Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today, admits he was wrong about George Bush. Last year he” criticized Hillary Clinton for saying ‘this (Bush) administration will go down in history as one of the worst.’” At the time Neuharth picked Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant, Hoover and Richard Nixon and the five worst Presidents and wrote, “It’s very unlikely Bush can crack that list.”
Neuharth admits he was wrong in today’s column. He writes, “I was wrong. This is my mea culpa. Not only has Bush cracked that list, but he is planted firmly at the top.”
Neuharth admits he was wrong. Bush’s failure to ever do this is one reason he tops the list of worst Presidents:
Another term historians may weigh critically is “Decider.”
Is he just a self-touted decider doing what he thinks right? Or is he an arrogant ruler who doesn’t care or consider what the public or Congress believes best for the country?
Despite his play on words and slogans, Bush didn’t learn the value or meaning of mea culpa (acknowledgement of an error) during his years at Yale.
Bush admitting his many mistakes on Iraq and ending that fiasco might make many of us forgive, even though we can never forget the terrible toll in lives and dollars.
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Bush is the worst President ever. Cheney is the worst VP ever.
Wow, it’s amazing how divided we really are . . . I commend President Bush and VP Dick Cheney on a job well done.
The president was selected not elected in 2000 & 2004 they moved the theft to Ohio. It makes perfect sense that he would be the worst of the worst. He had no real foreign policy experience and He was a divider not a uniter as he campaigned. He has alienated the world against america. CERTAINLY WILL WILL DO BETTER THIS TIME!!!
Selected not elected, give me a break. In 2000 in Florida the Democrats went to court to get invalid ballots (those with multiple selections for President or those with none) counted as votes for Gore, due to claim that the format of the ballot was “confusing to citizens.” Of course the fact that the allegedly unfair ballot was designed by Democrats was ignored, because it was part of a conspiracy by Gov Jeb Bush. Then when that attempt to get the vote count thrown out was thwarted, they tried to have the votes counted using rules established after the election. As far as Bush being the worst president, I would say he will rank in the bottom 5-10, clearly better than say Grant or Harding, and probably Ford, Carter, Nixon and Johnson.
Wayne,
That’s total nonsense. It was the Republicans who went to the Supreme Court to stop a state recount. Ballots where the intent of the voter could be determined should be counted. If all such votes were counted, post election analysis showed that Gore probably would have been elected.
Some of the votes which should have counted but didn’t had people both check off Gore’s name and also write in his name. They were not counted because they voted twice, but it is clear they intended to vote for Gore. Including these ballots would have given Gore the victory. Similarly a full state wide recount would have given the election to Gore.
You are just coming up with ways to rationalize what amounted to attempts to steal an election
Ron,
Yes the republicans did go to court to stop the third recount, which would have been done under rules DIFFERENT than those in place on election day. Sounds closer to the finish of the 1972 Olympic Basketball Gold Medal game than an election in a “free” country.
Your claim, “Similarly a full state wide recount would have given the election to Gore” ins’t fully true, see
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/20...../main.html
which states “A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.
The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN.”
Wayne,
That is incorrect. First, it was the Republicans who changed the rules after the fact. When this was fought in Florida, where Republicans would normally have the matter settled with their views on federalism, the recount was declared legal.
The consortium did not come up with a clear answer as you claim. There was controversy over their methods and the interpretation of their results with different news outlets coming up with different answers regarding a statewide recount. Conservative news organizations like CNN said Bush would have won while others said Gore would have won a state wide recount. Even your article hedges this in saying that it “suggests.”
AP reported this as a probable win for Gore:
http://seacoastauction.com/2001news/11_12_w2.htm
“A vote-by-vote review of untallied ballots in the 2000 Florida presidential election indicates George W. Bush would have narrowly prevailed in the partial recounts sought by Al Gore, but Gore might have reversed the outcome — by the barest of margins — had he pursued and gained a complete statewide recount.”
Later in the article they look at various scenarios with Gore winning under the state wide recounts:
“In the review of all the state’s disputed ballots, Gore edged ahead under all six scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide:”
Without a review of the overvote there remained controversy over who won even with the consortium study. There was agreement, even in the article you cite, that if the overvote was included Gore would have won.
This doesn’t include the problems with the butterfly ballots for which we can assume what was intended but there was no legal remedy as they accidentally voted for Buchanan while intending to vote for Gore. There were also voters who tried to vote for Gore and Lieberman separately, misunderstanding the directions about how to vote for president and vice president. Many misread “Libertarian” for “Lieberman” and voted for both the Democratic and Libertarian tickets, invalidating their ballots. If the mistaken Buchanan or Libertarian double votes are considered, Gore won easily. AP reported, “Had many of these voters not marked a minor candidate in the second column, Gore would have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush.” While there was no legal remedy for this problem, there is no doubt that a significant majority of Florida voters intended to vote for Gore.
Ron,
That’s a great prospect “If the mistaken Buchanan or Libertarian double votes are considered, Gore won easily” Gee we want to count votes that were cast incorrectly! Give me a break. If someone is incabable of reading the directions on the ballot, and they made a mistake, the vote is out! That is common sense.
Furthermore, on your comment “This doesn’t include the problems with the butterfly ballots for which we can assume what was intended.” If you are advocatating picking the president by “assuming what someone intended” why even bother have elections? Just let Congress, some media pundit, or anyone just assume that the election would turn out some certain way. Asumming that a double vote was clearly for Gore is a sham, and violates the principle of one man, one vote.
Wayne,
Read what I actually wrote. That is not what I said at all.
I described how Gore would have probably won with a state wide recount. Neither I nor Gore advocated counting these votes. Gore probably would have won with out them, but it is also of interest that if we look at how people intended to vote there was a very significant margin who preferred Gore.
Regarding your second comment, which I hadn’t seen when writing the above, this does not violate one man one vote because nobody is talking about changing this.
However while there is no legal remedy it is often easy to tell what was intended by the types of errors. This is not at all analogous to having a media pundit replace elections. We have actual ballots making it possible to tell what each voter intended to do. We know that many voters both checked off Gore and wrote in Gore and there is no doubt they wanted Gore but their votes were not counted. We know that the butterfly design led to a combination of Gore and Buchanan and really doubt that heavily Jewish areas really wanted Buchanan. It is also likely that those who checked Gore and Libertarian thought they were checking Gore and Lieberman as some stated afterwards.
George W. Bush’s sentence-by-sentence speaking skills are deteriorating. Apparently, this may be due to a mental illness called “presenile dementia.” Bush may or may not be secretly still drinking heavily. Bush lied, and thousands of people died. Bush suffers from narcissism and megalomania. Moreover, Bush has been arrested three times. Bush was arrested for disorderly conduct. Bush was arrested for stealing. Bush was also arrested for a serious crime—driving under the influence of alcohol. There are reasons to believe that Bush suffers from a learning disability. Bush’s learning disability would explain a lot of things. All in all, Bush is a severely mentally ill individual. Bush is not fit to be the president of the United States.
Submitted by Andrew Yu-Jen Wang
B.S., Summa Cum Laude, 1996
Messiah College, Grantham, PA