Worst President ever debate

Josh Marshall takes up Matt Yglesias' question: is Bush the worst president ever? In comparing him to Reagan (my personal worst ever... until Gee Dubya), Josh says:

Reagan had the ability, simply, to change his mind. You might say it's the ability to allow the facts to overcome your mind or as our secular saint, President Lincoln, put it, far more eloquently, the ability to 'disenthrall ourselves.'

And that is an ability the current occupant of the White House entirely lacks -- a fact which is on display now as he again crosses the country arguing that black is white and up is down.

President Bush represents something different from the normal sloshing back and forth between liberalism and conservatism. He's a radical. He's set on a destructive course, laced with corruption and fed by extremism. And he mistakenly believes that stubborness and ignorance constitute a virtue he calls 'leadership'.

I don't think there's much question that President Bush is the most conservative president in modern American history. But the issue is not his conservatism; it's his radicalism and destructiveness, his willingness to wreck the state. 'Worst ever' covers a lot of ground. But I think there's a good argument to be made that he is.

(ed.note: For those who are interested the full Lincoln passage is: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country." It's from his second annual message to congress -- what we'd call his second State of the Union address -- in December 1862.)