HEY MR.PRESIDENT: DON'T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU IN THE ASS ON THE WAY OUT

Believe it or not, Herbert Hoover was not such a bad president. Unlike the present occupant of the Oval Office, this Republican was an actual success both in business and in politics. He canceled private oil leases on public lands, withdrew US troops from ill-advised occupations overseas, appointed a card-carrying Democrat to the Supreme Court (because, he said, the court "should have a strong minority of the opposition's party"), advocated for an early version of Social Security, and picked a Native American as his running mate (Charles Curtis, also the last VP to wear a mustache while in office). Yes, he fiddled as Wall Street—then so unregulated it would have made the securitized-mortgage whiz kids giddy—burned. And his conservatism failed the compassion test when he insisted that there was nothing to the Depression that philanthropy couldn't fix. But as any economist will tell you, few presidents have really made a difference on the big, underlying trends in the economy. (Sorry, Bill Clinton.)

George W. Bush, on the other hand, is likely to go down in history as one of the few presidents who failed on every conceivable front. Future chroniclers will no doubt uncover malfeasance beyond what we can even now imagine, but as it stands, it's hard to think of a single admirable, or merely adequate, thing this administration has done. (Okay, one: Bush could be called many names, but "bigot" is not one of them. His Cabinet looked a lot more like America than any Democrat's ever has; without Powell and Rice, the Obama candidacy might not have been possible.) Even aside from the war, detention, and torture, there are innumerable ways in which Bush has left us worse off and less safe. Some are detailed in this issue, along with their relatively easy fixes. (Reverse the emasculation of the epa, fda, nasa, etc.? Done—as soon as you kick out the cronies and ideologues who have hog-tied the actual scientists.)

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