Historic ranking

-The head of Walter Reed Hospital and the Secretary of the Army lose their jobs because the conditions for soldiers at the Army’s foremost medical facility in the Washington Capital District are found to be intolerable. Reports now indicate that conditions at Walter Reed are only the “tip of the iceberg” when canvassing other Army medical facilities.

-The former chief of staff to the Vice President is convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in a case involving an ongoing campaign at the highest reaches of the Administration, orchestrated by the Vice President himself, to smear a critic of faulty war intelligence by (illegally) outing the critic’s wife as an covert CIA operative.

-The FBI and Justice Department admit that they have thoroughly abused the power given to them under the USA Patriot Act and illegally obtained thousands of financial, phone and business records of ordinary Americans without judicial approval.

-The death toll for American soldiers in Iraq will pass 3,200 any day now.

-An international poll published in the UK names the United States as the third least popular country in the world, trailing only Israel and Iran.

-A year and a half after Hurricane Katrina, much of the Gulf Coast still lies in ruins. President Bush acknowledges that there are “frustrations”.

Those tidbits only cover the last week and a half. In any survey taken of reputable historians, when asked for the best presidents in American history, Lincoln, Washington, FDR and often Theodore Roosevelt top the list. That list hasn’t changed much in the past 50 years. When asked for the worst presidents in American history, the most oft-cited names are the two men who flanked Abraham Lincoln in the Oval Office: James Buchanan, who sat idly by and did nothing while the country descended into Civil War, and Andrew Johnson, a rabid white supremacist who did everything in his power to deny former slaves even the most basic freedoms past abolition. Along with those two, Richard Nixon (resigning in disgrace after Watergate), Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge (the two most corrupt of all time), as well as one or two others, generally rank as the worst failures.

I would actually keep Nixon off the list of the worst of the worst, since he at least had notable foreign policy successes, such as China. Put him together with LBJ and you could have had one complete, competent president. One capable of handling foreign policy, and the other domestic affairs.

And then we have George W. Bush. It is now becoming widely understood that the current administration will easily go down as rivaling any who went before as the flat-out worst failure of them all. He truly has nothing positive to show for his time in office. He campaigned on a pledge to restore honor and dignity to the White House, and his administration has been marked by arrogance and unprecedented attempts to maintain secrecy at all costs, up to and including obstruction of justice and perjury. The gulf coast is STILL in ruins and chaos, a full 18 months after Katrina tore through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Helping fellow Americans get back on their feet after a natural disaster is clearly not a sufficiently pressing concern for this White House, in spite of the words to the contrary.

And then there’s foreign policy. Lyndon Baines Johnson, a hideously poor foreign affairs chief executive, looks like FDR compared to this president. Bush undertook to overthrow a sovereign nation based on a combination of gross overstatements and outright fraudulent accusations, sprinkled through and through with misleading intelligence assessments and the overriding fear that “the smoking gun you’re looking for could be a mushroom cloud”. There were no weapons of mass destruction, either nuclear, chemical or biological, and people in power knew that before we invaded. Be they in the State Department or the Pentagon, they were shouted down. There was absolutely no relationship between Iraq and the people who masterminded the events of 9/11, and the Bush administration knew that, too. There was no “grave and gathering threat” to the US, as Bush intoned as his final pretext for war, and anyone who said otherwise was branded as unpatriotic or worse. The governments of France and Germany (!), after insisting that we were making a colossal mistake, were belittled as “old Europe”, unfit to take part in the discussions with the big boys.

Old Europe was right, of course, as was Russia. We overthrew Saddam Hussein and made sure he was put to death, but now we, our soldiers, and our interests around the world are in more danger than ever. American troops are dying by the dozens now, caught in the crossfire of an Iraqi civil war that neither we nor they are capable of stopping. George Bush has no military reason to stay in Iraq any more, but he doesn’t have the guts to leave, as that would be a naked admission of failure and defeat. Bombs have exploded in Madrid, London, and Bali, along with Baghdad and Basra. Not only are we less safe, but the world in general is less safe because of this man. Oh yes, and the people who actually directed the attacks of 9/11? They’ve never been brought to justice, here or anywhere. Let’s not forget that part.

He’s an incompetent politician, as well. He’s now squandered every ounce of political advantage he ever held. He’s lost the Congress, he’s lost the American people, and now, finally, he’s starkly revealed for what he’s been all along: an incurious, incompetent, inarticulate fraud of a man who could never and will never be half the leader his father was (and while his father wasn’t the greatest president, he looks like a statesman now, doesn’t he?). All of us are now paying the price for the colossal mistakes Bush the Younger has made in office; mistakes for which we shall probably be paying for years, and possibly generations to come. I daresay that in less than a decade, historians will rank George W. Bush as one of the two worst (Buchanan being the other), if not the worst ever to hold the office. If you voted for him, I’m very sorry, because you’ll have to live with that.