Excellent Opinon piece.

When in comes to the so called Democratic "leaders", like say, hum..... House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, does the Peter Principle come to mind?

Huh?

Wow, at least Bush won't be alone in his rubber room. 28% approval rating and dropping = loser. Congressional oversight = democracy.

2 more points to go to match Harry Truman's low - and Truman is now considered 'near great' by historians.

Dave

Huh? Truman? You gotta be kidding! Care to name some names?

Truman was a hack, and most citizens were relieved when he did no worse than he did by the time he left office.

What planet is this writer living on? Nobody is whupping anybody. Both sides are simply fulfilling their generally accepted roles in American life: Congress, to attempt to enact the people's mandate: Bush, to scold, threaten and ignore anybody and anything that contradicts what his closed and locked mind decided years ago.

Historians only rate truman as near great because they are democrats and have so few democrat presidents who aren't pure disasters that they have to inflate the reputations of the few who don't totally suck.

Historians only rate truman as near great because they are democrats

Look in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No - it's Captain Stereotype!

Historians are academics, Lumpy. They are trained to analyze historical facts and interpret them without regard to personal prejudice. Do all of them manage to do that all of the time? Of course not - they're human. So their assessments don't always match your ideology? Tough titty.

As to your contention that all historians are Democrats, I refer you to one Victor Davis Hansen - with whose writings you may be familiar, as he has a nationally syndicated newspaper column.

Speaking of historians - Dave?

I think Harry Truman would probably be physically ill if was alive today to see what has happened to his party.

Mike

What planet do you live in. You cant just make up how people feel and write an article as if it means something.

You made up every point in this article. None of it is real.

I know that form of dialouge if popular among a now large portion of people who consider themselves right leaning, but the rest of us have brains.

What was your aim??

Speaking of historians - Dave?

In my experience most historians are neither democrats or republicans. Their political leanings depend very heavily on their field of specialization. Modern historians and those specializing in the coloial and third world are overwhelmingly marxist. Economic historians and those specializing in the ancient and medieval periods tend to be libertarians. There are, of course, exceptions - like former Republican Senator Phil Gramm.

As for Truman's ratings, he is indeed normally rated as 'near great'. Wikipedia has a compilation of various ratings of presidents which ranks him 7th between Jackson and Wilson. I think the list is way too kind to Wilson and ought to bump Eisenhower and Polk up higher.

I'd actually rank Truman lower. I think his anti-communist mania was a major flaw which is hard to excuse. In a lot of ways he really is a LOT like George W. Bush, getting a boost from a crisis - in his case the death of FDR - and then generally being irritating and incompetent and getting the US into unnecessary conflicts. He also won a very narrow reelection despite extremely low ratings.

Dave

Historians do indeed have their political agendas and bias. As a student studying Israeli-Arab relations I am also witnessing a battle between Left and Right wing politics. The most shocking argument coming from the right winger Alan Dershowitz; you don't need to be an academic to realise just how awful his publication 'The Case for Israel' is. If you lean to the Right at least stay clear of this guy.

Graham, a lot of people would characterize Dershowitz as moderate to left of center. I don't pretend to speak for him, but I'm pretty sure that he identifies himself politically as a Democrat rather than a Republican or any kind of conservative, even if he doesn't toe the leftist line on Israel.

Dave

On considering a bit more, I think Dershowitz would have to be characterized as a liberal anti-socialist, a position which I more or less share, made more complex by his support for Israel. There are a lot of people in both parties who believe in the basic tenets of liberalism yet don't support internationalism or socialism. Dershowitz is a good example - highly critical of the administration and the moral conservatives, yet equally critical of the extreme left like Noam Chomsky.

Dave

#11:
One huge difference between Bush and Truman--Bush thinks he IS the presidency, and Truman knew HE wasn't.

Their backgrounds are so completely different--early family life, economic circumstances, education, military service, political careers, personalities, ideology--that they are, in a lot of ways, opposites.

'Our Congress has failed to prevent a war concocted from pretext and initiated upon false claims and propaganda. It has failed to stand against funding an immoral act of severe malicious aggression that has spawned widespread and long-term consequences. Our legislators have ignored the cries of the American people and the screams of the families in Iraq. The leaders on Capitol Hill have consistently bowed to the will of the monarch in the Oval Office -- signing off on a war that we, the people, do not want.'

Amen comrade!

Dave,

I gather that when an American refers to the Democrats as 'left' the rest of the world ought to interpret that as 'right of center' as opposed to actual 'left of center' or just plain old 'left'.

