Bush will be remembered as the worst President ever. Not only as the decider who presided over the tipping point for this nation, but as the classical tragic figure who actively pushed shoved and heaved to make it happen.

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By the way, any piece that includes the introduction "was granted unprecedented presidential access" should be imediately dismissed and treated as a propoganda piece, not a work of serious journalism.

there will be no sanitizing of his mistakes, as happened post assassination with JFK. (high school kids today think the vietnam war was started by nixon)

bush will remain an anathema for a generation.

I certainly agree, with the exception that I believe that there are so many of us who are furious, dismayed and disgusted, that we will still be hammering about it to our great-grandchildren. I pray that more than one generation will know with clarity, what a danger we put ourselves into, by selecting presidents whose own background shows their tendency to surround themselves with those who do not nay-say him.

And in one sense, I think Bush has made headway. He has proved to those of us who are Centrists or Moderates, that we have too long chosen to let the righteous and the indignant hammer it out. We have too long taken the road of believing that sooner or later, everything will be all right, and not bothering to speak (or even think too hard) because politics so often turns into mayhem, with two extreme sides screaming (and the moderates backing away).

I consider this presidency to be an extreme, and it shames me as a Centrist to admit culpability. We moderates have been too bored and wistful. We slept through the first election, frankly believing that our own past proved that NO president had time or enough clout to destroy our country and our Constitution. We'd seen plenty of bad presidents. "Our country has Checks and Balances. One bad president is just one president who'll soon be gone."

What lazy idiots we were. And when we raised our voice in the second election, we were far too late, for the term "moderate" was unfamiliar. Anyone who spoke against Bush was considered a bleeding heart liberal. We had no basis by which to prove our political savvy.

I yearn for a third party, cut right out of the middle. Or make the conservatives who haven't a conservative thought in their head stop calling themselves Republicans, and the liberals who want personal rights beyond what makes any sense for the good of ANYone, stop calling themselves Democrats.

These days, I object strenuously to being considered any of those terms. They all have such negative connotations. And I'm embarrassed to call myself a Moderate, because being moderate = not troubling yourself to get involved.

I know you'll point out to them that it was started by Eisenhower.

Why don't you literati wannabes check your facts? Eisenhower started Viet Nam? Kennedy started Viet Nam? Our top allies, the French, should bear most of the blame for that one, seconded only by the UK.

Typical shortsightedness by your average American- yes the same crowd scolded, although very tactifully, by Miss Teen South Carolina.

The Colonialism of all the European powers in the 18th/19th/20th Century, the same colonialism that some here gladly, albeit falsely would accuse us of, is the root cause of ALL of the problems we have faced in the last century.

Clearly, our part in it was started by Eisenhower and you might recall that the French retreated prior to that. Your point on colonialism is well taken. Consider Iraq, for example.

being centrist.

the political game they play is to cater to their extremist elements during primaries (activing your core base), then ape a centrist philosophy in the general election.

in that regard (ironically) someone like biden might have more luck than hillary, obama, or edwards, who have a longer paper trail of non-centrist positions.

mccain, who the centrists were enamored of a few elections ago, simply isn't (a centrist). democrats only wanted him because they wanted to shed the "weak on defense" mantle. thus the ascendancy of the unqualified, do nothing kerry as their 2004 candidate.

a centrist party is an intriguing idea, but any 3rd party presidential , from any point on the political spectrum, has the immediate practical problem of now power base in congress. i think there is one libertarian and one "independent" in all of congress right now. a 3rd party president has the difficulty of both parties, not just one, regarding him as the enemy. presidential candidates like H. Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, etc. serve mostly to vent the angst of disaffected voters - and angst is seldom the motivation of centrists - they debate which is the lesser of the major party evils when they go to the polls.

3rd party candidates do extraordinarily poorly at the state leel (state senator, assemblyman, governor) because of the big money behind the major party candidates, and the local newspapers kowtowing to that money for political ads. 3rd party gubinatorial candidates always receive an editorial saying they have "some new ideas", but seldom an actual endorsement. and i can count on one hand the number of local races which are won without the endorsement of your local newspaper.

Delaware had one (non endorsed candidate win) in the last cycle - "Beau" Biden became the youngest attorney general in the state's history, over the endorsement of opposing candidate Ferris Wharton, on the basis of mistaken identity - evidently tens of thousands of voters of limited literacy pulled the "biden" lever thinking they were sending Joe Biden - his daddy - back to the senate.

Will name recognition work for Hillary, as it did for Bush? She doesn't look enough like Bill for it to matter, imho. maybe if she gained 70 pounds and started talking with an arksansas twang?

i believe eisenhower was the first president to send a man to the moon (er, vietnam).

but combat troops didn't start arriving in numbers too large to count on one hand until JFK sent them.

If you are attempting to draw a distinction between the 2,000 or so American servicemen who were sent to Vietnam by Eisenhower and "combat troops", I'm not sure what that might be. The first casualties named on the Vietnam memorial were killed before Kennedy was elected.

I guess I should ask, how many fingers do you have on one hand?

I think you nailed it yourself: someone who is disengaged.

Someone who is engaged - a thinking learning evolving person - is gong to be all over the map in terms of the "spectrum". That is natural and ok. One day I am a liberal raving about the right to be gay if you want to. The next, I am a conservative fuming about out of control federal spending, I an isolationist internationalist foreign aid loving entreprenuerial son of a union member who would fight for my family but disband the CIA. I am a libertariogressivepopuliberala­tive.

We have an adversarial legal system and an adversarial political system that is composed of tugs of war by extremists that go back to the founding of the nation itself.

The center is whereever the average of all the tugs of war fall. But you cannot replace a tug of war by having everyone grab the rope in the middle. There is no middle.

What upsets "centrists" is that the extreme seem to have gotten so, um, extreme.

I believe that is a facade.

What we have now is two parties that pretend to fight over peripheral social issues and a couple throwaway battles while generally agreeing to be corporatists and fasicts that only disagree on how far that way to go.