Is Bush the worst U.S. president ever?
The Toronto Star
Historians might argue over ranking, but there's no doubt he has been an unmitigated disaster
March 22, 2008
Thomas Walkom
Historians will argue over whether George W. Bush is the worst president the United States has ever endured. But that is not the point. Five years after Bush's ill-starred invasion of Iraq, three years after Hurricane Katrina and seven months into the unravelling of the U.S. financial system, the point is that the 43rd president of the United States – regardless of his ranking in the pantheon – is a unique and unmitigated disaster.
Whether Bush is more of a warmonger than James Polk, who in 1846 manufactured a crisis with Mexico in order to seize what is now California, more tolerant of cronyism than poker-playing Warren Harding (1921 to 1923), or more unlucky than William Harrison (he died after catching cold at his 1841 inauguration) is interesting but irrelevant. What we do know is that this president, this "decider" (to use his favoured term), decided his way into a war that has destroyed the nation he was allegedly trying to free, destabilized further an already rickety Middle East and given Islamic terrorism a whole new raison d'etre.
Bush is not the first U.S. president to take a cavalier attitude to civil liberties. Abraham Lincoln did so during the Civil War, while modern presidents reaching back to at least John Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower have sanctioned the use of illegal assassination.
During the 1960s, when Bush was still a hard-drinking frat boy, American experts operating under presidential authority were teaching enhanced torture techniques to their Latin American counterparts. Bush didn't initiate the practice of extraordinary rendition – sending suspects abroad to be tortured. That honour goes to Bill Clinton.
(Continued here.)
Historians might argue over ranking, but there's no doubt he has been an unmitigated disaster
March 22, 2008
Thomas Walkom
Historians will argue over whether George W. Bush is the worst president the United States has ever endured. But that is not the point. Five years after Bush's ill-starred invasion of Iraq, three years after Hurricane Katrina and seven months into the unravelling of the U.S. financial system, the point is that the 43rd president of the United States – regardless of his ranking in the pantheon – is a unique and unmitigated disaster.
Whether Bush is more of a warmonger than James Polk, who in 1846 manufactured a crisis with Mexico in order to seize what is now California, more tolerant of cronyism than poker-playing Warren Harding (1921 to 1923), or more unlucky than William Harrison (he died after catching cold at his 1841 inauguration) is interesting but irrelevant. What we do know is that this president, this "decider" (to use his favoured term), decided his way into a war that has destroyed the nation he was allegedly trying to free, destabilized further an already rickety Middle East and given Islamic terrorism a whole new raison d'etre.
Bush is not the first U.S. president to take a cavalier attitude to civil liberties. Abraham Lincoln did so during the Civil War, while modern presidents reaching back to at least John Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower have sanctioned the use of illegal assassination.
During the 1960s, when Bush was still a hard-drinking frat boy, American experts operating under presidential authority were teaching enhanced torture techniques to their Latin American counterparts. Bush didn't initiate the practice of extraordinary rendition – sending suspects abroad to be tortured. That honour goes to Bill Clinton.
(Continued here.)
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