"towelie" <bugoNOSPAM@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:1radnXK-JaPHt8jZ4p2dnA@centurytel.net:

Fred Stone wrote:

Josh Miles <no@thanks.com> wrote in
news:1q2dnbOnTud4isjZRVn-vA@sigecom.net:

ariel wrote:

Was Neil Young asleep for the last, let's say... 30-40 years? Did
Neil Young need Bush to 'figure' some things out? I think Neil is
not very 'bright'.

OR, maybe he was bought by american democrats...

BTW, GWB is just a scapegoat. He is evil and dumb, be he is a
scapegoat. Who is going to profit? Democrats, not you... 'people'.

Check this stuff out!

"Let's impeach the president for lying
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door
He's the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war
Let's impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones..."


Artists... funny people.

BTW, maybe Neil is talking about ALL of the US presidents? Now,
THAT would be cool.

What do you think?

I think you're failing to realize that Bush is arguably the worst
president in US history.

You can argue that, but you can't win the argument when you've got
Jimmy Carter to deal with.

So you're admitting that Dumbya is the second worst president ever. I
can buy that.

http://betsyspage.blogspot.com/2006/04/problem-with-lists-of-worst-
presidents.html

The Problem with Lists of the Worst Presidents

You might have heard that Sean Wilentz has come out with a story in
Rolling Stone arguing that George W. Bush may be the worst president
ever. Jay Cost explains why Wilentz's method of arguing is specious and
weak. Wilentz sets up three criteria for judging presidents.

This is why I was so aggrieved to read Wilentz's piece. He is a
great historian who should know better than to devolve into the idle
speculations of the history buff - but that is exactly what he does.

This becomes evident with a careful reading of his eighth paragraph.
Wilentz gives three criteria for differentiating the good president from
the bad. These are: (1) did they divide or unite the nation? (2) did
they govern erratically or "brilliantly"? (3) did they leave the nation
more or less secure? I shall take these as they are given - but I will
say that I have serious objections to all three (particularly the
second, which seems to present a false dichotomy and, with "brilliant,"
uses a word so hackneyed that it is almost bereft of meaning).

I'd just like to focus on the first question for a minute. The
presidencies have left the country quite divided. We became bitterly
divided during Washington's presidency, though he did his best to resist
the emerging partisanship. Andrew Jackson was bitterly divisive and
seemed to relish his fights with the newly-created Whig Party, a party
that united groups who hated Jackson. Weak antebellum presidents sought
to paper over the deep divisions that separated the country over the
expansion of slavery into new territories. Both Pierce and Buchanan
tried to appease Southerners on the slavery issue. Would that make the
rate higher on trying to unite the country than Abraham Lincoln who
would "accept war rather than let it perish?" Gee, what could be more
divisive than that. Sure, he tried to bring the country together with a
relatively soft Reconstruction plan and pleas to "bind up the nation's
wounds," but let's not forget the anger with which the South had
received Lincoln's offer of a lenient Reconstruction plan to welcome
them back into the Union. They would find out how much worse
Reconstruction could be under Andrew Johnson and the Radical
Republicans, but at the time, during his presidency, I don't think you
can describe the country as united. Even in the North, the Union was
deeply divided between Republicans and Democrats. Would Wilentz dock
Lincoln on that criteria? Or what about Harry Truman campaigning on the
"do nothing Congress" and demagoguing the GOP? Was he uniting the
country? Truman instituted loyalty checks in the federal government? Was
that uniting us? Where does Wilentz put Truman on that criteria?

You know, it takes two to tango. The country can't be united if one
group bitterly resists any attempt to bring the country together. That
should not be the criteria on which to judge presidential greatness.
Sure, we can come together in a crisis such as Pearl Harbor, but in the
daily swing of things, we're a country that is divided ideologically
because people believe different things. People have different views on
the best way to attack the nation's problems. That is why they belong to
different parties. Do we want a president who ignores these differences
and just tries to pretend that everyone agrees on the best way to fight
terrorism or strengthen the economy? Jay Cost is exactly right about
what a silly exercise this was for Sean Wilentz, not to even get into
judging a presidency while it is going on. Think of how our assessments
of the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Reagan have
changed in the last 20 years. We can wait a bit for time to tell us if
the war in Iraq was a terrible misadventure that deepened the problems
in the Middle East and heightened the threats from terrorism or whether
it was the turning point that changed the situation that we were facing
regarding terrorism and these rogue nations. Serious historians should
recognize the need for that time to pass.

UPDATE: I didn't have time before to address Wilentz's second and third
criteria, but Jay Cost has some thoughts on the silliness of evaulating
a president's governance as erratic or brilliant. I have a few minutes
to offer some more thoughts. Of course, these terms represent value
judgments and, if one despises George W. Bush, chances are you are not
going to be able to be able to even conceive of the idea of his being
brilliant. Is that necessarily the term you think of for those
presidents usually regarded as great? Did George Washington govern
brilliantly? It's not the adverb I would have chosen although I have
usually put him in second place when I have been asked to evaluate
presidents.

And trying to evaluate if the president left the country more or less
secure while he is still in office is fatuous. Just think of what we've
learned about Clinton's presidency in terms of leaving the country less
secure since he left office. Think of what we learned after Reagan's
presidency afterwards when we could evaluate it in terms of knowing that
the Cold War would end a year after he left office. Think of what
historians might have thought of Truman and leaving the country more or
less secure if they'd tried to evaluate his presidency in 1950 in the
beginning of the Korean War? And did FDR leave the country more or less
secure? Sometimes, it doesn't depend on what the president does but what
others do. Pearl Harbor happened on his watch. I don't argue that he
knew about it ahead of time, but was he taking a needlessly aggressive
stance towards Japan when he placed an embargo on certain goods? Or was
he guilty of not making it clear how the United States would respond if
attacked? He died after Yalta - did that agreement do anything to
exacerbate the Cold War? Did the decision to rein in Eisenhower and the
troops as they approached Berlin have an impact on the situation in
Europe after the war? These are all questions that can be debated. Would
Wilentz then place FDR in the middle of presidents because the country
was not necessarily more secure in terms of international relations than
when he entered office? I somehow doubt that. And, of course, we could
debate all day long if FDR's actions ameliorated the country's economic
situation or exacerbated the problmes of the Depression. Historians have
a more complex view of FDR today than they would have had in 1945 when
FDR died. Wilentz's exercise in judging Bush's presidency is silly and
not a serious task for a respected historian.