ץ Leiter and Akerlof's Rating of George W. Bush As Worst President Ever. Brian Leiter, and George Akerlof, whom he cites, must be added to my file of irrational Bush Haters. Even if Bush is bad in all the ways Democrats say, that just doesn't add up to him being "the worst President in the history of the United States".

Anti-Bush Ads are...

...here and they certainly make clear why Bush is the worst President in the history of the United States. How embarrassing that so many law professors who blog won't say as much.

No conservative ever said Bill Clinton was the worst president. (Am I wrong on that? Please let me know if I am.) We disliked him intensely, with the same gut feelings that liberals have for Bush, but we distinguished between despising him as a person and disliking his policies. We did dislike his policies, of course, but few Democrats would have been any better policywise, and many (e.g. every current Democratic candidate for President except maybe Liberman and Clark) would have been worse.

My own list of candidates for Worst President Ever would probably be drawn from the set of Andrew Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, Buchanan, Jackson, and Wilson. Probably Tyler, Fillmore, and Pierce would enter the list too, if I could remember more about them. Maybe Grant, Nixon, Truman, and Roosevelt, too-- but that gets us into the bimodal presidents--those who had both big pluses and big minuses. But surely even a liberal could find someone worse than Bush in these lists. Allowing the Civil War to start, trying to block Reconstruction, getting mired in Vietnam and the Great Society, and deporting the Five Civilized Tribes all are at least a notch more important than a small tax cut and a couple of low-casualty wars. Liberals have no sense of history. Or even if you think Bush's Patriot Act is bad policy, do you really prefer Wilson's Palmer Raids, Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts, and Roosevelt's Japanese internment? Do you Bush haters of the older generation really think Richard Nixon, the former object of your hatred, looks good by comparison? And don't you remember what you used to say about the dangers of having Ronald Reagan in the White House?

[ http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/04.01.10a.htm . erasmusen@yahoo.com. ]

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