March 21, 2006
Who's Bad?
Matt Yglesias, another blogger I heart a lot, is currently embroiled in a bit of a squabble with other lefty bloggers and his commenters over his statement that George Bush is not, in fact, the worst president ever, and not even as bad as Reagan was.
He's clarified his position a little in his latest post. Apparently he was actually just taking issue with Senators Reid and Clinton:
I think invading Iraq was a bad idea. Under the circumstances, I think a creditable case can be made that Bush is a worse president than Ronald Reagan was (I'm not sure comparisons to the distant past make sense). However, Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton at least claim to believe that invading Iraq was a good idea. I don't think it makes sense for them to think Bush is worse than Reagan.
He goes on to document how Reagan's domestic and fiscal policies were truly terrible, and say that Bush's haven't quite topped those in sheer damage.
I disagree with his assessment of Bush's foreign policy (he gives it a passing grade, if you forget Iraq) and I think he misses the most important damage George Bush has done to our country.
Foreign policy-wise, Bush's sins far exceed those tied to Iraq. In a way, Iraq serves to obscure the numerous faux pas' and wrongheaded policies the Bushies have pursued over the years.
Before 9/11, he was hamfisted and belligerent in dealing with North Korea, resulting in the rapid breakdown in that situation and the open renewal of North Korea's nuclear program. He had already stepped on many toes by withdrawing from the ABM treaty, actively seeking to undermine the Kyoto Treaty, and generally advocating an American retreat from international agreements as a rule.
After 9/11 he squandered the subsequent outpouring of global goodwill in insisting on conducting the Afghan war alone, promulgating a doctrine of preemptive war, denying the application of the Geneva Conventions to the conflict in Afghanistan and the wider war on terror, and establishing a camp for indefinite detentions of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.
And that's just the above-board stuff. He also set up secret detention facilities around the globe, made torture a quasi-official tool of American policy, and dramatically increased the rate of extraordinary renditions. I'll leave out the substantive abandonment and mismanagement of the wider war on terror, because I believe that's tied to Iraq in a big way and we've already called that against him.
These last speak to what, in my opinion, is the preeminent sin of the Bush administration to date - the arrogation of unprecedented and readily abused power in the hands of the executive. War powers have been asserted that make a mockery of the Bill of Rights, and a war has been declared that has no end - and of course, it's Congress that constitutionally should have to declare war to begin with. Bush has instilled a culture of politics-over-policy from the suppression of scientific evidence in health and environmental studies to the "reeducation" of the intelligence community. Vastly more government information is classified or restricted today. And don't get me started on "signing statements." Bush has tilted our system of checks and balances in a dangerous direction, and I don't think we'll be able to easily reverse it. We will be dealing with the effects of that for a long time.
Context is important - for one example, neither Bush nor Reagan have acted on looming global warming issues but Bush is arguably a worse actor on that count because of the larger amount of hard evidence and increased speed of climate change. Worst President Ever? I don't know. But pretty damn bad? Yes, yes indeed.
Posted by ben at March 21, 2006 05:44 PM