndon Johnson for his mismanagement of the Vietnam War...Richard Nixon over Watergate...Jimmy Carter for his impotence on economic matters and the Iran hostage crisis.
All valid options, each of those men among the bottom tier of presidents. But the difference, in my opinion, is that none of those other presidents had the distinction of failing at every level, on just about every issue. The other members of that lower tier can at least point to some successes somewhere in their presidencies. Whether it be on the domestic front (Johnson's civil rights legislation) or in foreign policy (Carter's Camp David accords), not everything they touched turned to shit.
George W. Bush, on the other hand...
It started with his campaign and the election of 2000. Running as a "compassionate conservative," Mr. Bush promised to work with Republicans and Democrats to get things done in D.C., and to bridge the partisan divide that poisoned the waters of government during the Clinton years.
I, for one, didn't believe Mr. Bush. I didn't trust his frat-boy personality, and beneath the prerequisite centrist campaign veneer I sensed an uber-conservative partisanship that was too dangerous for America in the 21st century. Not to mention the fact that it was Bush's Republican Party that started the partisan warfare of the 90s in the first place, refusing to accept Bill Clinton's presidency as legitimate, and working to derail it from day one.
How ironic then that Mr. Bush's election in 2000 came at the hands of a Supreme Court ruling that pulled the battered Republican ticket over the finish line in the Electoral College (giving it 271 votes, 1 more than needed), despite a half-million vote loss in the national popular vote. That result is much closer to the definition of "illegitimate" than Mr. Clinton's 43% showing in 1992. (Clinton, for the record, won the popular vote in a three-way race. More over, in 1968 Richard Nixon also won the presidency with 43% of the vote in a three-way race, yet Republicans never called his election "illegitimate.")
Many thought the haywire election of 2000 would force Bush to uphold his campaign promise to govern from the center and to include Democrats in his cabinet. Indeed, a true patriot would have done just that. But Mr. Bush and his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, didn't even think about it. They took their popular vote loss and proceeded to rule as if they were handed a 20-point win, lurching a country that so obviously voted for centrist rule into a hard right trajectory.
And that wasn't the only way the new president said "fuck you" to the American voters. Shortly after being named president, Mr. Bush plucked two incumbent Senators from the ash-pile of the 2000 elections. After losing a re-election bid to a dead guy, Sen. John Ashcroft was named Attorney General; and following a narrow loss to his Democratic opponent, Sen. Spencer Abraham was named Energy Secretary.
Doris Kearns Goodwin famously wrote of Abraham Lincoln's "team of rivals." Well...with two losing Senatorial candidates joining the popular vote-losing president in the White House, one could easily call the Bush administration a "team of losers."
Talk about a symbolic beginning to an eight-year run of incompetence and failure!
To be sure, as we approached Election Day in 2000, I argued passionately that George W. Bush was nowhere near ready to take on the duties of the presidency. And today, as we look back over the last eight years, we find that I was right. The end of the Bush era finds America on her knees, battered, bruised, and bankrupt; a direct result of his incompetence, combined with a Fascist style of right-wing governance that has crippled the Republican Party for a generation.
At this point I had planned to lay out, point-by-point, the misdeeds and failures that led me to assess Mr. Bush as the worst president ever. Alas, I've blathered on and on way too much already. Thus, I post below Keith Olbermann's recent essay that showcases the last eight miserable years in eight concise minutes. He covers just about everything. Give it a look, and then I'll conclude this post below.
In his final press conference last week, Mr. Bush refused to accept responsibility for decisions made on his watch that led America to its current state. Little Boy George is still the spoiled brat who drives the family car into a tree and then refuses to accept responsibility for it, instead blaming everyone else for the accident he caused. (Eight years later, he still tries to blame shit on Clinton!)
And so, it is with a great deal of anger over the shit storm he's steered our great nation into, combined with a great deal of relief that his term in office is coming to a close, that I say goodbye to this failed chief executive. He should have never been president to begin with, let alone "re"-elected. (And don't even get me started over the fact that he was never impeached or charged with war crimes.)
The United States and the rest of the globe can now take a long overdue sigh of relief. On Monday we can celebrate the last full day of the Bush presidency and on Tuesday, the inauguration of Barack Obama. But then...the long, hard journey of righting the wrongs of the worst president in history begins in earnest.
