Lincoln Chafee Calls Bush Worst President in History

[davidswanson]

Former Republican Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee on Tuesday evening called George W. Bush the worst president in U.S. history and the occupation of Iraq the worst foreign tragedy in U.S. history. Chafee said Bush deserved to be impeached.

Chafee served in the U.S. Senate from 1999 to 2006 and credits his defeat in 2006 - as do most analysts - to his membership in the party of Bush and Cheney. In 2003 Chafee was the only Republican senator to vote against authorization to attack Iraq. Chafee and John McCain had been the only two Republican senators to vote against the first round of Bush tax cuts.

While Chafee is supporting Barack Obama for president, he said on Tuesday that the Democrats as well as the Republicans have moved too far to the right. Without any apparent bitterness, Chafee remarked that while voters got a new Senate and House in 2006, they didn't get any changes in policies out of it.

Chafee made his remarks on a radio show I hosted, the audio of which can be found at
http://www.thepeoplespeakradio.net/audio/2008

The discussion focused on Chafee's new book:
http://www.davidswanson.org/node/1245

[Faygo Kid]

1. Great job, great show, Chafee is right.

Nixon WAS the worst in my memory (yes, over Reagan), and Andrew Johnson may have been the worst before him, but it's no longer a contest.

Historians agree.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

6. Being a young adult...

And politically aware during the Nixon era, I can say with certainty that there is, to my mind, no contest. Yes, Nixon was Bull Goose Loony, a paranoid little man with delusional traits and, from the tapes, an over-fondness for fine whiskey and High Weirdness. But he did have some competencies and he did have around him some people who tried to keep him from really screwing the pooch. Yeah, he was a bad, bad man, but he was still a rank amateur, in comparison to these clowns.

Dear Leader has no apparent core competencies, save aphasia, he is surrounded by a cult of personality challenged in it's devotion only by those close to Kim Jung Il, and they couldn't piss and hit the ground if you held a gun to their head. It is as if someone identified, as the strategy to form this administration, people who were more sociopathic, more delusional, more incompetent, more larcenous, more contemptuous of the Constitution, the people and the institutions of the United States, and more dangerously ideological than Dear Leader and turn them into an administration.

So they did it.

It boggles the mind.

[MadMaddie]

2. Didn't Chafee support many of * efforts?

[grannylib]

3. Damn right; the country has been moving in lock-step to the reich

ever since Ray-gun, and it's scaring me:scared: We need some real, honest progressive movement in this country.
There is not as much difference between the parties as I know I'd like to see.

[MikeNearMcChord]

4. Outside of being a dictator of the Stalinesque stripe

A person in the future will have to work extremely hard just go deeper in the abyss than what Bush has gone. Hell if all you did was just have a pulse, you can't do any worse.

[xxqqqzme]

5. Chafee makes much sense for a publican

If he changed parties or even ran as an independent, he could probably get his seat back. Both parties too far to the right - you betcha!

[Kixel]

14. The Bell Curve...

He's no longer a Republican even if his views remained the same. The party left him.

[Booster]

7. Well, Hell, I did that 6 years ago. A little late, Chafee.

[Octafish]

8. Thank you, Mr. Swanson.

Chaffee is a good man who puts his nation ahead of his party and truth ahead of self-interest.

Proud to K&R.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

9. I wish more Democrats in Congress would speak out this way

especially about the impeachment part.

[bdamomma]

10. too little too late Linc.

[no_hypocrisy]

11. Take a ticket and go to the back of the line.

[roamer65]

12. Chafee should run again as a liberal Democrat.

[pacalo]

13. Bookmarking.