(updated 5-7-06)

By Robert Farrow

The Worst President in History?

One of America’s leading historians assesses George W. Bush

George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a “failure.” Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration’s “pursuit of disastrous policies.” In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton — a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole — a fact the president’s admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about “the current crop of history professors” than about Bush or about Bush’s eventual standing. from the Rolling Stone.

Wow, that’s a shocker, (and I am so surprised that the revenue for the MSM continues to decline), however, I felt the need to write something missing from today’s journalistic endeavors, namely the other side. One might think this is just a reaction, but, I cannot help but find it amusing that the pro-slavery, pro-communist, pro-terrorist party has the nerve to critique anyone. True, many conservatives are not happy with Bush’s views on immigration, the budget, and he has made mistakes in Iraq. But on the other hand, the alternative is not to join the party that since the 50’s that has never lost an opportunity to side with America’s enemies.

So let’s review the history of that party of appeasement, that party of defeatism, that party of treason, the Democratic Party.

As I stated in a History of Treason , the Democratic party began their shameful history as the pro-slavery party that during Lincoln’s difficult re-election accused Lincoln of breaking the law and needlessly spilling blood for a war that could not be won. (Hmmm, doesn’t that sound familiar? ) To counter the charge that they were unpatriotic that many Northerners leveled, they brought out the general Lincoln fired, General McClellan, to campaign against him. Had the Democrats succeeded, slavery would have continued.

This pattern continued until the Soviet Union fell, no thanks to the party of defeatism. Ann Coulter notes in Treason that Walter Mondale went along with Democratic opposition to Reagan’s confrontation of Communism by claimed that Reagan’s support for the Contras “embarrassed us, strengthened our opposition and undermined America’s moral authority.” The media, as they do today, decided to ignore an aggressor ideology as that NYT, carrying the torch lit by Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, demanded to know “where the Russians were taking over.” Only in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Mongolia, Turkmenia, Uzberkistan, Tajikistan, Poland, Moldovia, Lithuania, Lativia, Estonia, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany, Yugoslavia, North Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, Laos, South Vietnam, South Yemen, Congo, Guinea, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Afghanistan. However, Ann replies, “this could hardly be called a pattern.”

Carter once described Yugoslav strongman Marshal Josef Tito as “a man who believes in human rights.” Regarding North Korea’s dearly departed Kim Il-Sung, Carter found him “vigorous, intelligent, surprisingly well-informed about the technical issues, and in charge of the decisions about this country,” adding “I don’t see that [North Koreans] are an outlaw nation.”

He was similarly generous regarding Manuel Noriega, Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaucescu and, of course, Yasser Arafat. He said of Ceausescu and himself, “Our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics . . . We believe in enhancing human rights.”

Almost all of the humanitarian activities of the Carter Foundation abroad have been in direct opposition to US foreign policy. Carter called Bush’s description of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil” was “overly simplistic and counterproductive.”
from Vcrisis

Carter and Clinton were both praised for their diplomacy during the North Korea crisis and Carter was awarded a Nobel Appease, excuse me, Peace Prize for, among other things, “containing” North Korean nuclear ambitions with a 1994 deal that North Korea quickly broke. To the surprise of Carter and leftists all over the place, North Korea now has nuclear weapons. Carter was equally shocked when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. This is the same group who called Bush a simpleton who sees the world in black and white after the “axis-of-evil” speech and after Bush broke off talks with North Korea because they would not honor any agreement that was reached. The same rant was raised after Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech. Apparently liberals and Democrats think mass murderers and tyrants keep their word. Did the Japanese obey the Washington Treaties? Did Hitler obey Munich? When are the stupid liberals ever going to learn? The answer appears to be never. Seeing the world in black and white seems less idiotic then seeing dictators though rose colored glasses.

Luckily, the public got so tired of Carter kissing the ass of every enemy of the United States, (Um, worst president?? Hello, Rolling Stones!!) that the public decided to actually elect a non-wuss as president. By the time Reagan left office, the Soviet Union was no more. The Soviet Union fell, in part due to an economic collapse spurned on by trying to match Reagan’s military buildup. Millions became free, however, the Democrats found little to celebrate, and instead began to clamor for hundreds of new social programs so our economy could be as weak as Europe’s is now.

