Comments Elsewhere

SemiPundit, I’m not claiming that G.W. hasn’t been a very bad President and indeed a rotten person. He has.

I’m asking for some historical perspective. Several of our early Presidents were personally slaveholders and fought politically for the advancement, protection, and perpetuation of chattel slavery. Several engaged in direct campaigns of genocide against various Indian nations during the early, middle, and late decades of the 19th century. James K. Polk, a large-scale slaveholder and leading fighter for the Slave Power, also fabricated a war of aggression with Mexico on grounds no less destructive and duplicitous than Mr. Bush’s war on Iraq, which ended with the conquest of half their territory. Woodrow Wilson, a militant white supremacist who instituted Jim Crow in the federal government and imprisoned and deported political opponents (including feminists, anarchists, civil libertarians, draft opponents, etc.), dragged us into one of the worst wars in world history after running as a peace candidate in 1916.

Acting like Bush’s (genuinely rotten) tenure could even plausibly qualify as the worst, compared to slavers, genocidaires, and the rest, either displays remarkable myopia, or else trivializes what can only be described as crimes against humanity.