Bad Law Professor of the Week

Stanley Fish is, among other things, a law professor at Florida International University.  Inexplicably, he is also paid actual cash money to write for the opinion page of the New York Times.  I wonder how many ones and zeros died needlessly to post this:

Now I would like to enter these treacherous waters again and venture another prediction: within a year of the day he leaves office, and no matter who succeeds him, George W. Bush will be a popular public figure, regarded with affection and a little nostalgia even by those who voted against him and thought he was the worst president in our history.

This, of course, assumes we’ll forget the heaps of dead bodies, the shredding of the constitution, and the politicization of every square foot of the executive branch.

But it gets worse.

Yes, I know that right now Mr. Bush is associated with an unpopular and disastrously expensive war, with an economic collapse brought about in part by an administration that abhors regulation, with a spectacularly inadequate response to hurricane Katrina, with a precipitous decline in America’s reputation. After all, this is a guy whose name was never mentioned at the national convention of his own party, the guy that John McCain seems barely able to remember (just as after the Enron debacle Bush seemed barely able to remember that he ever knew Kenneth Lay).

Hey, everybody fucks up.

But when Bush leaves office, he leaves behind all those liabilities, even though he had a large part in producing them. The war, the economy, the environment, the Middle East, a newly bellicose Russia — these will all be either McCain’s or Obama’s problems, and Bush will just be someone who shows up regularly and says mildly self-deprecating things about himself on the way to doing some good deed, perhaps in the company of his father and Bill Clinton.

This schmuck actually believes George W. Bush will try to help someone other than himself.

What does Bush have to do? Not much, just be himself, not the wise and inspiring leader of the Western world — he never quite got that one right — but the amiable, funny, folksy and gregarious guy who tricked himself and the rest of us into thinking he was something more. Now he doesn’t have to do that. We’ll not be depending on him, so we’ll be free to like him.

Yeah, it’ll be easy to forget the destruction of two countries, one economy, and the lives of hundreds of thousands.  Piece of cake.

It’s one thing to challenge common wisdom, which Fish prides himself on doing.  It’s quite another to suggest that day is night, that up is down, and that George W. Bush is anything other than a dangerous sociopath.

I’ll let R.V. Young administer the coup de grâce (from the Criticism section of Fish’s Wikipedia entry):

Because his general understanding of human nature and of the human condition is false, Fish fails in the specific task of a university scholar, which requires that learning be placed in the service of truth. And this, finally, is the critical issue in the contemporary university of which Stanley Fish is a typical representative: sophistry renders truth itself equivocal and deprives scholarly learning of its reason for being. . . . His brash disdain of principle and his embrace of sophistry reveal the hollowness hidden at the heart of the current academic enterprise.

Mr. Fish, please consider the good of the U.S. educational system and retire.

Comments

[actor212]

Epic stupidity, Fish-boy. Epic.

Bush will have done precisely one good thing for the Republican party: He'll make Hoover look good!

[JollyRoger]

Wow. there must really be a lot of cocaine in the Florida water supply.

[tata]

He's a trailblazer for overeducated morons everywhere.

[shane]

Yes, this is how it usually works. Hitler, Stalin, Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy. 'Member how we used to think they were monsters? And now we just have so damned much affection for 'em.

[mandtm]

Some folks will eat anything. Stanley Fish is the Jeffery Dhamer of Republicans.

[King Quaker]

Drinks like a Fish?

[Grace Nearing]

Now I would like to enter these treacherous waters again and venture another prediction....

Some people really can't stop themselves, can they? It's a new category in the DSM-IV-Revised: prediction addiction.

[Agi]

I'm going to stand up for old Stanley the curmudgeon. I rarely agree with him - and find him to be a cranky old wise-ass most of the time. But I think he's right about this.

The American public has a very short memory - and an even shorter attention span. A year from now they will have forgotten GWB's mess. He will be that old koooky frat boy that you want to have a beer with. He'll make appearances on Dancing with the Stars and the Tyra Banks show.

All of the current problems will either be McCain or Obama's fault. Yes, he may be a war criminal, but there is still something charming about him that the public will adore.

To quote George Carlin..."the public sucks!"

[actor212]

Don't Fish rot from the head? Explains a lot.

[RepubAnon]

If John McCain wins, the professor may be right - especially after poor health forces John to turn things over to President Sarah Palin. 6 months of President Palin, and we'll call the Bush/Cheney era the "good old days."