The Worst Ever?


History Evaluates The Bush Presidency

No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. A nation enjoying a robust economy, a nation at peace, perhaps underestimated or undervalued the role of the executive to the extent that people began to think anybody could do the job. Having the occasional go at the president is surely great sport, but the underlying concern is both significant and sobering: our nation is in serious trouble, the severity of which we won’t even realize until Mr. Bush is returned to his Crawford ranch. The next president—Democrat or Republican—is going to be stuck picking up the pieces of a fractured society. We, as Christians, black white or green, cannot and must not allow anyone to blindfold us with our own faith—politicians least of all.

In early 2004,

an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that 81% considered the Bush administration a “failure.” 12% flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina [and] Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher. In The May 4th edition of Rolling Stone Magazine, noted political historian Sean Wilentz put the Bush administration into historical context, giving the president failing grades across the board and suggesting Bush may, indeed, be the worst president in history. Which goes farther than I did, and I don’t even have a Ph.D. I suggested Bush might be the worst president in modern history. Wilentz, and at least twenty other noted historians, don’t think I went far enough.

In what must be joyous and welcome news to the beleaguered Bush Administration, all-Qaida’s leader in Iraq, Abu Musab all-Zarqawi, was apparently killed in an air raid today. A major victory in what the administration has characterized as, and what many of us foolishly believe is, a “War on Terror”—a war increasingly unpopular with conservatives and liberals alike—the Bush administration spin machine is undoubtedly in overdrive smelling its own farts over this, the next best thing to having accomplished the goal they’ve consistently missed: capturing Osama bin Laden. The actual war on terror is about capturing and stopping terrorists like bin Laden. The Iraq war was never about any of that, but was folded into the so-called “War on Terror: in order to sell Bush’s crusade to “America” (by which I mean white conservative America, as they are, in large measure, the only demographic who believes Iraq ever had much to do with finding bin Laden or fighting terrorists).

The spin will, I am certain, conveniently exclude the point that all-Zarqawi (whom the president simply calls “Zarqawi” because he cannot pronounce his or most any other terrorists’ name) is a villain largely of Bush’s own creation, or that Zarqawi pretty much didn’t exist until Bush’s disastrous Mideast policy all but invented him and elevated him to global consequence. They will also miss the point that the administration’s tragically and ineptly managed military campaign has created tens of thousands of bin Ladens and Zarqawis in the hundreds of thousands of orphans the rampant and spiraling violence there has created; each of those orphans now having reason to spend their childhood hating us and living only to see us die.

Instead there’ll be church bells celebrating ding dong the witch is dead, lots of rhetoric and politic bluster designed to shore up the president’s rapidly-defecting conservative base in order to prevent a GOP bloodbath in the midterm elections; naked emperor politics that cruelly exploits the brave men and women who have sacrificed so much.

On January 16th, 2001, as Governor George W. Bush was sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States, I cried. I felt defeated, gut punched, lost. I simply could not believe this country somehow thought this guy was a good idea. In their righteous anger over President Bill Clinton’s personal moral failings, the Christian right banded together to force the nation to the right. A nation enjoying a robust economy, a nation at peace, perhaps underestimated or undervalued the role of the executive to the extent that people began to think anybody could do the job. I imagine some found the governor’s Inarticulate Mischievous Redneck Underachiever routine charming or even amusing, all the while assuming a depth this president clearly does not have.

I wept because I felt the cloud of certain disaster—political, economic, environmental, wartime. Because I felt, in my gut, this man was the ignorant choice of ignorant people. A choice to vote for anybody Republican, to vent anger at the godless Bill Clinton by electing a man who wears his alleged faith on his sleeve. But it was, by no means a rational choice. It was all about suspension of disbelief, about ignoring what our very eyes and ears told us: that we were ostensibly replacing one redneck president with another. Only, instead of sending a brilliant man, a qualified man, we elected a buffoon. We knew he was a buffoon. He ran on a buffoon’s platform, making cute excuses for his tragic ineloquence and clumsy unfamiliarity with history, with facts and figures. America chose to embrace that as a “everyman” quality, but I cried because I saw it for what it was: the man was an onion. We elected an onion. The American people had made the saddest mistake of all: believing anybody can do the job.

Of course, Al Gore ran a bad campaign, running away (?!) from Bill Clinton’s stellar domestic policy record and distancing himself from one of the most popular commander in chiefs in recent history. Instead, Gore relied on his granite disposition and leaden personality. Bush’s Just Folks shoulder-shrugging, frat-house-towel-snapper disposition made Gore seem even more turgid [?]. The choice came down to the egghead versus the good ol’ boy, a regular guy. Which cleverly avoided the point there was absolutely nothing “regular” about George W. Bush.

The U.S. Supreme Court, acting in clearly partisan faction, halted ballot recounts in Florida and declared Bush the winner—as though there were some clock running. As though time were running out, that the nation couldn’t possibly withstand a few weeks or even a few months of waiting to be sure the right man was sworn into office. The constitutional crisis, fueled by Gore’s blunder (rather than request a statewide recount, he asked for recounts only in those districts that might help him), centered around the widespread and obvious suppression of the black vote, led by Bush’s brother (Florida Governor Jeb Bush) and snickering henchman Florida GOP Supervisor Katherine Harris (currently a disastrously incompetent state senator from whom Bush is now distancing himself). Both Jeb Bush and Harris fought hard to count as few votes as possible, after which the Supreme Court, voting along party lines in a partisan manner, put a stop to the counting—for no rational or even legal reason—and declared Bush the winner.

