Bush & his-story

With the Bush administration finally on its way out, people are starting to sum up the accomplishments and impact of the well spoken Texas rancher. The question of how Bush will be remembered in future generations has been raised. Bush’s own comment on the matter was the following sharp and relevant observation:

“As far as history goes and all of these quotes about people trying to guess what the history of the Bush administration is going to be, I take great comfort in knowing that they don’t know what they are talking about, because history takes a long time for us to reach.” – George W. Bush, Fox News Sunday, Feb 10, 2008

Quite an impressive way to shrug of criticism, guess we’ll have to wait 2-300 years before we pass judgment on Mr. Bush & Co. Contemporary speculation about his legacy is apparently useless.

Some people may disagree with this statement, for example historians themselves. The History News Network (HNN), founded by, and independent of the George Mason University, recently conducted a courageous poll among professional historians, daring to compare Bush to his predecessors, a long time before we have actually reached history.

The survey was open to all historians, and among the respondents were some of the most respected historians, including Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize winners. I will let the graphs speak for themselves, and finish of with a few quotes from participating historians that sum up Mr. Bush’s achievements in a clearer way then I ever could. After this, I will let him be.. for a while.

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush, Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

“With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,” said another historian. “When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of areas: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.”

One historian indicated that his reason for rating Bush as worst is that the current president combines traits of some of his failed predecessors: “the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover. . . . . God willing, this will go down as the nadir of American politics.” Another classified Bush as “an ideologue who got the nation into a totally unnecessary war, and has broken the Constitution more often than even Nixon. He is not a conservative, nor a Christian, just an immoral man . . . .” Still another remarked that Bush’s “denial of any personal responsibility can only be described as silly.”

“George Bush has combined mediocrity with malevolent policies and has thus seriously damaged the welfare and standing of the United States,” wrote one of the historians, echoing the assessments of many of his professional colleagues. “Bush does only two things well,” said one of the most distinguished historians. “He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches. His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.”

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