he wasn't the worst we've ever seen.
Name somebody worse. Did anybody else oversee a disasterous war of choice AND an economic collapse. Johnson had the first and Coolidge/Hoover had the 2nd. Only Bush was epic fail enough to do both.
Carter would be high on my list of sh**tty Presidents........they were both poor, in different ways.
Carter has been a much better ex-president than he ever was in the White House.
He handled 9/11 great and, contrary to popular opinion, the war in Iraq was a necessary evil. There is no way that Saddam Hussein would have given up control through diplomatic efforts. No one in their right mind would argue that Saddam Hussein needed to be removed from power. Even if he didn't have WMD's at the time, who's not to say he wouldn't have continued to terrorize his neighbors and his own people. Bush's mistake was not going into Iraq, but not knowing what to do once he toppled the regime. We could have been there a lot shorter of a time had the Bush administration had known what to do once the regime was removed. He went in late March 2003, and the regime was toppled before May 1 that same year. We could have easily been out of there by 2004 and we would have saved thousands of our young men and could have focused more on Afghanistan, and possibly have ended that war by the time he left office. Instead that one mistake after Saddam was removed cost us another 7 years in Iraq and forced his successor to fight a war that had no business going on that long.
As far as the economy goes, sure Bush could have done a lot more to prevent collapse, but the blame is not his alone. It belongs partly to the Clinton administration for not regulating the banks in the late 1990s.
