...an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure."

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history.

Bin Laden again acknowledged a central role in initiating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed about 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, saying he thought of the idea after the U.S. military involvement in Lebanon in 1982. "As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way [and] to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women," he said, according to one translation. "It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American forces would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone at a time when they most needed him, because he thought listening to a child discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers," Bin Laden said. --LA Times, October 30, 2004

"From hell's heart I stab at thee..."

An examination of the details and consequences of that theme provides a startling object lesson in the pitfalls and conceit of an interventionist foreign policy.

How do you think Lincoln would have ranked in 1863? If they were taking polls then, what do you think his numbers would have been? How do you think Truman ranked in 1951, versus how he's seen today?

Just because Bin Laden is bad does not make W good.

It was a far worse abuse of power than anything done before, or since.

From time to time one statement that bin Ladin made at one time is taken out of context to try to support the theory that the only useful response is more of the same actions that are causing the problem in the first place.

So, the driving-away jihad against the US does not stop with its withdrawal from the Arabian peninsula, but rather it must desist from aggressive intervention against Muslims in the whole world.

They'd rather the problems continue, to help sell the fictional WOT, justify Bush's existence, and the support of him.

There are other statements made by bin Ladin, and there are also statements and actions of others that are important to be aware of...

It is only the doctrine of Western "exceptionalism" (see here and here, for example) that permits this lunacy to go largely unremarked.

We believe that we have the ultimate solution to human history, and that it is our right and obligation to share it with the rest of the world -- by military might, as required. Since we have identified ourselves as inherently noble and virtuous, nothing we do can possibly be wrong. We might make a few regrettable errors -- engage in a little torture here and there, for example (even though the systematic use of torture is now indisputably official U.S. policy) -- but we are always on the side of the angels. And those we have identified as our enemies are inherently evil.
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This apocalyptic crusader perspective suffuses the West, and the United States in particular.

here haven't been any abuses of power by this administration -

Which abuses of power? Be specific.