In a poll, 81 percent of professional historians have labeled W’s presidency a failure. In finishing the sentence “Bush’s presidency is the biggest failure since (blank),” the most popular choice was Nixon. The second most popular choice was that W is the worst president in American history.
Here are some choice quotes.
“He is blatantly a puppet for corporate interests, who care only about their own greed and have no sense of civic responsibility or community service. He lies, constantly and often, seemingly without control, and he lied about his invasion into a sovereign country, again for corporate interests; many people have died and been maimed, and that has been lied about too. He grandstands and mugs in a shameful manner, befitting a snake oil salesman, not a statesman. He does not think, process, or speak well, and is emotionally immature due to, among other things, his lack of recovery from substance abuse. The term is ‘dry drunk.’ He is an abject embarrassment/pariah overseas; the rest of the world hates him… He is, by far, the most irresponsible, unethical, inexcusable occupant of our formerly highest office in the land that there has ever been.”
Also:
“After inadvertently gaining the sympathies of the world’s citizens when terrorists attacked New York and Washington, Bush has deliberately turned the country into the most hated in the world by a policy of breaking all major international agreements, declaring it our right to invade any country that we wish, proving that he’ll manipulate facts to justify anything he wishes to do, and bull-headedly charging into a quagmire.”
Finally, check out the long list of bullet points towards the end of the article, which sums up most of the horrible things he’s done since he became president.
The mind reels at the fact that this man runs the country.
How come you left these quotes out?
“I suspect that this poll will tell us nothing about President Bush’s performance vis-à-vis his peer group, but may confirm what we already know about the current crop of history professors.” The liberal-left proclivities of much of the academic world are well documented, and some observers will dismiss the findings as the mere rantings of a disaffected professoriate. “If historians were the only voters,” another pro-Bush historian noted, “Mr. Gore would have carried 50 states.”
And the many economic bullet points at the bottom ignore the fact that Clinton had a stock-market bubble on his watch, one that naturally popped (and started to pop in March 2000, 9 months before Bush took office), eliminating a large portion of capital gains revenues, eliminating a lot of jobs that were artificial to begin with, and leaving a malaise in its wake.
But you’re a Blue Stater, so all of this doesn’t matter to you.
Iron Man, I linked to this article because it was filled with some particularly good quotes that echo my own thoughts. My point was not “if the historians say it, it must be true”; my point was, “Amen.” It wasn’t relevant to point out that a majority of academics are liberal, something that most people already know anyway.
In regard to your second paragraph, my beef with Bush isn’t that the economy has sucked for most of his presidency; presidents have, at most, limited control over the day-to-day economy. But only two bullet points deal with the short-term economy. What is Bush’s fault is the deficit, which is as huge as it is because Bush’s tax cuts have brought so much less money into the treasury. This is going to ruin the nation’s financial standing in the world, and Americans are going to have to pay more money in the long run toward the interest on all that debt.
Finally, “you’re a Blue Stater, so all of this doesn’t matter to you” is tautological.
Tautological? The primary meaning of that is, if I’m not mistaken, “redundant”. To say that my assertion, “you’re a Blue Stater, so all of this doesn’t matter to you” is tautological, must imply that it is a given that Blue Staters don’t care about politics (or in the most specific interpretation of your sentence,the reason Bush is criticized), which I was not aware was the case.
Let me see if I can explain why it seems redundant to me, and also untrue. First, just because I’m anti-Bush, doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter to me that Bush isn’t responsible for the economy turning bad. There are tons of reasons why people support or oppose a particular candidate. Second, not everyone in the “blue states” voted for Gore, just like not everyone in the “red states” voted for Bush.
Here’s why I saw it as tautological. “Blue Stater” sounds like a derogatory label that a pro-Bush person would use to describe anti-Bush people as a whole. It sounds like it’s meant to describe someone who’s against Bush for knee-jerk reasons. So it seemed to me that you were saying You’re a dumb Blue-Stater who doesn’t care about the facts, so the facts don’t matter to you. Which to me seems tautological.
(I’m not saying that this is what you meant, but that’s how it came across to me. Of course, it was all happening in my brain so fast that I couldn’t quite put it into words until I actually thought about the thought process just now. :-) )