Just when you thought George Jr. was even close to being pretty, a couple of horror-shots of his legacy loom large.
The first: The escalating violence has residents of Baghdad stocking up on rice, vegetables and other foods in case fighting or curfews prevent them from getting to shops. “It is wrong to say we are getting close to a civil war,” a senior Iraqi politician said. “The civil war has already started.”

And the lost war gets found: Seven U.S. soldiers and a member of the NATO-led coalition were killed on Saturday in one of the deadliest days for Americans and other foreign troops in Afghanistan in recent months, as the Taliban continued attacks as part of their spring offensive. The renewed violence came as Afghan President Hamid Karzai acknowledged at a news conference that regular payments his government has received from the CIA for more than a decade would continue.

(Illustration found here).

In the last few weeks, some tropical assholes have attempted to rehabilitate the image of George W. Bush, and they have been pushing the envelope — even it’s time to stop blaming him for shit, even to showing some respect, and even to praise for his handling of Hurricane Katrina.
What are these nit-twits trying to do — make an asshole out of a sow’s ear?

During the dedication of George Jr.’s loony library a couple of weeks ago, a bunch of former leaders of the free world tried to create a sense that George Jr. was actually a cool guy and didn’t really completely fuck up the planet, he was just misunderstood.
The past is just the future rewound: “There’s no need to defend myself,” Bush told USA Today in an interview published Monday. “I did what I did and ultimately history will judge.”

Well, you little shit, history has already judged — the same as always.
George Jr. sucks!

Recently, the History News Network conducted an informal poll among top-tier US historians and found George Jr. was still terrible — the title of the post, “Historians Still Despise George W. Bush.”
A few high/low points:

Sixty-four historians responded. Thirty-five — over half — rated his presidency an outright failure.
“Thank you, God, for this opportunity,” one professor, a faculty member at one of the service academies, wrote in a comment.
“He was not qualified to be president and it showed for eight long years.”

Other historical comments by historians:

President Bush’s communication ability, long the subject of mockery during his time in office, was also complimented: “Definitely better than Coolidge.”
…
“Pre-emptive war has no place in the American historical tradition.
He justified it with false evidence and lied to the American people.
He accepted the use of torture, thumbed his nose at international treaties like the Geneva Conventions, and relied on faulty interpretations of the U.S. Constitution to get his way.
A president is supposed to protect and defend the Constitution, which he clearly did not do.”
…
“The selection of Dick Cheney as his vice presidential running mate was perhaps not an ‘executive appointment’ in the strict sense, but it was the functional equivalent, and it was the worst choice in American history.”
…
“He had a vision — stronger and weaker at different points in the presidency — but it proved to be a generally disastrous one.”

Five years ago, HNN conducted a similar poll, done in the wake of a Pew Research Center survey that showed then George Jr’s approval rating was down to 28 percent.
Some snips from that one (which received a lot of media attention):

In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.
…
Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history.
Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations.
…
The reason for the hesitancy some historians had in categorizing the Bush presidency as the worst ever, which led them to place it instead in the “nearly the worst” group, was well expressed by another historian who said, “It is a bit too early to judge whether Bush’s presidency is the worst ever, though it certainly has a shot to take the title.
Without a doubt, it is among the worst.”

And this comment nailed it all:

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one.
“Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill.
In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

George Jr.’s tenure in office would be laughable, if the horror he inflicted wasn’t so horrible.
He still stinks and will stink far worse when real-time history judges him — asshole that he is!