Now that the mid-term elections are over and the Dems one, left-wingers everywhere are rushing to write books and articles which claim that Bush is the worst President in our history. Let's look at the facts on this one...

The economy has been roaring from the low following the 9/11 attacks, which were not in any way caused by Bush, and if you have to blame them on a President, it would be the one before, Clinton, but that's not really fair either. You need to blame years of ignoring the rising problem in the Middle East from all of our leaders for decades back for this one. Anyway, the economy has been on a slow rise since then, and doing quite well. Historically low unemployment and all that. And Bush had little to do with that, too, because Presidents just don't have the ability to affect the economy much. But he didn't destroy it, either.

As far as the Middle East.... No matter how ill-advised you feel the Iraq invasion was in the first place, or how bad you think the execution following the initial invasion has been, there have only been 3000 American deaths over there. This is not Vietnam, where one of our most celebrated Presidents, JFK, got us into a much longer war with a lot more dead Americans. So you can't use that point to say Bush is the worst ever, because other Presidents did the same thing with far worse results.

Corruption? The Bush administration, for all it's problems, has shown little evidence of corruption. People like to point to no-bid contracts with Halliburton, but they ignore the fact that Halliburton was about the only company with the infrastructure and experience for these sort of jobs, and already had a strong connection with the military, which made implementation much easier. And people want to point out the Plame leak scandal, but they then forget to mention that in the end, Bush and Rove were found innocent, with a State Department staffer that was not tied to the administration being the source of the leak.

Despite predictions of civil liberties violations from the Patriot Act, there haven't really been any. And Guantanamo? Give me a break, water boarding may or may not be torture, but it's a far cry from cutting someone's fingers off (or beheading someone on international TV), and whatever the talking heads may say, if someone is water-boarding me, I'm probably going to tell them what they want to know. Maybe it's not even very effective, but it's not exactly an Iron Maiden or some other hardcore torture method.

So really there are very few reasons to back up calling Bush the worst President ever. You may not love the guy, but for every fault with his administration that you point out, I can find five Presidents that have done worse and are counted as heroes for it.