George W. Bush’s popularity ratings are climbing. This should not be — he was a bad president, and we don’t want another one like him. At least Saturday Night Live is explicit about this worrying trend.
If only they hadn’t made him seem sweet; a bumbling nice guy who just dragged us into pointless wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and that are still spinning on.
The same thing happened to Ronald Reagan. Remember Reagan? Avuncular old Ronnie, barely aware of what was going on, yet still corrupt as fuck and seeding the corruption — “supply side economics”, pandering to the religious right, secret wars, dismissing broad swathes of the American public as expendable and better off dead (neglect of the AIDS crisis is just one of his legacies) — that still poisons the Republican party. He got mocked on SNL, too, but even now he’s revered as a Republican saint.
We seem to be trapped in a process of normalization, where instead of aspiring to be better, we dust off hideous relics from the past and pretend they weren’t so bad. Next election, the GOP will nominate some shabby antiquated Reagan impersonator and try to sell us on flawed old memories of past ‘glories’, sweeping the ignominies of the last buffoon under the rug, and trying to sell us on the claim that the current crop of abominations aren’t the product of official Republican policies — but that their new candidate, who will be some greasy selfish flack, is a return to tried and true standard conservatism. They’ll fail. They’ll be worse than the last one.
Meanwhile, the Democrats will look incredulously on the idiot the Republicans nominate, and think all they need to do is prop up someone marginally better to win.
The first Republican president I remember is Nixon. Every single one since has been wretched. Yet they keep getting elected. We’ll never learn.
The first president I can remember is Eisenhower, who was in power for most of my early youth. I don’t remember Franklin or Truman although I was alive for part of the first’s reign.
I grew up thinking that Ike was a terrible president and was *so* relieved when Kennedy got in. But, in retrospect, Ike looks better and better. Today someone with Ike’s views (bar the militarism) would I think be to the left of the center of the Democrats. But the economy thrived, people had real jobs and decent incomes for the time. Of course there was also this looming threat of nuclear destruction…
All the Republicans after Ike were, as you say, terrible evil white men.
One of my friends likes to say that Eisenhower was the last Republican president who actually tried to leave the country in better shape at the end of his term than it was when he started.
“The first Republican president I remember is Nixon. Every single one since has been wretched.”
Uh, Nixon was wretched too.
There are evil stooges on both sides. In fact, it seems to be mostly evil stooges all the way down.
And every time I think it couldn’t get any worse, the Republicans surprise me. I dare not think of what kind of person they come up with next.
@ #1
“Today someone with Ike’s views (bar the militarism) would I think be to the left of the center of the Democrats.”
There are no issues that Eisenhower would be to the left of the Democratic Party today. He was virulently anti-communist and authorized anti-communist operations by the CIA around the world. During his first term, when Joe McCarthy was running amok, he refrained from criticizing him to preserve unity among Republicans, allowing McCarthy to ruin many lives. He was regressive on civil rights, believing desegregation should proceed slowly after Brown, until events forced him to send troops into Little Rock. He was middle of the road, for those times, on economic issues. He’s mostly remembered for the Interstate Highway system.
I also grew up in those times, and I remember him mostly as playing golf all the time, much like our current president. I also remember how crushed my parents were when Stevenson lost, twice. Stevenson would have been our most intellectual president since Jefferson.
You don’t think Trump’s going to run for a second term?
Personally, I suspect that the next GOP nominee is probably going to be a lot worse than just “some shabby antiquated Reagan impersonator”… There’s blood in the water now. I’d say there’s a good chance they’ll nominate an open fascist – someone who’ll make Trump look like a moderate.
who ever the conservative party nominates will be a champion of the good old days and want to bring them back. They are victims of selective memory and faith. Picking unconsciously what they think is real and what is not, never wanting to know what is really happening because they already know, They have faith and the will and force to back it up!
mean while reality rolls right along
“There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip”
uncle frogy
I don’t think of Ford as wretched (certainly not as a person).
Ugh. That’s the strategy democrats keep repeating – a blandly inoffensive stiff with nothing to offer other than not being visibly awful. Someone whose policies are throughly lukewarm and business-as-usual and whose rallying cry is “hey at least I’m not that guy.”
“we dust off hideous relics from the past and pretend they weren’t so bad.”
Compared with the following ones, they weren’t.
The bar keeps getting lower and lower: there must be a joke in there about being left in limbo, but I can’t bring myself to make it.
Where do people form their opinions of past presidents? (For that matter, where do people form their opinion on evolution?)
I suspect that public schools (especially the textbooks) are incapable of addressing the problems of past presidents because of partisan complaints.
The first Republican president did some good things (and some awful things). Grant was better than his reputation, and Garfield might have been a decent President if he had survived 19th Century medicine.
But it’s pretty much been downhill since (including that racist, imperialist warmonger TR).
You bitch about the Repubs ,you should have been in GB when we were under the thumb of the Grantham witch .
Of course he is – unless he’s impeached and convicted first. The former is going to happen sometime after the midterms. The second will depend on how much Mueller will have published by then.
(Some people speculate that Trump, who never wanted to be president in the first place, will decline to run for reelection by his own free will. That is guaranteed not to happen. It would make him look like a loser in his own eyes; he hates losers, and he’s incapable of hating himself, so he can’t be a loser!)