"Is not!" "Is so!"

Oh, well...the conservatives are squabbling again.

Last month over at The Blogland of Earl Capps, they took a dim view of people who say President Bush is the worst president ever:

American political culture is full of angry and hateful people these days, many of whom signify themselves by their hatred of President Bush, who they derisively call the “Worst President Ever”.

Sure, we all know Bush doesn’t win opinion polls, and there have been plenty of mistakes, but does he qualify as the Worst President Ever? Not hardly.

It has been our experience that most of the shit-for-brains lefties rabidly raging about the performance of the Bush administration have little or no background with American history upon which they base their judgments...

Enter- stage right- Sic Willie from Anaconda:

Forget Herbert Hoover, Warren Harding or Andrew Johnson … Dubya is No. 1 with a bullet.

Elected on America’s ignorance and reelected on its fear, “the Deciderer” will leave office in another three months with just one tangible accomplishment that we can see - the fact that he never got a blow job in the Oval Office (that we know of).

So what did he do? Aside from setting presidential records for vacation time and deficit spending, of course.

Let’s recap, shall we?

First of all, George W. Bush has set the bar for presidential moronisitude at a potentially unreachable new low.

We’ve had stupid presidents in the past (i.e. Ulysses S. Grant, Andrew Jackson), but at least those guys had endearing qualities - like the fact that they won wars and could speak in complete sentences.

Plus, Jackson had like a dozen lead bullets rattling around inside his body and Grant was … well … pretty much drunk all the time.

Bush is just dumb, people, and he’s dumb without anything redeeming attached to it.

In addition to his stupidity, Bush is also (here’s our real beef) the chief betrayer of fiscal conservatism in the 21st Century, a “moderate” Republican who refused to reign in the big government excesses of his own party. That failure ultimately cost the GOP both of its Congressional majorities as well as the faith of the American taxpayers.

And is if that legacy wasn’t enough, Bush stuck a final knife into the heart of capitalism with his $700 billion bailout proposal, a crass, callous and unconstitutional reversion to socialism intended to “rescue” us from the failed government policies his administration either wasn’t smart enough or (in the case of the sub-prime mess) strong enough to correct.

Then there’s Iraq, a war we ordinarily wouldn’t mind supporting were it not for the smug cluelessness with which Bush’s administration advanced it.

Mission Accomplished? Not hardly, although we do give Bush credit for recognizing that failing to clean up his own mess would mean a far greater threat to our national security in the long run.

But smugness and cluelessness - which defines pretty much everything our federal government has done over the last eight years - are also Bush’s defining characteristics.

It’s not just that he’s stupid, he’s an asshole about it.

Not surprisingly, Bush will leave office with atrocious approval ratings - like Nixon and Truman.

But both of those presidents have been borne out by history as forward-thinking visionaries whose legacies - in spite of their failures - helped make this country strong. Truman, in particular, is now regarded as one of the greatest presidents to ever occupy the Oval Office, despite the heaping contempt poured on him by his contemporaries.

Are there any seeds in Bush’s legacy that could produce the same historical about-face?

We sure don’t see any …

Of course, Bush’s longest-lasting legacy could end up being the election of Barack Obama, who is currently poised to ride a wave of relentless anti-Bush sentiment all the way to the White House.

If Obama beats McCain, the latter will have no one to thank but his Commander-in-Chief.

After all, Bush was the anchor that dragged him down into a defensive campaign - precisely the ground you want to avoid if you’re already perceived as an angry old man who missed his shot at the limelight eight years ago.

And therein lies the irony … we’re not fans of McCain by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s difficult to conceive of a scenario in which he’d have done worse than Bush.

So yeah, thanks a lot there, South Carolina (circa 2000, anyway).

Add it all up and we think “Dubya” easily goes down as the worst president ever, although as always we’re interested in your thoughts on the subject …