And I just cried. Then I wrote an angry, mean-spirited screed calling the newly sworn-in president names and calling his limousine ugly (which it is). I predicted dire consequences of this choice and predicted, early on, that Bush would be one of the worst presidents in modern history. Many people got on me about those early essays, calling my views extreme and saying I was too hard on the new president.

Flash forward four years.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr:
Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush — and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots — or received them too late to vote(4) — after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment — roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) — more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See
Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn't even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes — enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)  —From Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

And that’s saying a lot. When we think of bad presidents, most people think of Richard Nixon, usually without knowing much about Richard Nixon who, unlike Bush, was a brilliant man. Nixon’s inner demons and personal insufficiencies drove him to bizarre extremes and his prosecution of the war in Vietnam was an abysmal failure, but Nixon did, in fact, open relations with China and formed a lasting peace with the Soviet Union resulting in a significant reduction of nuclear arsenals. Nixon was a brilliant pianist—which sounds like I’m reaching, but to my knowledge, Bush doesn’t even play harmonica. And, although we can and certainly must fault Nixon for prolonging the Vietnam war, it is important to note he did not get us into Vietnam. John F. Kennedy, our revered martyr president and Democrat, got us into Vietnam and his successor Lyndon B. Johnson vastly escalated it. Nixon merely stumbled around for four years trying to find a graceful exit, only to ultimately not find one anyway. Which, incidentally, is precisely what George W. Bush is doing.

By any reasonably objective standard, the presidency of George W. Bush has been an abysmal failure, for many of the reasons I’ve articulated over the years (see essay list below). The brilliant men who brought Bush to power and who have, thus far, kept him in power, are a continuing mystery to me. I consider Vice President Dick Cheney, openly reviled by Democrat and Republican alike, to be a brilliant man. A, gosh, reasonable man. When he talks, he sounds perfectly rational and very convincing. I’ll even admit to sleeping better at night knowing Cheney is rattling around the West Wing somewhere. While Bush terrifies me, Cheney reassures me in that, even though I’m probably 180 degrees off-center from his political philosophy and worldview, at least I believe he *has* a political philosophy and worldview and that it makes sense.

Cheney’s breaking with the president over gay rights seemed what it was calculated to seem—brave. The vice president as independent thinker gave the president’s political myopathy a bit of much-needed contour and dose of humanity. Which is odd that such humanity would be generated by a guy with the warmth of a prison warden.

I don’t (politically) like Cheney, but I believe I understand him and I trust (for whatever that’s worth) his internal logic and political process. He comes across like a grown up. A grown up Nazi, perhaps, but at least I don’t think he’s an idiot. I think the president is an idiot. I’m sorry that I feel that way, but I do. And, hate me if you will, but I’ve slept better knowing Cheney was around to keep the president from doing something *really* stupid.

On the other hand, it may in fact *be* Cheney who goads Bush into all of these stupid things, which again, makes me wonder about these smart men, these Karl Roves and what have you—brilliant political strategists who tie the Democrats up in knots, but who apparently fervently believe in the mishigosh of the president’s utterly and tragically flawed political and economic failures. As a political analyst put it this week, the Bush administration is good at politics—brilliant at it, in fact—but they’re lousy at governing. Winning elections, selling agendas, is what they do best. But those ideas are terrible and poorly implemented at that.

In The May 4th edition of Rolling Stone Magazine, noted political historian Sean Wilentz put the Bush administration into historical context, giving the president failing grades across the board and suggesting Bush may, indeed, be the worst president in history. Which goes farther than I did, and I don’t even have a Ph.D. I suggested Bush might be the worst president in modern history. Wilentz, and at least twenty other noted historians, don’t think I went far enough.

The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine.

Bush's faith-based conception of his mission …jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS…

The White House's sectarian positions—over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific “intelligent design,” global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more — have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls “the first religious party in U.S. history.”

This frankly terrifies me. Much as I’d like to have a man who knows and loves God as our commander-in-chief, the last guy I’d want in the oval Office is Church Folk. There’s a real difference between people who love God and Church Folk. You see, Christians worship Christ. Church Folk worship the church. Church Folk are religious. Christians are spiritual. Spiritual and Spirit-filled people who emulate Christ and who radiate God’s grace, peace and mercy. As governor of Texas, Bush put 150 people to death, while fighting tooth and nail to ban abortions. That he (and his religious right base) sees no inconsistency between those two positions alarms me.

Nancy Regan, wife and chief handler of the beloved Gipper Ronald, who was likely suffering symptoms of Alzheimer’s before he left office, daily consulted a psychic and coordinated all of hers and the president’s schedules through the psychic. The press had some fin with Mrs. Reagan over this, but it scared me to think that people who thought that simplistically and who were that superstitious were sitting comfortably in the same room with the nuclear launch codes.

