On this date in 1974, Richard Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal, exiting in a spiral of crime, shame and paranoia that no subsequent disgraced president has even come close to matching.

Not that they haven't tried.

Jimmy Carter did his best to top Nixon by running his presidency straight into the ground. But even with the energy crisis, record inflation, a skyrocketing national debt, and one very ugly sweater, Carter's presidency lacked the "evil genius" quality that made Nixon's disgrace so complete. Carter simply went out by going on national TV, babbling something about "malaise," and rubbing his own nipples in a shameful public display of auto-erotic masochism.

Of all disgraced presidents, only George W. Bush has even came close to topping Nixon's mark for 'Worst Performance by a Commander-In-Chief." But Bush's unique mixture of Machiavellianism and pure incompetence was so entrenched in his presidency that the public soon grew numb to it. Katrina, WMD's, Abu Gharib, Scooter Libby, the Attorney General's politicizing of the justice department -- any one of these would have been enough to put any other president right next to Nixon on the first plane out of town.

But with Bush, disgrace became the new normal.

And so it is unlikely that any future president will shock the world by doing anything. A fact that will probably ensure that Richard Nixon's mark for presidential humiliation will stand for centuries to come.