How can you even argue with someone whose response to the overwhelming evidence that George W. Bush’s presidency is a colossal failure is to insist that Bush might just be one of the best presidents ever? (via tristero)

The President “lied” us into war. Much of the pre-war intelligence was wrong. The civilian defense chief was detested as “brusque, domineering and unbearably unpleasant to work with.” Civil liberties were abridged. And many embittered Democrats, claiming the war had been an utter failure, demanded that the administration bring the troops home.

George Bush? Well, yes – but also a President who looms far larger in American history, Abraham Lincoln.

So is that the new game on the right? Take the most vaguely worded and least likable aspects of a great leader and use them to draw some sort of parallel? We could have some fun with this :

He was controversial leader during a political era noted for its sharp partisan divisions. His religious views helped shape his policy, much to the chagrin of his critics. An outspoken defender of states rights, until he was put in charge of the federal government. And he was seemingly indifferent during an extraordinary crisis leading his detractors to charge that he doesn’t care about black people.

George Bush? Well, of course, but also…get ready for this…Thomas Jefferson.

Did I just blow your mind?

Or how about this?

He was a two-term President who was also a member of a secret society. He sent thousands of men to die in a war that had mixed support from the American people. He was a rich white male who led a country that saw him as the American equivalent of a king. He loved whiskey and didn’t get along with France.

George Bush? Duh. But George Washington too. Seriously.

Besides, none of the parallels between Bush and the great presidents are as striking as the ones between Bush and some of the truly awful presidents, as the cover story in the newest Rolling Stone makes clear :

How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

C’mon Bush supporters, do you really want to look this stupid and out-of-touch?? You’ve got shy of three years left in the Bush era to try to turn things around, but any sane course of action would have to start by admitting you’re going to wrong way.