If the presumption is true, that George Bush sees himself playing some pre-trib, pre-millennial role, that would explain many of his least explicable actions, most notably the invasion of Iraq. As I said previously, I have severe doubts Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would be comfortable with the notion of President Bush ushering in the Apocalypse, but religious fringe groups are already speculating about Daniel's prophecy, noting that ancient Babylon is modern day Iraq and claiming that the ram signifies fundamentalist Islam and Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant Dr Ayman all-Zawahiri represent the horns of the ram described in Daniel’s dream, one horn being taller and younger than the other. Bush’s 2001 call for a global organization against terrorism happen to spell the acronym “GOAT.” This is, indeed, fringe thinking, but what if this business somehow plays into the president’s motives? That the United States must act as the arm of God and sword of righteousness? Could this all be some Christian version of an Islamic jihad or holy war?

Throughout history, a great many men have attempted to ascertain the signs of the times and predict Christ's return or the Apocalypse based on a spate of natural disasters, wars or other global events. But the Bible warns us to be careful of people who claim to know when Jesus is coming back or when the end of this world is near. Over time, there have been many signs and many wonders, and many men and women who claim to know what they all mean. No one, absolutely no one, say with certainty that Katrina and Iraq mean Jesus is coming back. I cannot say, with certainty, that these signs do not indicate His soon coming.

The president, who at times politically convenient fancies himself a born-again Christian, has said, with some reluctance, that he consulted God about the Iraq invasion, falling just short of claiming the God told him to do it. Which, of course, raises the question of which god Bush was talking to. Jesus Christ is biblically described as the Prince of Peace. War is ontologically anti-Christian and it is unlikely that a Judeo-Christian God would inspire us to kill anyone. In that respect, I find the Christian right's near-blind support for Bush and the war to be perplexing, the punch line of a joke I don't get or perhaps the plot of a movie I've walked in on halfway through. I find it terribly confusing when Christians, pastors most especially, embrace and support things that are clearly against the teachings of Christ. I am grieved to see people committing hateful acts in Christ's name.

Bush's faith-based conception of his mission …jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS…

The White House's sectarian positions — over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific “intelligent design,” global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more — have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls “the first religious party in U.S. history.”

Note the choice of term “religious” as opposed to “spiritual.” There’s a big difference. I would that we’d all strive to know and love God for ourselves, and to be directed by His Holy Spirit. That has nothing to do with religion, which is man’s invention: a process and systematic search for God. Searching for God is different than having a relationship with Him. When you have a relationship with Him, there’s some clear evidence of that relationship, outwards signs of change and growth. A code of conduct that prescribes an inner conviction consistent with professed beliefs.

Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a “compassionate conservative,” more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right … no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.

The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts — a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as “voodoo economics.” The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. Between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever — with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006.

Ronald Reagan soundly thumped Jimmy Carter—our last evangelical president—by simply asking if we were better off than we’d been four years before. Five years into George W. Bush’s presidency, I think it completely fair to answer “no.” I also think it fair to consider his presidency an unequivocal and perhaps unprecedented failure of epic and tragic proportions. His political strategy—to divide the nation and appeal to the larger portion of that pie—has carried over into his governing and become deeply and troublingly embedded into the American psyche: Red State and Blue States.

This is perhaps the most important indictment against this man: he has divided us. He has cheapened and obfuscated the very [meaning] of The United States of America, a nation founded by disparate groups of peoples with the purpose of many becoming one and all becoming free. The president might know tat if he’d been a better student of history.

It is, perhaps, that very lack of simple education and initiative that has brought Bush to this place, where, having not learned the lessons of history, he is indeed doomed to repeat them.

Having the occasional go at the president is surely great sport. But the underlying concern is both significant and sobering: our nation is in serious trouble, the severity of which we won’t even realize until Mr. Bush is returned to his Crawford ranch. The next president—Democrat or Republican—is going to be stuck picking up the pieces of a fractured society. We, as Christians, black white or green, cannot and must not allow anyone to blindfold us with our own faith—politicians least of all. The religious right (supported by many within the black church as well) has fueled the Bush agenda with their unfaltering support, undermining our democratic processes and freedoms and causing pain, anguish, suffering and death on an tragic and enormous scale—all I the name of Jesus. Our Prince of Peace.

No serious Christian can look him or herself in the mirror and think, soberly, that Jesus inspires, endorse or approves of President Bush, or that the president’s policies are in any way God-breathed or God-inspired. When all the rhetoric has ceased, when all the spin has stopped, when all the pageantry has quieted, we are left alone with our guilty conscience and bloody hands. Lemmings or, as Jesus put it, sheep led astray by our greedy and ridiculous religious “leaders” pushing insipid agendas about stem cell research an abortion—neither of which changed materially since Bush’s reelection; it was all lies designed to manipulate people anxious to be manipulated.

This man may be the worst thing to happen to America ever. And Church Folk—not Christians, Church Folk—put him in office and kept him there. If you voted for George W. Bush, shame on you.

Christopher J. Priest
18 June 2006
editor@praisenet.org
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