From Some Guy with a Website,
http://www.xoverboard.com/index.htmlThey all suckIt's annoying that many find it hard to believe that you can call the current holder of any title or status the "worst" out of all of them. When I say the president is the worst president ever, people always seem to whine that I'm just saying that it's because he's the president now. I'm not sure why there's some invisible rule that the worst ever can't be the current thing you're living through.
I'm sorry that it bothers a lot of right-wingers that John McCain has joined the chorus of pointing out that Donald Rumsfeld is the worst Secretary of Defense in our nation's history. But if you want to oppose that statement you're going to have to do a lot more than simply say that it's because his tenure was so recent.
The fact is, they're all the worst. Rumsfeld is the worst SecDef in American history. Rice is easily one of the worst Secretaries of State. Rove, for all the mystique of his dirty tricks, is a miserable Chief of Staff, having allowed unfettered corruption and leaks in what is supposed to be a period of intense internal security to pass by for the sake of electoral convenience, which ultimately failed miserably in 2006. Elizabeth Dole is the most embarrassingly incompetent leader the NRSC ever had. Christie Whitman's singular act of significance as head of the EPA was lying about the danger of the air over Manhattan post-9/11: an act that could potentially give a few million people cancer in the next two decades. John Ashcroft wasted a couple grand on ten-foot burquas while helping Rice and Powell ignore the greatest and most fatal security breach in the history of the United States to a scale so horrific and neglectful it made his successor's allowance of a few thousand people in New Orleans to drown while an entire city was wiped off the map look "not as bad." And all of this is without even getting into Bernie Kerik and Harriet Miers, who were so unfit for their jobs even right-wingers laughed at them, and Michael Brown, who at this point has become an adjective.
It is not merely the fact that these people are failures. Clinton, and Bush, and Reagan, all had people on their staff who, like the Presidents themselves, failed in tasks. But this is the first modern case of a system where these people were all practically devoted to a single, particular task and failed at it in every imaginable respect. If you want to talk about current history, imagine what the work of future presidents will be in our childrens' history books. History will be written not on the back of Bush's accomplishments but how well the 44th, 45th, and 46th presidents managed to repair every mistake he made that scarred the very stature of the United States for a generation.
The scale of ineptness, incompetence, and ignorance on the part of a handful of individuals at the seat of power who abandoned almost everything this country had going for it for the sake of a single new objective- that failed- is overwhelming to the degree far beyond just saying they're "the worst ever." These people aren't just bad, they're unbelievable. Schoolchildren will read of the George W. Bush administration in history books and not even think it was the worst administration ever; they'll actually believe what they're reading is a fucking typo.
Posted by August J. Pollak at 8:29 AM
