As awful as Bush is, Andrew Johnson was worse.  Actively reinstatitng the old order of the South during Reconstruction with their atrocious mistreatment of African-Americans was a bigger crime.  Bush is certainly one of the worst but I don't think he's going to be able to surpass Johnson unless he starts a nuclear war or starts mass arresting dissents.

In defence of Hoover, he was following the prevailing economic wisdom at the time that the budget must always be balanced.  Remember Keynes' ideas of deficit spending during recessions/depressions emerged in the 30s, with FDR basically coming up with the same ideas on a completely pragmatic basis.

Before the Great Depression, Hoover had made his name as an engineer overseeing some impressive public works.

I strongly believe Bush will rank at the same level or below Buchanan, currently ranked worst President ever, the guy whose inaction led to the Civil War.  God knows what is going to happen to this country, that historians will ultimately lay at Bush's feet.  Maybe the end of our constitutional republic and the emergence of a police state, that'll beat Buchanan easily.  Or an economic depression to rival what Hoover was blamed for.  Or environmental catastrophe and galloping desertification leading to a collapse of food supplies, due in part to a failure to tackle global warming and curb wasteful water practices.  Or an energy crisis due to turmoil in the ME.  

Or all of the above.

What I think Yglesias is criticising is not that the likes of Reid badmouth Bush, but that their doing so is a fraudulent displacement activity to give their followers the feeling that Dem leaders are making progress in attacking the GOP machine.

Whereas all they are actually making is - smoke.

As I mentioned earlier, Reid has made something of a habit of the practice. What Weisberg calls (piece linked in mine) spasms of random aggression.

Reminds me of one of the relentless Janeane Garofalo's catchphrases: red meat for the dopes. No doubt Reid and Co figure: it seems to work for Bush, why not give it a try?

As for criticising Dems - that's wrong when Lieberman does it. Yglesias, I'd say: not so much.

(But, having got onto the worst president topic: I'd rather think it was one the ones between Van Buren and Lincoln. Though if I was Buchanan in a balloon debate, I'd have a bloody good go at LBJ: Great Society, certainly; but Vietnam? Sixty thousand Americans dead, God knows how many gooks...)

I think George W. Bush is a serious contender for the worst president ever. Buchanan was quite bad, but I'm of the belief that the Civil War was probably going to happen regardless of what anyone did. Sure Buchanan didn't help matters, but I don't think the full blame should be laid at his feet.

Most bad presidents (Buchanan, Carter, Hoover, Andrew Johnson, etc.) fail because they mishandle a difficult situation. Bush's failures are of a completely different nature. To be sure, he has done his share of mishandling (Afghan War, Katrina), but the greatest failures of his presidency are because he recklessly pursued foolhardy policy, like the tax cuts and the Iraq War. Because of the former, our economy is headed down a path to ruin: we're deeply in debt and facing both a demographic shock because of rising health care costs and the aging of the baby boomers and an energy crisis because of the looming threat of peak oil. Because of the latter, we've alienated our allies, compromised the trust in our intelligence services, put a stain on any claim to moral leadership, weakened our military, strengthened our enemies, and killed and seriously wounded tens of thousands of soldiers and Iraqi civilians. And neither the tax cuts nor the Iraq War were at all necessary. Any halfway decent president would have recognized the dangers manifest in such reckless policies and dismissed them entirely. Put another way, the tax cuts and the Iraq War were entirely optional.

And we haven't even discussed how thoroughly corrupt this administration is, and how casually they toss aside basic traditions of American governance. They've advanced a legal theory that says the president can do whatever he wants regardless of the actions of Congress or the courts, and they've used this power to spy on Americans, imprison people without trial or counsel or even evidence, and torture. They blew a CIA agent's cover, imperiling national security, in order to punish her husband for damaging them politically. And then there's the small matter of stealing the 2000 election.

It's as if Bush, Rove, and Cheney actively studied the bottom of the presidential barrel and took the worst from all of them. They combine the corruption of Grant and Harding with the incompetence of Carter and Hoover, the malignant partisanship of Andrew Johnson, and the contempt for democratic values of Richard Nixon. The worst of it is that while previous presidents have failed because they didn't know how to do what's best for the country, or had a bad idea of what the best would be, Bush has failed because he has no concern whatsoever for the good of the country, and has sought only to gain and hold power and use it to enrich his friends and crush his enemies (his domestic enemies. If only he showed as much cunning and zeal in pursuing the nation's enemies). This is what happens when you put a gang of sociopaths in charge of the country.

