Was the American electorate the worst electorate in history? After all they relected George W Bush in 2004.

I would say if you look at the character of those who hate Bush/Howard so much you realize just how good a President/Prime Minister they were.

I simply don't know enough about US presidential history to tell if there's been a worse POTUS, but that's not what makes this article so great. What makes it so great is that I can now cook up some popcorn and watch OLO's resident Rightists contort themselves trying to demonstrate that Bush was in fact a wise and effective leader.

And, Blairbar, Bush was only elected in 2000. The 2004 election was the largest and most elegant case of vote-rigging in history.

I would classify Bush as next to the worst president in American history.

My candidate for the worst president is Andrew Jackson, a genocidal Bible basher with a disregard for law. The civilised Indian tribes of the southeast United States had adapted to white man’s ways having prosperous farms, a newspaper and even a university. White men wanted their land so Andrew Jackson forced them west on the “Trail of Tears’ in which many died. People along the trail were even forbidden to give them food or water.

Until Jackson’s presidency the personnel in government departments below cabinet level were unchanged regardless of what party was elected. Jackson introduced the ‘Spoils System’ whereby workers were sacked in wholesale lots and replaced by cronies and party supporters. Civil service legislation introduced under President Arthur curbed the practice somewhat, but it still exists.

Jackson ignored court orders. He said, “Judge Taney has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” Under Jackson there was no rule of law either domestic or international. Before he became president Jackson invaded Florida that was a Spanish possession. As president he allocated federal money to his ‘pet banks’.

Bush has done more damage since the United States was a much more powerful nation under Bush than it was under Jackson. However, Jackson as far as I am concerned was worse. With all his faults Bush, unlike Jackson, was not a racist.

I don't know enough about earlier US presidents to know just where George fits in ths table, although I think a couple of other recent ones would rank ahead of him in the "worst president" rankings.

Be that as it may, even if you had awarded him that rare honour, at the end of his terms, he did not hold it for long. Obama has all ready made him look like a mature statesman, in just a couple of months.

I have always distrusted orators. Too much thinking about the how, rather than the what, they are saying.

Yes this bloke is all ready the worst, I just hope he is not that bad, that he is the last.

Maybe it is the worst electorate in history, characterised by paranoid myopia backed with an idiotically penile reliance on guns. Bush reflected their own stupidity and in doing so got away with the worst excesses of any dictator. Not only that but he convinced other western leaders - lapdogs Blair and Howard in particular - to join his barbaric cause. When people objected (for example, painting 'No War' on the opera house) they were somehow unpatriotic and the objects of government scorn.

Since when has it been OK to torture people? Detention without charge? Scrap the Geneva Convention? Kill civilians indiscriminately?

Instead of blistering rage and a hard-edged imperative to have him and his fawning minions brought to trial, they are still American heroes to the same myopic masses whose blind patriotism makes them complicit in his criminality.