Is George W. Bush the stupidest President since James Buchanan?

(Originally Posted on Myspace February 9, 2007 - Friday)

Is George W. Bush the "stupidest" President since James Buchanan? (History lesson)


Some guy made the statement that George W. Bush is the stupidest President since James Buchanan. Although I only agree with the President maybe, 50-60 percent of the time on a good day, saying he is the stupidest President since James Buchanan is very childish sounding. So, we need to set the facts straight:

1. James Buchanan wasn’t stupid; he was a weak and ill-equipped President. Buchanan was an idealist who believed that the nation's problems were not that complicated or hard to solve. In essence, he was right, but wrong on a technicality because the issue was only as bad at the opponents on each side treated the problems. Buchanan was an “end of an era” type of President who just couldn’t get the job done anymore. Buchanan was more like a James Polk or a Franklin Pierce than any of his predecessors until Calvin Coolidge came along.

2. Concerning stupid Presidents, let’s discuss some "idiotic" Presidents since Buchanan because someone doesn’t know much about history and is obsessively anti-bush for the sake of being Anti-Bush:

*Andrew Johnson: Became President when Lincoln was assassinated. Johnson has the dubious reputation for being the only other president aside from Clinton to be impeached and it was all over a man in Lincoln's old cabinet he disagreed with.

*Ulysses Grant: Great General, lackluster president. Had trouble exerting Presidential powers, couldn’t keep a rogue congress in check, and even was known for make executive orders that were never enforced because he never signed them...Also, happened to not be "aware" of corruption in his own administration.

*Benjamin Taylor: Didn’t keep half his campaign promises, ended up losing his re-election bid to the man he had beaten 4 years earlier (Grover Cleveland).

*William Taft: Never wanted to be President, it was his wife's idea. He got what he wanted a decade later when another President gave him his dream job: Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Taft went through the motions as President, did his best, but after awhile the nation realized what they had done: elected a man into the presidency whose greatest purpose of being there was so his wife could be first lady.

*William Harding: Aside from putting a former president on the US Supreme Court, had numerous scandals in his administration before he died while traveling. One newspaper said of Harding "Corruption was his middle name". But one of the things Harding ran on was "keeping the white house clean of big money/party politics" and then proceeded to have the most corrupt and topsy-turvy administration the nation had ever seen until some guy name Nixon showed up...

*Hebert Hoover: Some believe Hoover was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others believe he only made things worse. Either way, Hoover couldn’t and didn’t know how to handle the crisis of the Great Depression and his "initiatives" actually made things worse. Hoover thought the government should help its people, but all that rhetoric and little action didn’t do too much for the nation, his legacy, or re-election bid.

*Harry Truman: When FDR died in Georgia, where was VP Harry Truman? In a special area in the white house basement drinking with his Senate buddies...at 2pm in the afternoon. Thankfully for the nation, there was no 24 hour news network that would have demanded to see the VP, because the nation would have been presented with a tipsy man who was drinking under the white house and talking political deals. Its bad enough Truman was the democrats 3rd option for VP and not any of FDR's picks. Everyone thinks Truman was so smart for ending WWII by dropping atomic bombs on Japan, but the facts are that even a high school drop out presented with the evidence and information in the presentations and discussions given to Truman would have done the same thing. Truman initially didn’t want to drop the bombs because he thought that was "excessive force". Oh, and lets not forget the fact he got the nation into a war he couldn’t get us out of (Korea) and fired the only General who had the brains and ideas to win the war in Korea. Why was Gen MacArthur fired? According to Truman aides, (some paraphrasing for space reasons) "Truman didn’t like the General's aggressive tactics. He had plans to crush the communists in Northern Korea and weaken the red Chinese forces and wanted to scare the Russians. Winning was not the option, containment was."

*Lyndon Johnson: "The Great Society", what a asinine plan that messed up the nation's welfare system up so bad that no president since has been able to totally fix all the problems and try to reconnect the dots. Johnson was a blow hard who thought he would make a great president after JFK was done his presidency. LBJ got his chance sooner than he thought and what do you know, he is credited for signing legislation (Civil Rights Act) that he never publicly supported until the bill passed the House of Representatives and that JFK had been calling for a year before the passage of the Act. Oh, and LBJ made things worse in Vietnam, while going on the radio and saying things were going one way and assuming something was happening when the opposite was.

*Richard Nixon: Who on earth breaks into the building of a political opponent who you know you are going to beat in your re-election and then beat them by an overwhelming majority? Nixon. Watergate was all about political revenge. But also, Nixon was an imbecile with the Soviets where he offered them things and the Russians never held up their end of any deals. Man, Détente really was working then. Oh and Nixon hated Reagan and considered him "very dangerous". Funny, because Reagan handled the country better than, umm, Nixon did. Nixon ran on an "anti-abortion on demand" platform and 3 of the 4 judges he puts on the Supreme Court were in the majority 7-2 ruling in Roe v. Wade. Yup, Nixon was real smart, let me tell you....

*Jimmy Carter: Sure, let’s not send our young athletes to the Olympics to show the Soviets what we are really made of...which was our stupidity. Sure, let’s crush the dreams of hundreds of young girls and boys who trained their entire young lives for that Olympics because we got to be diplomatic with the Russians. Then there was the Iran hostage crisis. Admitting in a debate that he asked his daughter for advice on nuclear policy was probably not very smart either. I could go on, but you get the idea.


Stupidest President since James Buchanan? Whether Bush is stupid or not is subjective, but he certainly wasn’t the only one in 150 years. "