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... --The Worst President in History?, One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush, Sean Wilentz, Rolling Stone Nixon is remembered for abuses of executive power and his outright disdain for the Constitutional "separation of powers". Like Bush, Nixon equated dissent with treason and considered critics to be threats to national security. He spied on US citizens, pried into income tax returns and considered himself above the law: "if the President does it, it is not illegal". Nevertheless, his assaults on the Constitution pale beside those of Bush. If Bush's various treasons are allowed to stand, he will have rendered the Constitution moot and the United States of its creation destroyed, perhaps forever. Nixon never came close, primarily because Nixon was courageously opposed by the media, the Congress and the courts. Where are those real "patriots" now? Where is courage? Where is outrage?That he lied about Iraq's 'threat' to the United States is no unsubstantiated allegation. The recently revealed "Downing Street Memo" is the report of Britain's' intelligence chief made to Prime Minister Blair about his trip to the United States eight months before the war in Iraq began, long before it was publicly considered.It is interesting that "worst" Presidents always seem connected in some way with the lingering consequences of slavery. Bush's base of support is not merely the south; demographically, it's base is found in the "dis-affected" South, the south that felt persecuted by an admittedly harsh and reactionary re-construction. But it is also the "south" that would never have abolished slavery short of Civil War. Nixon, for example, is remembered for his "Southern Strategy", an exploitation of bigotry if not an outright appeal to it. What had been a Democratic south (the south had hated Lincoln) has been solid "red" since the sixties. There is even some credence given the opinion that the rest of the US would have been better off if the south had gone its own way. That position, however, does not wash Northern hands of the crime of slavery, a crime against humanity if there ever was one. The American political system has long used different groups and issues to divide people into an "us" and a "them." The reason America remains, and has always been, a two-political-party country is that we prefer our beliefs as simple duality-black white, good bad, us them. On every issue from slavery to communism to abortion, Americans have preferred to fight rather than to compromise. Sometimes, as with slavery, this is the correct choice. Sometimes, as with the issue of abortion, the American political path makes it too easy to tear each other apart and never resolve anything.Bush has taken his disdain for law much further than Nixon. The Washington Post wrote recently that Bush sought "...to strip people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta". Bush, in fact, arrogated unto himself the right to declare anyone opposing him an "enemy combatant -- two words which deprive you of the right to be told what you have been charged with, the right to retain defense counsel, the right to a "speedy trial" by an impartial jury of one's peers. Bush's treatment of prisoners of war have disgraced the US and alienated the world which now sees the US as a rogue nation, a banana republic, a fascist dictatorship. As Bush is owned by large corporate support and those corporate interests that make up the Military/Industrial complex, the charge is absolutely, irrefutably true. The US, under Bush, has become a fascist dictatorship. Live with it or change it! It was not Nixon who blazed the trail for Bush. It was Ronald Reagan, who managed to sugar coat tyranny and make incipient goppers feel good about being jingos, narrow mindeded bigots, fascists and/or militarists. Ronald Reagan put an elderly, kindly smiley face on government incompetence and criminality. The reality was worse. Perverts ran a child prostitution ring right out of the White House. A program of endemic treason, Iran/Contra armed avowed enemies as well as right wing terrorists. Not surprisingly, terrorism was worse under Reagan than under any Democratic administration since WWII. Terrorism is always worse under GOP regimes. Ronald Reagan clearly has become the sort of polarizing figure that Franklin Roosevelt was for an earlier generation-or, perhaps a better way to understand the phenomenon is that Reagan has become the personification of the pole opposite to Roosevelt. That polarization is evident in historians' evaluations of George W. Bush's presidency. "If one believes Bush is a 'good' president (or great)," one poll respondent noted, he or she "would necessarily also believe Reagan to be a pretty good president." They also tend to despise Roosevelt. "There is no indication," one historian said of Bush, "that he has advisors who are closet communist traitors as FDR had. Based on his record to date, history is likely to judge him as one of America's greatest presidents, in the tradition of Washington and Lincoln."Bush claims the right to ignore those parts of the law with which he disagrees. He rules by decree. He exploits the fatal flaw in the US political system. The Supreme Court has typically given "Presidents" a free hand in the conduct of national defense, particularly in times of "war", a flaw merely waiting to be exploited by a demagogue, a would-be Buzz Windrip!
http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/ Len Hart is a Houston based film/video producer specializing in shorts and full-length documentaries. He is a former major market and network correspondent; credits include CBS, ABC-TV and UPI. He maintains the progressive blog: The Existentialist Cowboy
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