What you said was this

The article concludes: So, congratulations for being the worst president in American history. That’s not just my personal opinion; that’s the opinion of 109 historians polled by the History News Network. Fully 61 percent ranked Bush as the “worst ever;” 98 percent labeled his presidency a “failure.” And this poll, taken in early 2008, predated the cataclysmic housing and banking crashes. Bye-bye W — history will not be kind.

Now you grant that it was not your personal opinion, yet you did see the source as reliable and having credibility that’s why you cited it.

I put to you that given Truman dropped 2 nuclear bombs on Japan and the US (following the British) engaged in much worse conventional bombings of civilian centres in WWII and that many US presidents tolerated and supported chattel slavery, anyone who suggests Bush was the “worst” is not really speaking credibly at all. One would have to ignore a hell of a lot of history to make this claim.

I think I made my position clear when I said that I would describe the Bush II presidency as “appalling” and “disastrous” – and avoid the trap of any superlative.

Yeah you say this hear when I point these obvious facts out. Elsewhere however you have suggest Bush is satan. Which paints quite a different picture.

Further to my last post, I don’t think an enumeration of a scholar’s failings constitutes an “ad hominen attack”.

Actually it is, as is insinuating he is a racist or attacking his moral opinions, and actuall addressing of his arguments might be of interest.

BUT FOR DYER, “MANY MORE THAN 379 PEOPLE WOULD HAVE LOST THEIR LIVES.”

Actually if there really was a choice between killing 375 innocent people and killing 3000 innocent people and there was no third option. I think one would be required to kill 375. Nor do I consider this controversial ( it’s the conclusion of the famous Trolley problem) What would you do, kill 3000? That’s the only alternative available.

But to your point, according to utilitarianism, which is the dominant secular ethical philosophy of today, one is required to kill hundreds to save thousands. I myself don’t accept this view largely because it clashes with theological premises I accept, but I do know that it’s a fairly common and position amongst secular ethicists one defended by numerous competent ethicists to suggest that a Historian lacks credibility because he accepts a utilitarian view simply shows you don’t know much about ethics.

It is tempting to make an entire article not only from Roberts’s forensic amorality but from his outright factual ineptitude. In a spasm of revisionist daydreaming, Roberts has announced that the Australian prime minister in 1938 was Robert Menzies. This would have astonished the actual Australian prime minister of that year, who bore the name Joseph Lyons. Presumably relying on one-volume encyclopedias’ entries, Roberts never got around to discovering that the Australian leader baptized Joseph Benedict Chifley was known to all his compatriots as Ben Chifley: not, pace Roberts, as “Joseph Chifley.” Someone might also with benefit have advised Roberts that the Brighton bombing aimed at Margaret Thatcher occurred in 1984, not 1985, and that Nelson Mandela was released from jail in 1990, not 1994. Virginia Woolf could hardly have contributed to the periodical Encounter, since she suicided 12 years before it began.

I think I made my position clear when I said that I would describe the Bush II presidency as “appalling” and “disastrous” – and avoid the trap of any superlative.

The capitalized section of the following paragraphs reminded me of your ethics/reasoning:

To expect in Roberts’s effusions the smallest nuance or humility makes hunting for four-leaf clovers seem like an intelligent use of one’s time. He is incorrigible. Not only must every good deed of British or American rule be lauded till the skies resound with it, but so must every deed that is morally ambiguous or downright repellent.

The Amritsar carnage of 1919, where British forces under Gen. Reginald Dyer slew 379 unarmed Indians? Absolutely justified, according to Roberts, who curiously deduces that BUT FOR DYER, “MANY MORE THAN 379 PEOPLE WOULD HAVE LOST THEIR LIVES.” Hitting prostrate Germany with the Treaty of Versailles? Totally warranted: the only good Kraut is a dead Kraut. Herding Boer women and children into concentration camps, where 35,000 of them perished? Way to go: the only good Boer is a dead Boer. Interning Belfast Catholics, without anything so vulgar as a trial, for no other reason than that they were Belfast Catholics? Yep, the only good bog-trotter … well, finish the sentence yourself.

If you give credence to articles which maintain Bush is the worst President in US history you have to be willing to take seriously some interesting claims. For example you have to suggest that American presidents who ordered their air force to engage in carpet bombing of whole civilian populations and dropped two atomic bombs on Japan some how constituted less sins than the invasion of Iraq ( assuming the invasion was unjustified which is not a self evident fact despite left wing journalists constantly short circuiting the moral debate and asserting it was).

You will also have to suggest that generations of presidents who supported slavery and allowed it to continue for centuries somehow acted more morally than Bush did.

You have to also argue that Bush should be removed from power and Ashscroft brought to justice because of alleged torture of suspected terrorists. But also argue that a regime which engaged in the systematic torture of thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians should not have been removed from power because to do that is contrary to “peace”.

And seeing the Churchill analogy has been raised, I agree Bush and Blair were not like Churchill. Neither for example ordered the fire bombing of whole German civilian centers such as the bombing of Darmstadt on 11 September 1944 killing 12000 civilians in a single night. Or the bombing of Hamburg which killed 40,000 or the bombing of Dresdan which killed 35,000, both done in order or terrorise the local population into surrender.