I don't think a true left wing actually exists in contemporary mainstream American politics. Would that be a fair comment to make?

Woah, graham. The american left and even the democratic party are more diverse than you think. We've got real hardcore communists who'd fit right in with europe's worst right in congress. Read up on charles rangel, john conyers and nancy pelosi sometime.

Truman should have dropped the bomb on San Fran.

"I don't think a true left wing actually exists in contemporary mainstream American politics. Would that be a fair comment to make?"

No. There are quite a few Congressional districts that regularly elect socialist-types. But when the Democrats run a candidate for President, they are forced to moderate their message a bit in order to have any chance of winning.

So Dave cites Arthur Schlesinger as an impartial historian?

Good thing we're distracted (all over BC) by discussing 1950s democrats so we don't have to discuss current failues of this administration, like Antonio Gonsales, the failing Iraq Surge, etc.

So discuss already, bliff...

What about Gonzalez? What about the surge?

Maybe Bliffle's right. There isn't much point in discussing whether this war was "concocted from pretext", because we've argued both sides for years. There's nothing in this article to change my assessment. So let's talk about Truman.

Well, if we're going to rehash the past, I'd like to complain about the Jackson administration. I'm still p*ssed about that National Bank issue!

National Bank? Biddle deserved what he got! It's the Trail of Tears I'm pissed about.

Dave

It's interesting to note that rehashing the past seems to be relegated to a worthless task on an agenda to nowhere land.

Yet, each day we are making mor ehistory that future critics will dump in the same worthless category. It is no wonder we continue to repeat the past. We refuse to learn from it.

In looking back at the past acts of the U.S. government and the cohorts in crime behind the scenes, we find a trail of tears that is unbroken from the slaughter of natives to the reckless sacrifices of human lives today in foreign lands.

In any century or decade one chooses we find horrific decisions that caused great suffering. Leaving the road of "manifest destiny" we look at the horrors of slavery. In the aftermath of slavery we see a nation divided over what to do with millions of refugees who don't own anything.

The ensuing battle between brave leaders in Congress and those who were cowards dealing with a ruthless president ended up with an impeachment, but failure to remove him from office. In the backdrop the real damage was done. The Freedman's Bureau, which orchestrated every aspect of assistance to the newly freed folks, was de-funded by the president. The Secretary of War, who oversaw the Department in charge of the Freedman's Bureau was the center of the struggle between the president and Congress.

Move on into the 1900s and we see the continued oppression of these refugees, who, again, are struggling to rise up from nothing with nothing.

The oppression of women and children as well is not to be forgetten.

Quickly rush ahead a few decades into the age of Margaret Sanger and her monumental movement toward etching the lessons she learned in Nazi Germany on the landscape of American history. While her Planned Parenthood lives on to assist in the destruction of tens of millions of tiny souls (by choice of course) few will recall her Negro Project, whereby she became the architect of "government plantations" where she desired to place the "negroes, unemployables, idiots, disabled, criminals, prostitutes, drug addicts," etc.

In the same time era check out FDR and his eugenics experiments with Air Force families in an effort to create a superior breed of whites.

And let's not forget the Tuskeegee experiments that continued for 40 years.

And I wouldn't want anyone to overlook the Jim Crow era.

As we walk into the Civil Rights era, we see the insurgence of the people against the rampant discrimination of government policies. That's not to dismiss the fact that individuals outside of government were also establishing their own brand of local discrimmination, but government decisions and policies have widespread and far-reaching capabilities that are recorded in history.

Meanwhile, the government was branching out its internal aggression to foreign lands.

The age of the warmongers, in the aftermath of WWII saw Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Central America nations, African nations, Eastern Europe and the Middle East all with the historic impact of American involvement.

The pretext of our government's decisions to kill folks is always for the greater good.

And if we continue to relegate strong analysis of the past to the ash heap of worthless discussion, pretending to banter about important things while jokingly dismissing them all, we will continue to sentence this nation to remaining a callous, egotistical, violent entity that exerts its will wherever and however it pleases around the globe ... thinking that all peoples exist at, and for, the pleasure of our leaders whose decisions impact millions of lives, not just at home, but the world over.

Touche!

Good point, Mike.

Bliffle, methinks you need to read more closely before heaping praise on our friend Mike.

Dave

"Bliffle, methinks you need to read more closely before heaping praise on our friend Mike."

I disagree, Nalle.

Nalle, misperceiving and misunderstanding, as usual, mistakes a touch for a surrender.