RUTHFULLY YOURS

Taxes are down.  Jobs are forming all over.  Regulations have been slashed.  Government coffers are filling up.  Companies are forming.  Migrants are choosing legal over illegal immigration.  The nightmare of Obamacare is almost over.  Europe is paying its NATO bills.  The ISIS empire is dead.  North Korea is trembling.  Russia is on the run.

And somehow, according to a widely dispersed poll, we elected the worst thing we could have done to ourselves in our current president.  All those good things, and somehow President Trump has nothing to do with them.

This new poll, put out by a couple of political science professors, places President Trump at rock bottom in its rankings of all the U.S. presidents.  Worse than Warren G. Harding.  Worse than James Buchanan.  Worse than Franklin Pierce.  Worse than Jimmy Carter.  And certainly worse than Barack Obama, who correspondingly rose to the top ten in the same estimation of the same political scientists.  After bringing us the Iran deal, Obamacare, the one-way love-fest with Castro, the unmaskings, the IRS targeting of dissidents, the global apology tour, the SEIU thugcraft, the politicization of the Department of Justice, and Ben Rhodes, he’s top ten!

That was the finding of the 2018 Presidents & Executive Politics Presidential Greatness Survey, released Monday by professors Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn of Boise State University.  The survey results, ranking American presidents from best to worst, were based on responses from 170 current and recent members of the Presidents and Executive Politics section of the American Political Science Association.

What it really shows is how politicized the faculty lounges at the nation’s university departments of political science and maybe history have gotten.  Diversity of opinion in what should be a largely apolitical field is over.  Faculty member A vets faculty applicant B, and only the leftists, with views exactly like those of the ruling cliques, get in.  Nobody else is allowed; conservatives are shut out.  And then they get together and put out rubbish like this.

As Tom Maguire observed:

Conservatives believe, on some evidence that the social sciences has become yet another bastion for academic progressives.  Consequently, right-wingers believe that agenda-driven progressives will engage in agenda-driven statistical jiggery-pokery, produce papers peer-reviewed by other progressives, and come away “proving” the efficacy of the progressive agenda item du jour.

That is what we are seeing with this game now.

To be charitable, I hope it’s just a ranking from largely useless political scientists, who seem to have all sold their trade down the river to support a leftist ideology.  The American Political Science Association doesn’t say if it allows historians to be members, but if so, it would not be surprising, given the strange leftism we have seen from that corner, too.  Example A of that is the great historian Simon Schama, whose books are magnificent and scrupulously truthful, yet whose Twitter account reveals his political opinions to be those of a left-wing dunce – a mystery to anyone watching.  USA Today reports that those polled were historians, but the professors who conducted the poll do not say that, and the other evidence suggests that it was just political scientists as well.

Those same political scientists, as it happens, obviously know virtually nothing about history.  In this poll, boy, does it show.