Day: April 19, 2006

O.K., it’s obviously a set-up but it’s still pretty funny.

Someone in the office of U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) tacked on a little something extra to a letter from the congresswoman to a constituent appalled by oil industry executives appearing before Congress in February. The letter ended:

i think you’re an asshole.

Since there was extra spacing and a hurriedly typed lowercase “i,” it looks as though the sentiment was added after the Republican personally signed the letter and added her own hand-written postscript apologizing for taking too long to respond. Let’s hope so anyway.

See a PDF of the actual letter.

When I saw the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone, with the headline, “Worst Presidency Ever?” I toyed with the idea that the editors had been reading Pensito Review. (Or maybe Jann Wenner is reading my mind. Yes, that must be it!) As constant readers know we have included “Worst President Ever” as one of our topics since last November and had been discussing it amongst ourselves here in our dusty electronic garret months before that.

The article’s author is Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz, and I think if he had written the title for Rolling Stone’s cover, he would have omitted the question mark:

George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

In our discussions here at Pensito Review, my colleague Trish offered Andrew Jackson as a candidate for the Worst President Ever because he ordered the genocide of the Cherokee after the Supreme Court had decreed that they could not be forced off their lands in Georgia and North Carolina.

According to Professor Wilentz, historians generally list three presidents as the nation’s worst: James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover. But now it seems clear that President Bush may have topped them all in incompetence and recalcitrance:

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.

It would be a good start:

A source “close to the President” told [NBC’s Tim] Russert that Bush “won’t fire Rumsfeld because it would be the equivalent of firing himself.”

Hotline is reporting that the job of White House press secretary could go to rightwing radio host Tony Snow or former Department of Defense spokesperson Victoria Clarke.

Bush will almost undoubtedly choose Snow, who was a speechwriter for his father. However Clarke proved her ability to lie convincingly on camera during her stint at DoD, during which time we invaded Iraq for no reason other than President Bush’s personal whim.

Snow has worked for Fox News and has his own rightwing talk show on Fox Radio. In the 1990s, he played a key, if inadvertent, role in the events that led to the impeachment of President Clinton when he introduced his friend Linda Tripp to Lucianne Goldberg, who was then a New York book agent — and is best known now as the mother of the odious girly-man Jonah Goldberg who writes for the National Review Online and the Los Angeles Times. Mater Goldberg shepherded the tapes Tripp had made of her “friend” Monica Lewinsky’s confessions about her love affair with the president the office of special prosecutor Ken Starr.

Snow also attended Davidson College at the same time as Pensito Review editor Buck.

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean says Karl Rove’s demotion in the White House is not enough:

“After having his hand in nearly every bad Bush policy decision and nearly every scandal that has consumed the Bush White House, it is not surprising that Karl Rove was demoted this morning. But, a demotion is not enough. From the collapse of the President’s scheme to privatize social security to Rove’s involvement in the outing of a covert CIA agent’s identity while he still holds a security clearance, the President has abundant reason to fire Karl Rove.

“The Bush White House is merely engaging in window dressing. President Bush doesn’t seem to understand that you can’t just change the window dressing, you have to make changes in the Bush Administration’s policies which have undermined America’s security – from the economy to health care, our families and the war in Iraq.”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan has resigned after years of prissily and combatively spouting half- and zero-truth statements on behalf of President Bush.

But, hey, don’t you worry about Scotty. There’s a world of possibilites in Republican politics for experienced liars.