For a shining moment, Rolling Stone stops sucking

The Worst President in History? is the cover story, by historian Sean Wilentz. Despite the title, this is not not not not NOT some vitriolic volley of anti-Bush rhetoric, but rather a thoughtfully written, well-rounded examination of the Bush presidency and where it went wrong. Wilentz points out that this country's greatest presidents--Washington, FDR, Lincoln--led the country through the most tumultuous moments in its history while unifying its people. He compares this to Bush's fellow candidates for "worst president": James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Herbert Hoover. And he offers the best summation of Bush's failings in this passage:
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

If Rolling Stone does more stories like this, I may forgive them for trying to pretend that Britney, the Backstreet Boys and N'Sync were significant artists.

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