Stephen F. Knott, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College has a column in today’s Washington Post in which he criticizes numerous historians for jumping the gun and declaring George W. Bush to be one of our nation’s worst presidents.
George W. Bush’s low standing among academics reflects, in part, the rise of partisan scholarship: the use of history as ideology and as a political weapon, which means the corruption of history as history. Bush may not have been a great president; he may even be considered an average or below-average president, but he and — more important — the nation deserve better than this partisan rush to judgment.
Bush’s defenders like to point to Harry Truman, whose reputation has been rehabilitated by Establishment types who think Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the creation of the National Security State, and the Korean War look better in retrospect than they did at the time. So, perhaps, 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security, warrantless surveillance, the Iraq War, Gitmo, Katrina, and the Great Recession will look better in sixty years than they look today.
I don’t know. It seems like a pretty faint hope. It seems less likely that Bush will move up the ladder in historian’s estimation than that others will move in below him. I don’t think we need to wait until all the classified information comes out or all the interviews with foreign leaders are conducted to put Bush’s presidency, at least as a preliminary assessment, near the very bottom of the list. For starters, look at today’s Republican Party. Do we have to be accused of partisanship if we simply note that the modern GOP is a disgrace and a national humiliation? Bush bears more responsibility for the current state of the GOP than any other single person. He presided over the total moral and intellectual collapse of the right in this country. He appointed the judges that created a majority for the Citizens United decision, which immediately caused Establishment Republicans to lose control of their party to the xenophobes and anti-governent lunatics.
Bush’s failures were near total. The cronyism was unprecedented. The functioning of government was bad on every level, from preventing 9/11, to the stove piping of intelligence, to the Abramoff Scandal, to the war-planning, to the performance of OSHA, to the regulation of Wall Street. Moral lines were crossed that should never be crossed. Innocent people are still languishing in Gitmo because of Bush’s bad legal reasoning. The economy completely collapsed.
Even if the Middle East looks like a paradise sixty years from now, it will be unlikely that Bush will get or deserve much credit for it. And let’s not forget that he never should have been president in the first place since he lost the election in Florida and only the fluke of a poorly-designed ballot in Palm Beach County even made the election close enough to steal.
