Worst President Ever?

An interesting perspective from Kyle Smith -New York Post


FAIL TO THE CHIEFS



BUSH WAS WORST PRESIDENT (EXCEPT FOR ALL THE OTHERS)



From bad to worse... Violation of civil liberties, war, criminal pardons, policy decisions that lead to economic problems? No problem!

Last updated: 5:31 pm

November 15, 2008

Posted: 12:59 pm

November 15, 2008

Farewell to George W. Bush. The. Worst. President. In. Modern. History.

Except for Nixon. That glowering paranoid freak sucker-punched the economy with his absurd price controls, secretly bombed Cambodia and led a gang of burgling henchmen who would later fill the federal prisons.

And Johnson. The most divisive event in modern American politics, it may surprise you to learn, is not the premature draping of a "Mission Accomplished" banner on an aircraft carrier or the decision to wiretap members of Al Qaeda's Friends and Family plan. It was the Vietnam War. It was a little matter of 60,000 fine Americans - many of them draftees, not volunteers - sent off to die for an irrelevant sliver of jungle on the shady pretext of a trumped-up, possibly fictitious attack in the Tonkin Gulf.

And Kennedy. LBJ sank into the quagmire that Kennedy stepped in. JFK wasn't kidding with that "Bear any burden, pay any price" nonsense, that "ask what you can do for your country" drivel. What he wanted you to do for your country was be drafted and go fight Communists wherever they lurked, even rice-paddy Communists in pajamas who would have posed no threat to this country unless they had figured out how to launch intercontinental ballistic spitballs. And how about botching the Bay of Pigs invasion, which led Cuba and the Soviets to buy an insurance policy in the form of a missile site that took this country the closest it has ever come to nuclear war?

And Carter. Four years of malaise. Inflation was running at levels last seen in Weimar Germany. Military morale sank to an all-time low as Carter allowed the armed forces to decay so badly that Delta Force commandos got nowhere near rescuing hostages being held by a bunch of jibbering religious freaks.

And Reagan. Let's not forget who presided over the only really agonizing recession since the Depression, the 1981-1982 one, in which the U.S. economy exhibited unemployment levels that can only be described as "Swedish." And let's not forget his whopper when he said he didn't know about the illegal Iran-Contra operation. Of course he knew.

And Truman. Small wonder he had an 22% approval rating when he was forced out of office instead of running for a second full term, after squandering 50,000 American lives who "died for a tie" in Korea.

And Clinton. A lying, venal, human petri dish of corruption, Clinton is to integrity what the frat house is to cleanliness. He swept up innocent people around him in his vortex of untruth and sold pardons to criminals for the hilariously pathetic purpose of adding to his own glory at his presidential library. Signing the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that set investment banks free doesn't look so uncontroversial today, does it?

And FDR. The downturn of 1937 - in FDR's second term - was almost as bad as the original one. How could his stewardship of WWII have been much worse? What kind of president lets our trans-Pond cousins get bombed in their beds every night for months? And Roosevelt should have opened the doors to every Jewish refugee who asked for asylum. Instead he locked them out. And he was so unprepared for the Japanese attack military theorists had predicted for years that our sailors got bombed in their own beds from Hawaii to the Philippines. Later he imprisoned thousands of Americans for the crime of having Japanese ancestry. By setting up Social Security not as a charity for the poor but as a Ponzi scheme, he insured that the program would cripple the budget some day while millionaires collected their checks each month on the golf course. And long before any of this he unleashed perhaps the most deranged attack on the Constitution in presidential history when he proposed adding six new Justices to the Supreme Court because he didn't like the ones who were already on it.

Everything is the best/worst/funniest/most tragic/most brilliant thing ever, if you're a high school girl, the hero of "Memento" or a political commentator. Things look different if you extend your memory more than five minutes into the past. Maybe the problem is the lack of a buzzword for the scandal. Here's one: "Superlativegate."

http://www.kylesmithonline.com/