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Is Bush the worst U.S. president ever?

Mar 22, 2008 04:30 AM

Historians will argue over whether George W. Bush is the worst president the United States has ever endured.

Bush is not the first U.S. president to take a cavalier attitude to civil liberties. Abraham Lincoln did so during the Civil War, while modern presidents reaching back to at least John Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower have sanctioned the use of illegal assassination.

An alleged fiscal conservative, he drove the U.S. treasury into deficit to pay for his wars and tax cuts.

Among U.S. historians, it has become great sport to rank the country's presidents. Bush vies with many for the title of absolute worst – from Ulysses S. Grant, who oversaw a post-Civil War era so corrupt it was known as Grant's Barbecue, to Richard Nixon of Watergate fame, to Herbert Hoover, the hapless president in charge during the stock market crash of 1929.