Dinesh D’ Souza writes that it is important to note that the doves or appeasers (the forerunners of today’s antiwar movement) were wrong on every point. They showed a very poor understanding of the nature of communism. For example, when Reagan in 1983 called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” columnist Anthony Lewis of The New York Times became so indignant at Reagan’s formulation that he searched through his repertoire for the appropriate adjective: “simplistic,” “sectarian,” “dangerous,” “outrageous.” Finally Lewis settled on “primitive…the only word for it.”

Writing during the mid-1980s, Strobe Talbott, then a journalist at Time and later an official in the Clinton State Department, faulted officials in the Reagan administration for espousing “the early fifties goal of rolling back Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” an object he considered unrealistic and dangerous. “Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end,” Talbott scoffed, adding that if the Soviet economy was in a crisis of any kind “it is a permanent, institutionalized crisis with which the U.S.S.R. has learned to live.”

Historian Barbara Tuchman argued that instead of employing a policy of confrontation, the West should ingratiate itself with the Soviet Union by pursuing “the stuffed-goose option–that is, providing them with all the grain and consumer goods they need.” If Reagan had taken this advice when it was offered in 1982, the Soviet empire would probably still be around today.

The hawks or anti-Communists had a much better understanding of totalitarianism, and understood the necessity of an arms buildup to deter Soviet aggression. But they too were decidedly mistaken in their belief that Soviet communism was a permanent and virtually indestructible adversary. This Spenglerian gloom is conveyed by Whittaker Chambers’ famous remark to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 that in abandoning communism he was “leaving the winning side for the losing side.”

The hawks were also mistaken about what steps were needed in the final stage to bring about the dismantling of the Soviet empire. During Reagan’s second term, when he supported Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform efforts and pursued arms reduction agreements with him, many conservatives denounced his apparent change of heart. William F. Buckley urged Reagan to reconsider his positive assessment of the Gorbachev regime: “To greet it as if it were no longer evil is on the order of changing our entire position toward Adolf Hitler.” George Will mourned that “Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.”

No one, and least of all an intellectual, likes to be proved wrong. Consequently there has been in the past decade a determined effort to rewrite the history of the Cold War. This revisionist view has now entered the textbooks, and is being pressed on a new generation that did not live through the Soviet collapse. There is no mystery about the end of the Soviet Union, the revisionists say, explaining that it suffered from chronic economic problems and collapsed of its own weight.

But that is a lie. It does not take an economics major to understand that declining economy coupled with a massive increase in military spending caused an unsustainable economic position that lead to a collapse. But once you have built your position with a series of lies, to stop now would be to discredit yourself. So the appeasement continued. Now with the Soviet Union no longer in existence, the Democrats lost little time in finding a new enemy to appease.

Bill Clinton, a president any dictator would love, continued to keep the proud tradition of Chamberlain alive with this great quote, “They have good reason to hate us, after all, we sent the Crusades to try and conquer them.” If Clinton wasn’t so busy getting oral sex from interns he maybe would have had time to understand that the Crusades were fought over control over the Holy Land. Perhaps Vince Foster or Mary Jo Kopechne was aware of the Muslim invasion of Europe that was finally stopped in the Battle of Tours and that the Muslim religion was spread for the most part by conquest, but they are not telling. To be fair, Billy did take time out from his adulterous activities to bomb Iraq to take the American public’s mind of his impending impeachment. Bill, with his foreign policy equivalent of roll over and play dead, seemed to echo the line liberals loved to say after 9-11, “Why do they hate us?” To this, Ann Coulter replied” Until we understand why rapists would rape a women instead of taking them to dinner, we cannot respond to the crime of rape.” Well that makes sense to me, let’s ignore all the bad things our enemies do and try to understand them, ignoring the fact that they have hated us for over 15 hundred years. Let us ignore Tours, Hattin, Constantinople, Las Navas de Toloso, Rhodes and Malta, or Lepanto, or more recently the 1882 Beruit bombings, the 1983 Marine Barracks, the 1985 Achille Lauro, 1986 Berlin Disco, 1988 Pam Am Flight 103, 1993 World Trade Center, 1996 Housing complex in Saudia Arabia, 1998 Kenya and Tanzania, USS Cole, 911 attacks, and the countless other attacks made by Muslims throughout the world that the media ignores. Let us ignore female genital mutilation, honor killings, abuses of women, and oppression of all major fundamental human rights by Islam because it is our fault they hate us.

Not only is it our fault, it appears, it is patriotic, as I quote again from my article, a History of Treason : (The History of the Democratic party)

And wear their hate as a badge of honor. If liberals scorn you, especially liberal historians, you must be doing something right. They have been wrong on every point.