We seem to be having American History week. We determined that Bush is no FDR, and then we argued that Bush is no Lincoln. He may eventually win the title of “Worst President in History,” however.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. weighs in today with “Bush’s Thousand Days” in the Washington Post. Schlesinger agrees that Bush is no Lincoln; nor is he Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, or John F. Kennedy. I think most of us lefties had noticed this.

Schlesinger also noticed, as I wrote here, that Bush doesn’t explain his policies and decisions.

The issue of preventive war as a presidential prerogative is hardly new. In February 1848 Rep. Abraham Lincoln explained his opposition to the Mexican War: “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose — and you allow him to make war at pleasure [emphasis added]. . . . If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’; but he will say to you, ‘Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’ ”

This is precisely how George W. Bush sees his presidential prerogative: Be silent; I see it, if you don’t .

In other words, this is no way to start a war. The president must explain to the nation why we’re going to war — and it has to be real reasons, not made up ones — before we can give an informed consent to going to war. If the president starts a war against the will of We, the People, then we’re no longer a constitutional democracy, are we?

Schlesinger is concerned that Bush will launch another “preventive” war with Iran, and he argues that history shows us that dangerous enemies can often better be dealt with in other ways than going to war. War sometimes makes a bad situation worse, in fact.

There aren’t many rightie responses to this column so far, but one of the few deserves special mention. He starts with a standard straw man:

It never fails to amaze me how liberals seem to think there are no bad guys in the world.

The blogger goes from there to the claim that “Schlesinger blames Bush” for nukes in Iran, when Schlesinger said no such thing. Schlesinger didn’t address the “nukes in Iran” question directly at all, never mind say whose “fault” anything is. But he did discuss the Cuban Missile Crisis. Cuba, my dears, had nukes.

This is Schlesinger:

It was lucky that JFK was determined to get the missiles out peacefully, because only decades later did we discover that the Soviet forces in Cuba had tactical nuclear weapons and orders to use them to repel a U.S. invasion. This would have meant a nuclear exchange. Instead, JFK used his own thousand days to give the American University speech, a powerful plea to Americans as well as to Russians to reexamine “our own attitude — as individuals and as a nation — for our attitude is as essential as theirs.” This was followed by the limited test ban treaty. …

…The Cuban missile crisis was not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War. It was the most dangerous moment in all human history. Never before had two contending powers possessed between them the technical capacity to destroy the planet. Had there been exponents of preventive war in the White House, there probably would have been nuclear war.

The difference between a real leader and statesman (JFK) and, um, Bush, is that JFK not only confronted the Soviets and the Cubans and got them to stand down without firing a shot; he used the incident to push for a limited test ban treaty. Bush and his rightie supporters, however, see war as their first and only option, not the last option. They know only how to destroy, not to build.

This paragraph reveals why the blogger is a tad unqualified to argue about history with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.:

The notion that Truman ruled out preemptive war with Russia [I assume he’s referring to the USSR] after World War II is a bit of a stretch. There, Russia only threatened Eastern Europe, not the United States. They had overwhelming conventional power on the continent, we had only a few divisions. Iran, on the other hand, threatens the entire world economy. Iran, through its minions, threatens terrorist attacks inside the United States. No, this is a terribly different situation. Russia never posed the same threat as Iran does.

Wow, I wish someone would have explained that to us back in the 1950s and 1960s. People wouldn’t have wasted all that time and money building backyard bomb shelters. The rightie might want to check out who the players were in the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, and who it was that was installing all those nukes in Cuba. Oh, and don’t forget the Soviets had nuclear-armed submarines that maneuvered into range from time to time …

Finally:

But his column carries another signature, the signature of the looney left true believer. He says this:

Observers describe Bush as “messianic” in his conviction that he is fulfilling the divine purpose.

Note that no one is named; only “observers”. This is a convenient way to make a charge without substance.

Uh-HUH, son. First, you don’t get to start a post with a straw man and then whine about other peoples’ straw men. This is called “intellectual dishonesty.”

Second, if this is the first time you’ve run into the “Bush is messianic” observation, you need to get out more. Google for “Bush messianic.” You will get lots of hits. Some good ones near the top include this, this, and this. Happy reading.

