George Bush Senior is Dead

[Yukaphile]

If he was an utterly wretch of a monster, why did he congratulate Obama for nabbing Osama Bin Laden instead of congratulating Seal Team Six like many hard-righters were doing at the time - it wasn't that "danged Negro," it was our brave soldiers? That mindset, not my President?

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

He was a very bad person but he had some decency in his soul, or at least sense of decorum.

He looks like less of a bad person because our current ruler has set the bar somewhere around the Marianas Trench in terms of political discourse.

[LittleRaven]

No, W was a terrible person through his actions as president with the blood of countless thousands on his hand. He was a grown-ass man with an apparently healthy brain, political experience and agency, and if he wasn't ready for the job he shouldn't have run.

Fuzzy, if we made YOU President tomorrow, you would have thousands of deaths on your hands before next summer. Make a mistake, and you could easily rack up millions. It's inevitable. Obama, who did the job about as well as I think anyone could, goes to bed every night knowing that hundreds of thousands of people are dead because of decisions he made. So that's not a very useful metric when it comes to evaluating Presidents.

Bush will be remembered as a bad President because he left the nation weaker than he found it. But many good men have done that. President is a hard, hard job. In hindsight, of course, he wasn't the man for the job, but that's not something that can be known before someone becomes President, because there is no job that compares to being President. Bush was a governor for many years before running, and quite a good one at that. He wasn't Trump - he was as well prepared for the job as anyone can be. But all that amounts to a hill of beans once you're actually in the big chair.