Nor was Bush or Blair he also was not responsible for military cock ups like Gallipoli that resulted in one of the worst massacres in New Zealand history. But of course Bush and Blair are evil demons worse than any previous admin they invaded Iraq. Churchill is one of the greats.
.-= My last blog-post ..Recyling: Rawls on Religion and Public Life =-.

… Bush, Cheney, and — in a recent, glowing cover story — National Review, have, in fact, embraced a man with links to white supremacism, whose book is not a history but an ahistorical catalogue of apologies and justifications for mass murder that even blames the victims of concentration camps for their own deaths. The decision to laud [Andrew] Roberts [the author of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, which President Bush has read and priased,] provides a bleak insight into the thinking of the Bush White House as his presidential clock nears midnight.

Andrew Roberts describes himself as “extremely right wing” and “a reactionary,” and, in Great Britain, the 44-year-old has long been regarded as a caricature of a caricature of the old imperial historians. He famously lauds the British Empire–and its massacres and suppressions–as “glorious” on every occasion. He sucks up to the English aristocracy to the point that Tatler, the society journal, says, “[H]is adolescent crush on the upper classes is matched by virtually no one else in this country.” One of the few things that can silence Roberts is a mention of his origins in the distinctly nonaristocratic merchant classes, with a father who owned a string of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. Much as he longs to be K&C (Kensington and Chelsea), to those he adores, he will always have the whiff of KFC.

Yet this Evelyn Waugh tomfoolery masks an agenda that the distinguished Harvard historian Caroline Elkins describes as “incredibly dangerous and frightening.” To understand the core of Roberts’s philosophy–from Waugh to war–it’s necessary to look at a small, sinister group of British-based South African and Zimbabwean exiles he has embraced.

In 2001, Roberts spoke to a dinner of the Springbok Club, a group that regards itself as a shadow white government of South Africa and calls for “the re-establishment of civilized European rule throughout the African continent.” Founded by a former member of the neo-fascist National Front, the club flies the flag of apartheid South Africa at every meeting. The dinner was a celebration of the thirty-sixth anniversary of the day the white supremacist government of Rhodesia announced a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, which was pressing it to enfranchise black people. Surrounded by nostalgists for this racist rule, Roberts, according to the club’s website, “finished his speech by proposing a toast to the Springbok Club, which he said he considered the heir to previous imperial achievements.”

The British High Commission in South Africa has accused the club of spreading “hate literature.” Yet Roberts’s fondness for the Springbok Club is not an anomaly; it is perfectly logical to anybody who has read his writing, which consists of elaborate and historically discredited defenses for the actions of a white supremacist empire–the British–and a plea to the United States to continue its work….

As a historian, Roberts is present-minded in the extreme, returning at every stage of his narrative to justifications for Bush’s actions in Iraq. The neoconservatives who want to spread democracy in the Middle East are the heirs to compassionate Victorians who sought to civilize India, China, and Africa. While the reader is still choking on the casting of Richard Perle as Lord Macaulay, Roberts is hard at work grafting Bush’s head onto Winston Churchill’s body. The president’s prosecution of the war on terror is “vigorous” and “absolutely unwavering.” His and Tony Blair’s Iraq war has provided “excellent value for money” to the taxpayer. That Bush has brought “full democracy” to Iraq is stated as unequivocal fact.

Roberts is as sloppy as he is snobbish. I am seldom bothered by minor errors from a good writer, but Roberts’ mistakes are so extensive, foolish, and revealing of his basic ignorance about the United States in particular, that it may be worth noting a few of those I caught in a fast read. The San Francisco earthquake did considerably more than $400,000 in damage. Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in 1941, did not write for Encounter, which began publication in 1953. The Proposition 13 Tax Revolt took place in the 1970s, not the 1980s—an important distinction because it presaged Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. Michael Milken was not a “takeover arbitrageur,” whatever that is. Roberts cannot know that there were 500 registered lobbyists in Washington during World War II because lobbyists weren’t forced to register until 1946. Gregg Easterbrook is not the editor of the New Republic. “No man gets left behind” is a line from the film Black Hawk Down, not the motto of the U.S. Army Rangers; their actual motto is “Rangers Lead the Way.” In a breathtaking peroration, Roberts point out that “as a proportion of the total number of Americans, only 0.008 percent died bringing democracy to important parts of the Middle East in 2003-5.” Leaving aside the question of whether those deaths have brought anything like democracy to Iraq, 0.008 percent of 300 million people is 24,000—off by a factor of 10, which is typical of his arithmetic. If you looked closely enough, I expect you could find an error of one kind or another on every page of the book.

(Support for my claim, at the beginning of this debate, that Roberts is a poor researcher.)

The tweet you refer to, claimed that Bush administration engaged in Torture and tried to suggest some how this means any support I had of the Bush administration is misplaced. ( or perhaps I condoned this) This does not follow, even if the Bush administration did immoral things like torture, it does not follow they were not the best choice, because the alternatives to them may have done even worse things. 

The example  I made in the tweet is abortion, which kills millions of people every year ( far more than the war in Iraq or Afghanistan did) which the Bush administration opposed and Obama has supported.  Another example often forgotten is that  Sadam Hussein engaged in the brutal torture of thousands, the removal of him from power could well have saved thousands of people from torture whereas an administration that had not initiated regime change would not have saved people from torture.  Its not enough to say Bush did X and X is bad, what one would need to say is that the alternatives to Bush would do better