A rightie named Thomas Bray has come up with the most tortured, desperate, sophomoric howl of flaming ignorance yet known to mankind to excuse George W. Bush’s mishandling of Iraq. Get this:

The President “lied” us into war. Much of the pre-war intelligence was wrong. The civilian defense chief was detested as “brusque, domineering and unbearably unpleasant to work with.” Civil liberties were abridged. And many embittered Democrats, claiming the war had been an utter failure, demanded that the administration bring the troops home.

George Bush? Well, yes – but also a President who looms far larger in American history, Abraham Lincoln.

Let’s take these claims one at a time.

1. “Lincoln ‘lied’ the nation into war.”

The ‘lie” Bray thinks he sees is that while campaigning for president in in 1860, and early in his presidency, Lincoln tried to end the secession crisis by assuring the South that he had no intention of abolishing slavery in the slave states. Indeed, it is clear he believed a president had no constitutional authority to do such a thing. In his first inaugural address he said,

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

This had been his stated opinion for a long time before he considered running for president, in fact.

Since the Late Unpleasantness, generations of American idiots have discovered this and other Lincoln quotes about slavery in the slave states and jumped to the conclusion that Lincoln supported slavery. Years ago I spent a lot of time on civil war history usenet forums, and you could count on one or two such idiots popping by about once a week. However, in fact, Lincoln detested slavery. The most prominent plank of his 1860 platform — the one issue he ran on more than any other — was a promise to keep slavery from spreading into the federal territories. He didn’t think the constitution gave the federal government the power to abolish slavery in the slave states, but federal territories were another matter.

This was a huge issue in 1860, as most of the country west of the Mississippi River was still territory, and citizens north and south cared passionately about what kind of economy would take hold in the territories — free enterprise and capitalism, or slavery? Slavery killed free enterprise; before the war the South’s slave plantation-based economy remain locked in 18th-century agrarianism while the North had marched into the industrial revolution. Thus, the issue of whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state had sent the entire nation into a murderous rage.

Conventional wisdom of the time said that unless slavery could spread into the territories eventually it would die. For this reason, when the “free soiler” Lincoln became president, the southern plantation owners were certain that secession from the Union was necessary to protect their wealth. For the secessionist point of view on this matter, see the Declaration of Causes adopted by the secessionist convention of Mississippi, for example.

Several states had seceded before Lincoln was inaugurated. His first few weeks in office were taken up with trying to persuade other states to remain in the Union and with troops at Fort Sumter, who were running out of food because South Carolina refused to allow them to be re-supplied. Sumter was, note, a federal military reservation, not part of the state of South Carolina. But South Carolina claimed it. And when South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina started the war.

The South started the war. They’ve denied this lo these many years, but they started it, not Lincoln., They began the hostilities, not Lincoln. If anyone “lied” anybody into that war, it was the plantation owners, not Lincoln. Therefore, Lincoln neither lied the nation into war nor “truthed” it into war, as he didn’t started the bleeping war.

Let us go to back to Bray:

Lincoln repeatedly asserted that his aim was to prevent the spread of slavery, not eliminate it in the South. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so,” Goodwin quotes him as saying. Thus when he finally issued his Emancipation Proclamation two years into the war, freeing the slaves in the Confederate states, his Northern critics claimed that he had misled the country.

Regarding emancipation — as soon as the war started, abolitionists began calling on Lincoln to abolish slavery. But Lincoln resisted this idea at first. In fact, when Major General John Fremont emancipated slaves in Missouri in 1861, Lincoln countermanded the order and relieved Fremont of duty. Lincoln feared emancipation would cause Missouri to secede as well.

So why did Lincoln issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which emancipated slaves only in the seceded states, in September 1862? As I explained in more detail here, Lincoln realized emancipation could be a tool to help the war effort. It would swing British public opinion against the Confederacy, for example, and discourage the British government from sending military aid to the secessionists. It would also allow for recruiting former slaves to serve in the Union Army.

In August 1862 Lincoln wrote to Horace Greeley, who had been pressuring Bush Lincoln to emancipate the slaves,

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.

Lincoln did not change the purpose of the war from saving the Union to abolishing slavery. He changed his policy toward emancipation to support the goal of saving the Union. Yes, the proclamation pissed off a lot of racist white northerners. Some Union volunteers deserted and went home because of it. But it proved to be a brilliant tactical move; it really did prevent Britain from entering into an alliance with the Confederacy (a plan being pushed by British textile mill owners who needed southern cotton), and it added about 200,000 highly motivated recruits to the Union army and navy.

