George W. Bush: worse than a dead man?

I love lists, but I am typically highly disappointed with them. Perhaps the worst place to get a solid 'best' list is from Rolling Stone. Their lists are always complete crap, like their list that ranked Bob Dylan as the seventh best singer of all time. I like Bob Dylan, but the man cannot sing better than all but six people that have ever walked the earth. Write songs, perhaps, but not sing them.

I think my favorite thing about lists is when they change for no reason. There was a ranking for the top 100 athletes of the 20th century that was released in 2000 (there were many I am sure) and Babe Ruth was first on many of them; however, when the lists were released in 1950 he wasn't. Strange that people like Jim Thorpe became worse as Babe Ruth become better.

This brings me to my main point of today. C-SPAN recently ranked all of the presidents. I think this is stupid because the presidency is almost too hard to compare. How would Abe Lincoln have responded to 9/11? We can guess, but we don't know. I know that smart, intelligent journalists (especially those still awake at C-SPAN) need something to do, and this is basically porn for them, but still, why? And how can we really compare George Washington to George W. Bush? The world has changed so much. George W. Bush was TERRIBLE at foreign relations, but how can we safely assume that George Washington would have been that much better? If Washington wanted to go to England he had to take a freaking boat for crying out loud. GW can just call or email (assuming he can figure out how to work those high-tech devices).

My second issue with the list, other than the complete non-necessity of the list, is how some of our oldest presidents actually GOT BETTER at their jobs since the list was last created in 2000. For example, George Washington was ranked 3rd overall in 2000, but is now 2nd. Abe Lincoln, while still number one, became more persuasive. Isn't that amazing? The cynic in me laughs because even dead people seemed to be better presidents over the last eight years that George W. Bush, but part of me just brushes off this list as just another stupid, inconsistent list.