"On the cover of the Rolling Stone..."

I'm in Hutchinson for a few days, visiting my family for Mom's birthday. Per our usual routine, Jeff and I were bellyaching about politics into the wee hours of this morning. He referred me to this remarkable cover story from Rolling Stone - an in-depth analysis by a prominent historian, concluding that Bush 43 might well be the single lousiest American president in our nation's history.

Pearls from the stinging indictment:

• In early 2004, an informal survey of 415
  historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant. (Remember this is a poll taken before Katrina, before Valerie Plame, before things went completely to hell in Iraq.)
• According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined.
• While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a
  radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science -- dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends."

I never thought of Rolling Stone as an important journal, but taken together with its disturbing investigation of the "Church" of Scientology, and Robert Kennedy Jr.'s sifting through the shady details of the 2004 election, Rolling Stone is rapidly rising in my esteem as a relevant, courageous publication.

Which, in all likelihood, means that to this administration it's a traitorous, anti-American, terrorist-loving, God-hating, out-of-touch, radical leftist heap of lies, half truths, and propaganda whose editors, contributors, and readers are soon to be extraordinarily-renditioned out of the White House's hair, and good riddance. Yep, I like it already!