Bray continues to try to draw parallels between Iraq and the Civil War, calling the latter “A bloody and unnecessary war was being fought in a Utopian effort to bring the blessings of democracy to a people who had little experience with it.” Is he saying the southern states had little experience with democracy? Perhaps not, but they might disagree. As for the freedmen, in 1863 it had not yet been decided if they could become citizens. Historians are still arguing about whether Lincoln would have supported the 15th Amendment had he lived long enough to read it. Bringing “the blessings of democracy” to the freedmen remained a goal way down the priority list while Lincoln was alive.

Bray continues,

Oh, and by the way, where did this President get off claiming, as Lincoln did, that his implied powers as Commander in Chief allowed him to tinker with institutions, such as slavery, expressly acknowledged in the Constitution?

The express acknowledgment of slavery in the Constitution didn’t make it legal everywhere in the nation; only where state governments had made it legal. But the states in rebellion weren’t states any more, genius. They had seceded, remember? I don’t believe there is consensus whether the seceded states had reverted completely to the status of federal territories, but they were required to go through a process of re-admission to the Union after the war.

And not until 1865 did the administration get around to pushing for the 13th Amendment officially ending slavery.

I’m not sure what Bray’s point is — maybe that Lincoln was for slavery before he was against it — but the 13th Amendment wasn’t Lincoln’s baby. Republicans in Congress came up with it. Lincoln didn’t take an active role in the 13th Amendment until after it was passed by the Senate in 1864.

2. “Much of the pre-war intelligence was wrong.”

Bray isn’t talking about faked pre-war intelligence that the confederates had weapons of mass destruction, but the opinion held by most that the Civil War wouldn’t last long, and that the rebellion would be put down in a few weeks. If you spend much time with military history you notice this is a common theme; when wars are getting started, people nearly always underestimate how bloody they will be and how long they will last. That’s not always true, but it’s very often true. For example, lots of Confederates believed the yankees would give up quickly without much of a fight. They were wrong, too.

Bray’s point is way stupid, in other words.

Bray points out General George McClellan complained he hadn’t been given enough troops to do the job, an obvious dig at current complaints that more troops should have been sent to Iraq in 2003 to secure the occupation. However, history shows us that McClellan was an idiot. Once Lincoln found a general who knew how to fight — Ulysses S. Grant — he had plenty of troops to do the job. In Iraq, on the other hand, events have shown us clearly that the Pentagon civilian planners were wrong about the number of troops required.

3. “The civilian defense chief was detested as ‘brusque, domineering and unbearably unpleasant to work with.'”

Bray is referring to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Stanton was a snot, but he was a very smart snot who was good at his job. Rummy, on the other hand, is an incompetent snot.

4. “Civil liberties were abridged.”

Bray writes,

… Or suspending the writ of habeas corpus, perhaps the most fundamental bulwark of liberty in the Anglo-Saxon tradition?

Only much later did Lincoln seek congressional authorization for the suspension of habeas corpus, despite the Constitution’s explicit instruction that Congress must agree beforehand.

As I explained in more detail here, Lincoln made emergency use of a power given to Congress (to suspend habeas corpus) to deal with riots and unchecked lawlessness in some of the border states while Congress was not in session. The next time Congress came back into session (not “only much later”), Lincoln went to Congress, acknowledged this power rightfully belonged to Congress, and asked for their retroactive approval even while the Civil War was still heating up. Unlike Bush and his NSA spy program, he didn’t act in secret, nor did he declare he could ignore Congress entirely because there was a war on. I agree Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus is still controversial, but if Lincoln was wrong, then Bush is thrice wrong.

5. “And many embittered Democrats, claiming the war had been an utter failure, demanded that the administration bring the troops home.”

Support for the war waxed and waned during the four years it was fought. The most prominent opposition to the war came from the “copperheads,” or Peace Democrats. In those days, the Democratic Party was the party of right-wing conservatives and the Republican Party was much more liberal and progressive, a distinction generally lost on righties today. The copperheads were pro-slavery white supremacists who favored a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy that would have protected the peculiar institution. They were on the wrong side of history, which IMO is where Bray is now.

Bray’s effort, dumb as it is, might have been a respectable effort for a ten-year-old. But he looks older than that in his photo, so there’s no excuse for him.

See Bennet Kelly at Huffington Post for more reasons why Bray deserves to be laughed off the Web.

