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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