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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: longnshort who wrote (52718)	11/1/2006 9:59:49 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

>>"Did you know that all over our country, historians are now arguing about whether Bush is the worst president among only those who've reached the second term, or among all presidents." no historian worth his salt is doing this.<< lns - I suppose you simply assumed my statement wasn't true, since just the tiniest effort at research would have revealed that it is. Here's an excerpt from an article on the subject, which talks about the results of a poll of 415 historians from around the country. Published on Wednesday, April 19, 2006 by Rolling Stone The Worst President in History? One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush by Sean Wilentz ... Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant. The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been. Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher. --- (emphasis mine) I think the views of historians are worth considering. After all, they know history, ignorance of which dooms one to repeat it. They have a base of knowledge of how past presidents have acted in various circumstances of war, unrest, peace and prosperity. This gives them a good, broad perspective. - Allen