Has Matt Ygnoramous seen Afghanistan? If doing Afghanistan was right, I'd hate to see wrong.

Afghanistan is a complete and total disaster.

In Afghanistan America had the chance to lead the world.

In Afghanistan America had the opportunity to "win hearts and minds" by committing to rebuild a Muslim nation and help save it's people.

In Afghanistan America had the change to catch and crush al Queda.

In Afghanistan America had the opportunity to draw in support from surrounding nations.

In Afghanistan America had the chance to show it was better, more caring, compassionate, humane, and smarter then the enemy.

Instead... we got Iraq.

Explain to me how Bush did anything... anything at all... right in Afghanistan.

Explain that to me because in Afghanistan Bush had the opportunity to lead the entire world.

Instead... we got Iraq.

I just read the whole thread on TPM cafe and it was very interesting.  I think Yglesias is missing a political point.

Compared to the other forty presidents, Bush is likely not the worst.  The two worst are two presidents that have tended to get high marks from historians, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson.  Their records on civil rights were somewhere off the scale of atrociousness.  Jackson actually committed genocide, in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling.  Wilson jailed his political opponents, and his maneuvering to take the country into WWI was as cynical as anything Bush did over Iraq, probably with worse long term consequences.  There attititudes towards the African-American population were what you would expect.  I have half a mind to start a public campaign to get Jackson off the $20 bill.

James Buchanan appointed a Secretary of War, who moved federal weapons into arsenals in the South as fast as he could during the secession crisis.  The seceding states took over those arsenals, and this guy wound up as a Confederate general.  I don't think Rumsfeld has been giving weapons to our enemies.

Andrew Johnson almost singlehandedly sabotaged any idea of giving the newly freed slaves their due rights as citizens.

However, most people's memories in the US don't go back before World War II, and it was a very different country then and the president had a very different job.  There is a strong case that the current incumbent is the worst president since World War II.  So Yglesias is being disingenuous, since there is no problem with Bush's opponents calling him the worst president within memory.

Greg Mortenson, author of 'Three Cups of Tea', has built 50 schools in Pakistan and Afghani villages over the past 12 years. Interviewed on WNYC, he said that Mullah Omar called a Taliban council and they voted to hand Bin Laden over to the Americans. Because there were no diplomatic channels open, however, Omar had no way to contact Washington.

This squares with everything else we know about the incompetence of the Bush administration. It's also highly likely that Bush never wanted to capture Bin Laden, and that any contact from Mullah Omar would have been ignored anyway.

The subsequent mess in Afghanistan, as pointed out above, makes any claim for the Afghani war as a plus for Bush obscenely ludricrous.

Bush is the worst president ever for one simple reason: He has done more than any other president to destroy our republic and CROWN HIMSELF KING.

And the horrible three years of scandal, corruption and destruction of international organizations.  

The way that Wilson led the country into war was certainly reprehensible, but it is hardly definite how things would have turned out otherwise.  I doubt that things would have been fought to a stalemate.  Here is an equally likely scenario:

Russia would have collapsed just the same, germany would have signed the treaty of Brest-Livostk, lined up all its troops on the western front, and overrun France, the Netherlands, and Belgium.  This leaves Germany in a stronger position than it was in at any point during WWII (no eastern front, no Allied capacity to perform signficant bombing campaigns).  Wilhelm II was clearly no Hitler, but noone could predict hitler's rise, and this outcome is clearly a gigantic strategic disaster.

Wilson's government was also the one moderating force at Versailles, as all the other nations wished even harsher retribution.  Versailles might have even worked had the Republicans in the US congress not prevented the US from signing it.  

There is clearly no definiteness about any of this, but still... the worst president list has to run something like:

Harding
Grant
A. Johnson
Buchanan
Jackson

It still enrages me that Grant is still on the $50.  There are about 10 presidents not on bills more deserving.

The thing about Bush is that he is bad on so many different fronts. For example, Grant's administration was incredibly corrupt, but Grant didn't torture people, launch a foreign war, fumble a major domestic crisis, trash America's reputation around the world, shred the constitution, etc.

All of Bush's competitors for the "worst ever" are one-note-Johnny's, royally screwing up one (or two) things but otherwise being mediocre at worst. Bush is a competitor for worst in almost every area of governance. While you might find someone who was worse in some regard or other, the breadth of depravity and incompetence hands Bush the "worst president ever" award by a wide margin.

It isn't even close, folks.