The worst president - envelope please

 

I’m a structure man, not an agent man. I’m instinctively suspicious of lists – the most overrated movies, the hundred best novels, etc. Of course, I’m a sucker, like any good American, for such lists, and the arguments that result in comparing one’s opinion. But I argue in some bad faith.

That said – shoving aside my theoretical objections – I do have an opinion on the perennially sweet topic of bad presidents, as in, was Trump the worst?

This summer’s news is more proof that the answer is no. The answer is George W. Bush.

There are a heap of bad, criminal, insane things the Bush administration did. The retreat from Afghanistan recognizes, distantly, one of them. But one must judge in a harder category: what didn’t the president do? Negligence is an easy thing to overlook, except when, as in the case of Trump’s response to covid, it is an aggressive negligence. Thus, that Bush neglected to heed the numerous warnings in the summer of 2001 of an upcoming attack has always been pushed to the rear of our historical consciousness – because it wasn’t known except to a few for years after that attack happened. If Bush had called a news conference in August, 2001, and said the CIA was trying to protect its ass by predicting an attack by this guy, Omama bin Sodom, we would have as strong a sense of incompetence before disaster as we have from Trump’s “joke” about inoculating yourself with detergent.

But the most massive negligence, which now looms like a giant tsunami over the world, is the eight years, during a crucial climate window, of doing nothing about climate change. Of doubting it, encouraging the ever higher level of exhaust, of cementing into the twentieth century system the nineteenth century dependence on carbon based energy. That, more than “democracy”, might become America’s real contribution to world history.

It didn’t have to be like this. George H.W. Bush, accepting the science, led the effort to close the ozone hole with a series of international accords and model like domestic policies. If he’d been like his son, we would be in a very perilous position today. George W. Bush is merely a name for a whole host of interests and agents, but – I can’t kick against the naming convention.

So, I say again: George W. Bush was the worst president America has ever birthed. Lord, have mercy on our souls.