Pacific Free Press was launched in March 2007 by Dutch-Canadian Richard
Kastelein of V.O.F. Expathos, in the Netherlands along with Chris Cook- CFUV radio journalist and Editor in Chief of Pacific Free Press. Cook is based in , Victoria, British Columbia.
The site is a sister to Atlantic Free Press and Brick Ogden an American Expatriate in Amsterdam has been a key supporter of this project.
The mission of Pacific Free Press is simple: to dig out nuggets of truth from
the slag-heap of lies, ignorance and witless diversion that has buried
public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
America’s historians, it seems, don’t think much of George W. Bush.
“It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,” concluded one respondent.
“His domestic policies,” another noted, “have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”
Now in all fairness, historians should wait a while before
passing judgment on a president’s who served recently, much less one
still in office. But the current incumbent is a special case. After
all, 81 percent of Americans, according to a recent New York Times
poll, believe he’s taken the country on the wrong track.
That’s the
highest number ever registered. The same poll also says 28 percent have
a favorable view of his performance in office, which is also in
Nixon-in-the-darkest-days-of-Watergate territory.
Among
historians, there is no doubt into which echelon he falls–his
competitors are Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and
Franklin Pierce, the worst of the presidential worst. But does Bush
actually come in dead last?
Yes. A Pew Research Center poll of
109 leading historians found that 61 percent of them rank Bush as
“worst ever” among U.S. presidents. Bush’s key competition comes from
Buchanan, apparently, and a further 2 percent of the sample puts Bush
right behind Buchanan as runner-up for “worst ever.”
96 percent of the
respondents place the Bush presidency in the bottom tier of American
presidencies.
Pew Research Poll: Historians Rate George W. Bush a “Failure”
And was his presidency (it’s a bit wishful to speak of
his presidency in the past tense–after all there are several more
months left to go) a success or failure?
On that score the numbers are
still more resounding: 98 percent label it a “failure."
This
marks a dramatic deterioration for Bush. Previously he wasn’t viewed in
the most positive terms, but there was a consensus that he wasn’t the
“worst of the worst” either.
That was in the spring of 2004.
In the
meantime, Bush has established himself as the torture president, the
basis for his invasion of Iraq has been exposed as a fraud, the Iraq
War itself has gone disastrously, the nation’s network of alliances has
faded, and the economy has gone into a tailspin–not to mention the
bungled handling of relief for victims of hurricane Katrina.
In 2004,
only 12 percent of historians were ready to place Bush dead last.
Here are some of the comments that the historians furnished:
“No
individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib,
contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his
deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with
his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the
Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the
terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a
looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s
goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious
an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”
“With
his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his
monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will
take decades to correct,” said another historian. “When future
historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States
began to lose its position of world leadership, they will
point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now
easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of
areas: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the
next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the
region with the best quality of life.”
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