A Presidency of Dunces

I found an article from The Times (see link at bottom) where a "panel of experts from The Times" ranked every U.S. president in order of how "great" they were. Some of the results were very obvious, but some were not as easy to see as you'd think.
Lincoln topped the list as the best president of all time (surprise surprise...) and James Buchanan brought up the rear as the worst president. Neither of these were huge surprises to me. What I wasn't expecting was our good friend James Polk to be number nine. The reason they give for giving him such a high place on the list is that he acquired a ton of land for the U.S. It also celebrates him for suffocating the Mexicans. We are supposed to believe that he was one the the best presidents because of his ideals of "manifest destiny." I'm not saying he was bad, I really do think he was great (not that I know a whole lot about him), but I think that LBJ or Andrew Jackson deserve to be higher on the list then Polk. (Even though his name is a lot of fun to say.) LBJ did great things for the Civil Rights Movement that I think are more important historically than the expansion of the nation. Please understand, I'm not saying that the expansion of the U.S. wasn't importaint, in fact I think it was incredibly important for the nation. I just think that if I had to choose between U.S. expansion and the civil rights movement, I'd pick the second one.
On the note of LBJ, I think that he and JFK should've tied. JFK beat out LBJ by one place, but I feel like they kinda worked in tandem. JFK had the new ideals and the fresh policies, but he was assassinated before he could carry out many of his intended plans. LBJ picked up where he left of and made his political dreams real. They did a tie later in the list, why can't they do it here?
Also, I'd like to talk about the tie between Nixon and Bush Jr. I wouldn't move them from their place in the list, because they were definately not good presidents, but at least in Bush's case, I don't think he should be hated as much as he is. He was truely doing what he thought was right for the country, and how can he be completely blamed for that? His mistake letting people influence him into not changing what he was doing. He needed a drastic change in what he was doing. Also, I don't think he was suited for the role of president. But that doesn't mean we should crucify him. I personally think he seems like a really likeable guy, but people judge his character by his poor skills at being president.
Anyway I thought that was an interesting article. Also, it should be noted that I am not an expert at presidents, I just made judgements off of what I read in the article, and what I had learned from other places (such as AIS). I'm probably very wrong in most parts.

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