Yeah, this looks bad:
A plurality of voters think Barack Obama is the worst president since World War II, a new poll says.Really? No one else? Not even Bill Clinton?
According to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday, 33 percent of voters think the current president is the worst since 1945.
Obama's predecessor, former President George W. Bush, came in at second-worst with 28 percent, and Richard Nixon was in third place with 13 percent of the vote. After Jimmy Carter, who 8 percent of voters said was the worst president in the time period, no other president received more than 3 percent....
After all, the last time Quinnipiac did a worst-presidents poll, in 2006, Clinton was regarded as America's third-worst post-WWII president, barely less awful than Richard Nixon. (George W. Bush topped the worst list, at 33%, followed by Nixon at 17% and Clinton at 16%.) And Clinton was ranked as the absolute worst by Republicans, white Protestants, and white evangelicals. Now only 3% of the survey respondents think he was the worst, and even among Republicans the number is only 4%.
And those 2006 poll results weren't Clinton's worst. Remember the notorious online survey conducted by the New York Post in 1999, in which Bill Clinton was declared the second most evil person of the millennium, with Hillary at #6, both of them as write-ins, with Free Republic as the driving force behind the voting? (Hitler was #1; Stalin, Pol Pot, and Joseph Mengele were #3, #4, and #5.)
And remember back in 2000 when George Will could write something like this without fear of seeming out of line?
Bill Clinton may not be the worst president America has had, but surely he is the worst person to be president. There is reason to believe that he is a rapist ("You better get some ice on that," Juanita Broaddrick says he told her concerning her bit lip) and that he bombed a country to distract attention from legal difficulties arising from his glandular life....If you lived through the Clinton years, you know how thoroughly right-wingers were worked up into a tribal sense of hatred against Bill and Hillary. That was still relatively fresh in wingers' memory the last time Quinnipiac asked about bad presidents, so of course Clinton got a lot of thumbs down.
And then, in 2008, the right-wing tribal elders cynically declared Hillary Clinton a blameless victim of the new object of their hatred, Barack Obama. Bill and Hillary were rehabilitated; they ceased being unpersons on the right.
And now Bill Clinton gets through these polls unscathed.
Barack Obama will bounce back, too. Soon, in all likelihood, the right will declare Hillary Clinton the worst person in America, and Bill just as awful. By 2017, right-wingers will be told that the Obama days were as nothing compared to the unspeakable awfulness of President Hillary's reign of terror. To the right, the worst president of all time is always the most recent Democrat.
I don't remember all the ins and outs of the various allegations against Clinton--between beinga murderer, a drug runner, and a rapist its easy to get confused--but it does strike me as curious that in those days the Republicans were, technically, anti rape while today they are quite definitively anti-rape-accusations and (ahem) pro-rape. As far as reality goes all Bill Clinton's sexual relationships were consensual and if some of the women were pissed off at him after and experienced buyer's remorse as I understand it from george Will's recent columns they were probably put up to it by the feminazis and just making these accusations for the obvious bennies.
ReplyDeleteOf course, if Bush, or any Republican, had "won" this poll it would be evidence of how terribly divided we are and of how over-the-top liberals are with their hatred.
ReplyDeleteBecause Both Sides*!
(*Except for the conservative side, which is always blamed in the abstract but is never specifically lectured at to stop doing something they're doing.)
Ms. Broaddrick signed an affadvit under oath, prepared by her attorney, attesting to the fact that President Clinton had not assaulted her. She changed her testimony when Ken Starr threatened to prosecute her and granted her immunity for her change of testimony.
ReplyDeletehttp://anusha.com/janedoe5.htm
Here's Katha Pollitt's non-pro-Clinton take on the matter from 15 years ago, which includes the timely statement "Women should turn up the heat for mandatory health insurance coverage of contraception..."
http://www.thenation.com/article/re-juanita-broaddrick#
George Will said that Clinton "bombed a country to distract attention from legal difficulties arising from his glandular life..."
ReplyDeleteThis is incorrect. He ordered cruise missile strikes in part to attempt to kill Osama bin Laden. Sadly of course bin Laden was not hit. But at least Clinton was trying to stop bin Laden, unlike GWB from 1/20 to 9/11/01.
Steve Benen did a great job of putting everyone's ratings yesterday.
ReplyDeleteIt's worth everyone's time to take a look.
He says the results are because the R's vote as a block, and D's don't.