Wampum

"Mr. Bush's fiscal and economic policies have been bad, but to give credit where credit is due, we haven't seen a 50% decline in GDP over a four year period."

You appear to be confusing badly an evaluation of the worst years in American history versus the worst President. Do you blame Hoover's policies for the entire 50% decline in GDP?

The question is how much negative impact the President's policies on what was likely to happen anyway. Now if you think it was Hoover's poor performance that caused the depression then he wins hands down, but while there are many critical of Hoover I dont know of any that blame him for the Depression. Hoover probably could have alleviated the problems slightly with better policies, in contrast, Bush's policies have affirmatively harmed America.

It's a crazy world we live in, but some folks live in crazier worlds than others . . .

Consider the an alternate universe inhabited by a reader of Andrew Sullivan, whose email Sullivant posted on his site. The argument Sullivan wants to share with his readers claims that when we compare Iraq today with the US Civil War and WWII, "Bush is doing a better job than either Lincoln or Roosevelt."

http://time.blogs.com/daily_dish/2006/03/bush_better_tha.html

Maybe this is from one of those folks whose marijuana Sullivan would like to legalize and tax.

As someone who grew up in Illinois, where school kids spend years studying Lincoln and the civil war, let's be clear. Is Bush worse than Hoover? Debatable, and certainly possible. But is Bush better than Lincoln? Get real!

Let's remember that George W. has painted himself into a corner and is in possession of nuclear weapons with approximately 3 years left to govern before we go saying that he is not the worst president ever.

Another thing that struck me is the idea that somehow Jimmy Carter would be a worse president than both George W and Herbert flippin' Hoover.

Yes, I would be careful with the Hoover comparison. Everything fell apart on him mere weeks after he took office and he spent the rest of his term trying desperately to re-pour a shattered foundation.

I very much expect that the next president will need to address very much the same sort of catastrophic situation, although all the blame --- all of it --- will lie on the inmates at the Crawford Chimp Farm.

Coolidge was the uber-Chimp in the depression, I think. Very much a Bush-like attitude toward economics. Rich got very rich and the bottom rotted out of the whole system. Coolidge fiddled while Rome burned, so to speak.

For what it's worth, when Truman needed someone to ensure that Europe did not fall into catastrophic famine at the end of WWII, he called on Herbert Hoover, who was so emotionally moved at Truman's offer that he wept right there in the Oval Office.

Don't give Hoover a bum rap. You can't blame him for internal German politics, certainly. The US was a very different place then, foreign policy-wise and would never have interfered in the internal affairs of a European country (South America, sure).

And blaming him for the Depression is a stretch. You can critique him for not doing enough in response if you like, but as others have noted, it wasn't his creation. Also remember that FDR ran to Hoover's right on economics, saying that Hoover was a big spender wasting the government's money. Whoops. Hoover's popular reputation as a do-nothing came largely from his habit of enjoying lavish multi-course meals in the White House while people were struggling to get by. But popular perception does not reality make, something that the Bush administration would have done well to remember in the run up to the Iraq War.

your crazy. no one could come close to the bushliar-criminal for worst POTUS ever:

forget all the lying and mental midgetness failings of the person;
forget illegal unnecessary invasion of Iraq creating massive instability and human suffering, and thrusting Iran to ME prominence;
forget imperilistic hubris;
forget bankrupting the middle class to enrich the super-rich;
forgot torture, rendition, and indefinite detention;
forgot illegal spying on Americans;
forgot Constitution trashing and theocracy installing;
forgot vote tampering, rampant cronyism incompetency, and losing New Orleans;

If for nothing else, ignoring and poo-pooing global warming and peak oil - the perfect one-two punch of natural calamity and global warfare for wiping out humanity, makes the bushliar-criminal the worst POTUS in the history of the world.
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"Worst" should have some correlation to cause and effect. A candidate for "worst" consequence in the domestic political history of the federal system is the conflict of 1861-1866. Its cause was the annexation of Texas, which James Polk ran on in the 1844 cycle, beating Martin Van Buren for the Democratic nomination for President, and Henry Clay, who was to be the Whig nominee, both opposed to annexation.

In the words of U.S. Grant, the annexation movement was " ... a conspiracy to acquire territory out of which slave states might be formed for the American Union ... The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times."

Another candidate for "worst" consequence is the rupture of the domestic political legal system from the international legal system. Its cause was the eviction of the Five Civilized Nations from the territory claimed by the Oglethorp Colony, later the State of Georgia. Andrew Jackson ran on "Indian Removal" and signed the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830. See US Grant's remarks above on the geographic expansion of the slave system.

To date, the Regime hasn't managed to trigger a multi-quarter depression, nor significantly damage the well-being of any Indian polity.

My personal belief is that actions should count more than outcomes when evaluating a president. By way of analogy, if I say someone is the worst airline pilot ever, it doesn't mean he has necessarily had an accident (yet), nor does it mean that any pilot that crashed a plane is necessarily worse.

-- Bush has launched an assault on the Constitution such as has never been attempted before. Nixon stopped well short of Bush (though probably only because he was booted from office).
--He launched a war of aggression against a soverign nation that had not attacked us and was not a clear and present danger. Other than perhaps the Spanish American war, that hasn't happened before, at least not without trying to use a fig leaf of respectability to cover naked aggression.
--He has turned a healthy economy with a budget surplus into a crippling defecit, and he's done it just as the dollar is likely to stop being propped up by oil (i.e. the dollar is likely to stop being on the oil standard). It is by no means certain that he has not triggered a depression.
--He has not only ignored global warming, he has tried to discredit the science and actively undermined attempts to do anything about human-based GHG emissions.
--His only reaction to the threat posted by "Peak Oil" has been to try to build an oil-based empire, rather than try to find alternative energy sources and encourage conservation.
--His is certainly a candidate for the most corrupt administration in history (though I might give the nod to Grant, because of the impact of the Tea Pot Dome scandal; however, give Bush time).
--He has completely trashed the image of the US around the world, creating new terrorists and possibly, with his Oil Imperialism, laid the groundwork for a future war with China over oil sources.

Those are really just the "high"lights of Bush's administraion (with 3 years to go). A full accounting of his incompetence would take more energy than I have this morning.

The reason I think Bush is clearly the worst is that, while you can find a president who was worse about this issue or that issue, there isn't any other president who is so bad on so many issues. And as far as disastrous outcomes go, he still has three years left, and his responsibility doesn't end when he leaves office (which is why Coolidge was a worse president than Hoover).