is the answer to the question asked in a headline from The Guardian yesterday: "Is George W Bush the worst ever US president?" DCap has a much better analysis than I could offer.
But what really troubled me in The Guardian article was this quote: "And if the US president is to be regarded as a figure of moral authority, embodying the nation's values and beliefs, then Bush's personal behaviour has been exemplary compared to many incumbents, and notably that of his immediate predecessor, the intern-challenged Clinton."
Got that? It's OK to lead the nation falsely into war, killing (at a minimum) hundreds of thousands of people you claim to have "freed;" it's OK to subvert the constitution and undermine the very foundation and structure of power in your country, setting the ground work for who knows how many crises; it's OK to hold prisoners without charges, indefinitely- heck, it's even OK to torture them, 'cause 1 in 10 might know something of use, as long as you say "oops, my bad" to the other 9- and actually, even that's not really necessary; it's OK to stage a photo-op with your good buddy McCain and his birthday cake while thousands of people drown or barely survive in third-world squalor- and it's fine to ignore the aftermath for years; it's OK to lie about "the controversy" surrounding global warming, evolution, endangered species, toxins in the environment, ad nauseum; it's OK to give cushy jobs to buddies that are absolutely unqualified for them, and come to that, it's OK to be absolutely ignorant regarding actual, established facts on every single issue pertaining to your own job (beyond how to run divisive, lying and ultimately successful campaigns)- after all you just decide: you don't need to know anything but your gut. It's OK to obstruct every option we might have had regarding oversight on our economy; it's OK to underfund the SEC and every other government arm intended to keep some restraint on the rapacious greed of your base, the haves and the have mores. It's perfectly OK to fuck 95% of the people in this country (and it's looking like the rest of the world too), in fact, according to this jackass in The Guardian, all of those things and more are "exemplary."
But for God's sake, don't have consensual sex with an intern, because- gracious!- that would be immoral.
Wow.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. Bush is the worst prez PERIOD.
Isn't the Guardian a Murdoch paper? I forget where he has his slimy tentacles.
I would think that in England the idea that Bush is morally superior to Clinton would be a concept considered even more absurd. They're always buggering somebody.
No, the Guardian isn't owned by Murdoch.
ReplyDeleteIt's niche in the UK market is an intelligent voice left of center... perhaps the nearest equivalent in the US is the NY Times.
As a Brit living in America I found that comment about Bush's moral superiority to Clinton astonishing... especially from a paper like the Guardian. I think most Brits would agree that torture and war crimes and killing thousands of people are a lot worse than adultery.
Actually, I quite like The Guardian- Tillerman's description is spot on. I do get irritated by the way they send the same article out in their RSS feed literally 20 to 30 times, but I'm willing to put up with it because they do such a good job with their reporting and commentary. They offer better US news than most US sources. Which is why the comment highlighted in this post was so infuriating to me- to judge the quality of someone's moral virtue on the basis of sexual behavior alone just seems too juvenile for that paper- more along the lines of US media.
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