Sherry Chandler

I figure George W. Bush is not going to buy five copies of this Rolling Stone for his mother.

Like “A Country Ruled by Faith,” Sean Wilentz’s article “The Worst President in History?” doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. It’s the aggregate that is so distressing. How far down we have come in the last six years.

Here is the money paragraph:

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

And I’ll take it back. I did learn something new in this article: GWB has borrowed more money during his administration than all 42 previous presidents put together.

From a NYTimes review of American Gangster:

The tradition is updated periodically, like science fiction movies or westerns, to reflect the anxieties of the moment. In the Depression, film gangsters like Paul Muni in “Scarface” evoked economic possibility and louche glamour; in the 1970’s, with the “Godfather” movies, they stood for family values and honor in a corrupt world; in the 1990’s, with “Goodfellas” and its ilk, they navigated the loss of empire. Tony Soprano adds the midlife anxieties of 21st-century suburban baby boomers, and, in recent weeks, “The Departed” played with the interchangeability of good guys and bad.

In “American Gangster,” which is based on the real-life heroin kingpin Frank Lucas and the detective-turned-prosecutor Richie Roberts, the themes are strictly corporate business.