Worse than Bush

I never believed the 'we couldn't get anyone worse than Bush' story. Bush was only as bad as he was because the GOP also held the House and the Senate. If the Dems had held the Senate (Paul Wellstone, your plane crash changed history horribly) he would have been simply another bad leader - instead of one of the worst to ever occupy the White House.

Krugman now says McCain/Palin could be worse than Bush/Cheney (emphases mine)...

Krugman - Blizzard of Lies - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

... I can’t think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign’s lies in 2000 were artful — you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again....

...how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.

I’m not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team’s ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

Only if the Dems lost the Senate and were crushed in the House. So worse in potential, but in practice -- probably not.

I emphasized "at least in America", by which Krugman really means the past 100 years in America, because America is starting to resemble Argentina. Yes, it could happen here.

Incidentally, FactCheck.org backs up Krugman on the blizzard of lies. It's not just we Dems saying that.