Part of the reason I love George Bush is his strength to stand by his beliefs in the face of so much adversity. In that way, he’s like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., except with more killing. So, I’m sure he won’t be bothered by this History News Network poll of 109 leading historians, where 61% of respondents classify him as the worst president ever, and 96% put him in the bottom 10. While Bush has repeatedly said that history will be the judge of his presidency, I don’t think he meant it in this way. The 107 poll respondents who classified Bush’s presidency as a failure are just eggheaded liberal academics who also believe in things like evolution, geology, and “the Constitution.” So, fuck it. The real story here is that there are 2 leading historians who think Bush’s presidency has been a success, but of course, the liberal media covers the negatives.

Here are some assholes’ poll responses:

“It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,” concluded one respondent. “His domestic policies,” another noted, “have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “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.”

Whatever. I’d still like to have a beer with the guy. Also, in December, when Iraq is fixed and the economy is booming and we’re faced with 4 years under a fabricator, a bad bowler, or whoever replace McCain when he dies, I’m sure Bush’s ranking will move up, at least to 40th best president ever

HNN Poll: 61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst [History News Network]

HNN Poll: How Historians Rank the Presidency of George W. Bush (2008) [History News Network]

Worst. President. Ever. [Harper's]

Bush’s Legacy [The Daily Dish]