Speaking of presidential history … Jonathan Alter compares Bush to FDR, and I thought this section particularly interesting —

Like Bush, FDR took an expansive view of presidential power. But he didn’t circumvent Congress, as Bush did on warrantless wire-tapping. On March 5, 1933, his first full day in office, Roosevelt toyed with giving a speech to the American Legion in which he essentially created a Mussolini-style private army to guard banks against violence. One draft had Roosevelt telling middle-age veterans, long since returned to private life, that “I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation that now confronts us.”

When I saw this document in the Roosevelt Library, my eyes nearly popped out. This was dictator talk—a power grab. But FDR didn’t give that speech. Although establishment figures like the columnist Walter Lippmann urged Roosevelt to become a dictator (Mussolini was highly popular in the U.S. and the word, amazingly enough, had a positive connotation at the time), the new president decided to run everything past Congress—even the arrogant and ill-fated effort to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937.

We are not facing a greater threat from foreign enemies now than the nation did then. Bush’s secrecy has a lot less to do with national security than with keeping his ass covered.

Roosevelt wasn’t big on excuse-making. Shortly after assuming office, he said he wanted a quarter of a million unemployed young “hobos” working in the forests by summer. Every cabinet member said it couldn’t be done. But because he understood the levers of power (partly from his experience in the Wilson administration, bureaucratic training that Bush lacks), he made it happen and the Civilian Conservation Corps changed the face of the country.

Had such competent leadership been present after 9/11, it’s a fair bet that it would not have taken more than four years for the FBI to fix its computers and for the government to secure ports and chemical plants against terrorism. FDR would have demanded it be done in, say, four months.

“He made it happen.” That’s what leaders do. They make stuff happen. They don’t make speeches and then retreat to the ranch and kinda hope it all works out somehow.

Where Bush has until now placed loyalty over performance, FDR put performance over loyalty. If aides didn’t do the job or keep him fully informed, he would freeze them out, even if—like Louis Howe (Roosevelt’s Rove), Ray Moley and Jim Farley—they had served him for years. And where Bush has often seen the war on terror as a chance for partisan advantage, FDR viewed World War II as a time to reach across party lines. He appointed Herbert Hoover’s secretary of state, Henry Stimson, his secretary of war, and the 1936 GOP candidate for vice president, Frank Knox, his navy secretary. He even brought his 1940 Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie, into the fold.

Bush is not much of a believer in accountability; FDR knew it could make him a more effective president. He held two press conferences a week and instead of shunning Congress’s oversight of Halliburton-style profiteering during the war, he put the main critic, Sen. Harry Truman, on the 1944 ticket.

Bush, on the other hand, doesn’t like to acknowledge that the Democratic Party exists. In fact, he can barely work with people in his own party, preferring to just dictate what he wants them to do.

Other differences — where Bush is stubbornly inflexible and seems to think a mind closed to change is a virtue, FDR “was so flexible that many Democrats tried to stop him from gaining the 1932 presidential nomination because they saw him as a straddler and flip-flopper on issues like the League of Nations and Prohibition. (Neither ‘wet’ nor ‘dry,’ he was a ‘damp.’)” Alter writes.

FDR sent Eleanor and others around the country so they could give him firsthand accounts of New Deal programs, so he could fix them. Bush seems to take no interest whatsoever in signature policies such as No Child Left Behind or Medicare drug benefits. Once a policy is shoved through Congress Bush washes his hands of it and expects the little people to somehow make it work.

FDR’s speeches helped unify the nation and calm peoples’ fear. Bush prefers to polarize the nation and stoke fear. This takes me to one other difference not mentioned in the Alter piece — especially through his fireside chats, FDR explained to the nation why he adopted his policies and how he expected them to work. You can listen to some of them here. Bush, on the other hand, doesn’t like to explain anything. He makes pie-in-the-sky pronouncements about “freedom,” or he has hissy fits and declares “I’m the decider,” but he rarely explains the steps he intends to take to reach a goal.

Here’s the most recent Bush radio address. It’s partly about military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, so you might compare it to this radio address given by FDR on July 48, 1943, on the war in Italy. Or since Bush also talked about job development, you might want to compare it to this talk from April 28, 1935, on FDR’s work relief program. Or just pick any FDR talk at random. I’m not going to point out how the talks differ; you’ll see it when you read them. Just read one, and then the other, and weep.