Yglesias says Bush is "somewhat better than Reagan"

[BurtWorm]

:wtf:

My $.02: Bush is the worst "president" in my lifetime. No. Question. About. It. (And I lived through Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush I. And Carter wasn't so hot in office either. But Carter and even Nixon were Henry Vs compared to this jerk.)

http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/27975

Worst. President. Ever.

By Matthew Yglesias | bio

Sam Rosenfeld's already snarked a bit on this, but seriously, what's with Harry Reid saying George W. Bush is "the worst president this country has ever had" or Hillary Clinton's similar claim that he's "one of the worst" in American history? On domestic policy, he's certainly been a bad president in the sense that I would gladly prefer Al Gore or John Kerry or Howard Dean or Joe Lieberman or Wesley Clark or Russ Feingold or pretty much whomever you like. He's somewhat worse than, say, his father. But somewhat better than Ronald Reagan. Bad -- very bad, even, if you want to get indignant about it -- but bad in a run-of-the-mill, parties- alternate-in- power, rightwingers- are-all-bad kind of way.

On other fronts, the Afghan War was necessary and it's been handled okay and despite a lot of problems with port security and related matters, we haven't had another terrorist attack. This just isn't the stuff out of which world-historical badness is made.

...

I still don't know that "worst ever" is the right thing to say, but certainly when Iraq comes into the picture you can start to see the case that Bush is super-bad. That was a big, giant, important blunder whose consequences we'll be living with for years if not decades. But then again, Clinton and Reid both . . . supported the war and don't support substantially changing Bush's war policy right now. So what can they be talking about? Who knows?

Well, now I'm playing dumb. Here's what they're talking about. They know the base is furious with Bush and they want to placate the base with occassional spurts of strident rhetoric in order to distract attention from the fact that they, like Bush, are on the wrong side of the most important issue facing the country. I think Reid's done a good job, generally, as Minority Leader and wish him well. But I also hope liberals won't fall for this bait-and-switch. The liberal blogosphere can generate all the strident rhetoric one would ever want. What liberals need from progressive politicians isn't rhetoric that's pleasing to the ears, but a combination of election strategies likely to win, and policies that will benefit the country.