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Several years ago, someone suggested to me that George W. Bush was the worst president ever.

“Nah,” sez I, “you’re forgetting Nixon. Bush is terrible, it’s true. But Nixon was much worse.” (Remember, this was several years ago.)

“Then what would Bush have to do to make you say he’s worse than Nixon?”

“I dunno — maybe try to cancel the elections or something like that,” I said. “Heh heh.”

A few months later, a Bush appointee was talking about postponing the election in the event of terrorist attacks, and icy chills ran up and down my spine.

I tend to be fairly pessimistic. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to want a Plan B if a foreseeable disaster interferes with normal voting. But I always see the negative side when people talk about postponing elections and stuff like that.

It doesn’t help that five years of Bush and Cheney have convinced me that you can never be too pessimistic or too paranoid. The torture debate, military tribunals, martial law, open-ended detention without charges or access to a lawyer, scrapping habeas corpus, bugging phones and now, opening mail without a warrant — maybe they’ll never, ever misuse the absolute power they’ve arrogated unto themselves, and maybe they’ll never, ever make a mistake. But they’ve certainly gone to a lot of trouble to make sure no court gets to check their work.

Maybe I’m just paranoid. Maybe it was strictly in a spirit of historical preservation that Bush signed a bill to preserve some sites from the World War II era. But the headline — “Bush signs bill to preserve internment camps” — I have to confess, that gave me a chill.

Via Bob Geiger, this promotional video for a political comedy show in New York City a few days ago. (Warning: Very sensitive folks might be offended by Congressman Rangel’s reaction to “President Bush” at the end of the video.)

I wanted to say I’m not stupid. This summer I read a Camus, I read three Shakespeares. I started the Constitution. Haven’t finished it yet.

The final week of 2006 brought us the deaths of James Brown, Gerald Ford, Saddam Hussein and the 3000th uniformed American to be killed in Iraq.

Death was really big in 2006.

Every December, the year-in-review pieces seem premature to me. Isn’t it possible that the “defining moment” of a year could happen in the final days, or even the final minutes of the year?

But now it’s January. Now we have perspective on 2006.

Slate has the Bill of Wrongs — their picks for the top ten civil liberties violations of 2006. There were so many to choose from.

It starts with the president’s complaints about “activist judges,” and evolves to Congressional threats to appoint an inspector general to oversee federal judges. As public distrust of the bench is fueled, the stripping of courts’ authority to hear whole classes of cases–most recently any habeas corpus claims from Guantanamo detainees–almost seems reasonable. Each tiny incursion into the independence of the judiciary seems justified. Until you realize that the courts are often the only places that will defend our shrinking civil liberties.

That, of course, is exactly why they attack the courts.

PERRspectives has the Top 10 GOP Sound Bites of 2006:

Smash hits with a great beat you could dance to like George Bush’s thumping “Stay the Course” and Tony Snow’s haunting “Adapting to Win” are gone from the charts altogether. While the RNC classic “Cut and Run (No Surrender)” is still hanging on at #7, newer melancholy tunes from the President’s team, including “New Way Forward” (#1), “Surge” (#2) and “Fresh Eyes” (#4) now top the charts.

Soon Bush will announce his new way forward. My prediction: new lyrics, but the song remains the same.

Via Liberal Oasis, DMIBlog looks at some of the best and worst in public policy. Some of the worst:

This year, Congress tried to tie a modest increase in the minimum wage to a cut in the Estate Tax, otherwise known as the Paris Hilton tax. … It didn’t pass, but legislation to use $21.3 billion in taxpayer dollars to build a fence on the Mexican border that won’t do a damned thing to address the real reasons that immigrants come here and stay here, did. The Bush administration made it harder for women on public assistance to count higher education as workfare credits, even though a college education is proven to be the most effective way of moving women on welfare out of poverty permanently. The White House gave nurses “promotions,” making the ineligible for union membership (thanks!), while also requiring parents to present proof that their children are United States citizens before qualifying them for Medicaid. And, unfortunately, here in NYC, Mayor Bloomberg continued down a path of making it as difficult as possible for sick Ground Zero heroes – the first responders and clean-up workers – to file claims for lost wages and medical bills, a microcosm of the larger ways in which access to justice is being cut off for millions of injured Americans.

MAD magazine has its own list of the 20 Dumbest People, Events & Things of 2006. Some of it’s pretty juvenile — what did you expect from MAD? — but some of it stings. They include the Cheney hunting accident (“You’ll be blown away!”), Floyd Landis (“Pedaling Dope”), Ann Coulter’s Basest Instinct, and Bush’s Assault on the Constitution, illustrated with a Pirates of the Constitution poster. Their #1 pick is the Iraq War (Mish-mosh Accomplished), illustrated with a fake ad for “The Iraqi Quagmire Chess Set”:

OUR GUARANTEE:

With Quagmire Chess™ “the violent last throes” will go on forever.

I don’t think we should be playing this game.