Sometimes He Really Scares Me

MINNEAPOLIS, Dec. 9 - President Bush suggested Friday that history will vindicate his decision to invade Iraq, saying he believed that a half century from now, it will be regarded as important a transition for the world as the democratization of Japan was after World War II.

"I'm absolutely convinced that some day, 50 or 60 years from now, an American president will be speaking to an audience saying, 'Thank goodness a generation of Americans rose to the challenge and helped people be liberated from tyranny,' " Mr. Bush said. " 'Democracy spread and the world is more peaceful for it.' "

It's pretty clear why W. didn't find a brilliant career as a historian or political scientist.

Perhaps the future President is referring to the generation of Americans who rise to the challenge and toss out Bush and his cronies, and work to recapture America's place in the world as a beacon of liberty and justice. (It's so odd that W. has such a messianic vision of himself as the spreader of Democracy and Peace, when his administration has done so much to undermine both.)

Many outside experts and even some of Mr. Bush's own aides question his reliance on the comparison, noting that Japan was a unified state before World War II, but that Iraq has always been divided along religious and regional lines.

"It may sound too simple, but this is a comparison the president believes in deeply," one of his senior aides said when Mr. Bush was in Asia, declining to be quoted by name in discussing the president's thinking. "It's the argument he knows his presidency will be judged by."

I can understand why he's thinking about his historical legacy, given what real historians are saying so far. Looks like he's on his way to edging out Buchanan for worst president ever:

... he was a confused, indecisive president, who may have made the Civil War inevitable by trying to appease or negotiate with the South. His most recent biographer, Jean Clark, writing for the prestigious American Presidents Series, concluded this year that his actions probably constituted treason. It also did not help that his administration was as corrupt as any in history, and he was widely believed to be homosexual.

Whatever his sexual preferences, his real failures were in refusing to move after South Carolina announced secession from the Union and attacked Fort Sumter, and in supporting both the legality of the pro-slavery constitution of Kansas and the Supreme Court ruling in the Dred Scott class declaring that escaped slaves were not people but property.

He was the guy who in 1861 passed on the mess to the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. Buchanan set the standard, a tough record to beat. But there are serious people who believe that George W. Bush will prove to do that, be worse than Buchanan. I have talked with three significant historians in the past few months who would not say it in public, but who are saying privately that Bush will be remembered as the worst of the presidents.

There are some numbers. The History News Network at George Mason University has just polled historians informally on the Bush record. Four hundred and fifteen, about a third of those contacted, answered -- maybe they were all crazed liberals -- making the project as unofficial as it was interesting. These were the results: 338 said they believed Bush was failing, while 77 said he was succeeding. Fifty said they thought he was the worst president ever. Worse than Buchanan.

They had some reasons:

• He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process;
  
  
• He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich;
  
  
• He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state;
  
  
• He has repeatedly "misled," to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign;
  
  
• He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign (Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida);
  
  
• He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity;
  
  
• He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress;
  
  
• He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic's oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

Odds of my being here in 50 years to see how it turns out are slim. Of course, with W.'s approach to global warming, odds of any of us being here are getting slimmer every day, a little detail that didn't even make it onto the historians' list.

Worst President Ever. And he thinks he'll be thought of as leader of his own Greatest Generation. Scary.