Welcome to Grand Junction!

Last month, when I read about the billboard in Wyoming, Minnesota, that featured a smiling, waving George W. Bush, with the caption, "Miss me yet?", I thought it was one of the most ridiculous things I had ever heard of. But the good citizens of my fair city, Grand Junction, Colorado, must have taken it as a challenge because one of them recently one-upped it in a big way. Yes, the billboard above is real. It sits near the intersection of 1st and Grand, about two miles from my home. Go ahead and click on it if you want to see the full 800x600 view.

The thinking behind this message is so foreign to me that I didn't even understand it at first. Obviously, Jimmy Carter's thought bubble is meant to imply that our current president, Barack Obama, has taken over the title of "worst president," but Obama has only been in office for just over a year. It's a little too soon to be making that kind of judgment, unless you're basing your opinion on factors other than job performance, like the man's skin color. Racism is alive and well here, and it was on full display at candidate Obama's rally in September 2008 and at President Obama's town hall meeting on health care in August 2009.

The more difficult thing for me to understand is Jimmy Carter in the role of previous "worst president." I will grant you that I didn't vote for him in either 1976 or 1980, but I most certainly did not vote for Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan either. I voted for Independents in both of those elections. But Jimmy Carter as worst president? I don't get it. Like President Obama, he inherited an economic mess from the previous administration, and he was unlucky to be in office when the Iranians decided to take some Americans hostage. Still, he narrowly lost to Reagan in 1980, so how bad could he have been? Former President Carter is now widely regarded as the most effective former president in history, acting, along with his wife Rosalynn, as America's ambassador to the world.

I don't care how much Karl Rove tries to sugar-coat it in his new book, George W. Bush will go down in history as the worst president ever--far worse than even Andrew Johnson, the first president ever to face impeachment. We will be living with the unconscionable economic and political damage of the Bush years for decades to come. President Obama was elected to begin the repairs, but he has no cooperation from the party that helped to wreck things in the first place. Yesterday's purely partisan vote on health care reform is clear evidence of that.

A more realistic billboard might show Republicans Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Mike Pence laughing hysterically and giving us all the finger. Now that's a message I could understand.

Going "Nucular" in Iran?

In a press conference today, President Bush responded to questions about the newly released National Intelligence Estimate on Iran with this: "Iran was dangerous. Iran is dangerous. And Iran will be dangerous if they have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon. I think it is very important for the international community to recognize the fact that if Iran were to develop the knowledge that they could transfer to a clandestine program, it would create a danger to the world. And so, I view this report as a warning signal that they had the program, they halted the program. The reason why it's a warning signal is they could restart it."

Instead of letting out a big sigh of relief over the fact that Iran has abandoned its nuclear weapons program, indeed that it had done so more than four years ago, back in 2003, Bush attempted to turn the tables, essentially posturing that he was right all along about the threat from Iran. This is especially alarming given that his administration knew back in August that intelligence estimates on Iran were in the process of being re-evaluated. Still he continued to warn of a potential World War III if America did not maintain its aggressive foreign policy position, leading many Americans to expect that we would soon be bombing Iran.

Now it all seems to be just another of Bush's cheesy political ploys--a power play in the run-up to the 2008 election or a chance to bolster his legacy as the "War President"--remarkably and tragically similar to the fake intelligence that led us into the Iraq quagmire. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us? I don't think so. This might have worked in the fictional world of George Orwell's 1984, where thanks to "newspeak," black was white, up was down, and left was right, but like the book's Winston character, after our brains stop flopping around in our heads, we realize that this latest gaff is so transparent that any shred of credibility left in this presidency is now completely gone. The legacy? How about "Worst President Ever."