How about the head of the KKK? Or the founder of NAMBLA? (Or really, any member of said organizations)
I would have to cast my vote for little Kimmy if we are talking about someone still alive and who has caused the maximum number of deaths (direct and indirect through sheer incompetence), pain, suffering, displacements, etc. Really, it’s no contest (the folks knee jerking on Bush are just showing the foam IMHO…he’s not even in the top 10 for worst based on any rational view of ‘worst’). Since Kim Jong-il has come into power he has starved millions of his own people, caused mass migrations of his own people to China and other points of the compass, displaced millions and caused truly unreal levels of pain and suffering, considering his rather limited reach. He has driven his country into economic disaster and pretty much made them an international pariah.
Unless we are basing ‘worst person in the world’ (living) on some other criteria, I don’t see that there is much competition there. To list a few others (in no particular order) that should be considered: Omar al-Bashir, Robert Mugabe, Hu Jintao, Seyed Ali Khamane’i…
Some of these guys make GW look like a teddy bear…for those of us who are rational that is…
-XT
Although I agree with your choice, what if we did limit it, as someone seemed to suggest earlier, to the last seven years? What evils has KJI done this millennium? Hell, make it more specific: what has he done since 2003?
Daniel
Charles Manson is still a seriously fucked up douchebag, even though he hasn’t committed any crimes THIS millenium.
Mister Jong is currently, right now this minute, aiding and abetting a government that is, right now this minute, brutally oppressing a large number of people. He’s a horrible person who thankfully is tiny enough that the world probably won’t be scarred by his insanity much longer than his own stay in power.
Well, we could further limit it to world leaders who vaguely resemble chimps and have the letter ‘B’ in their name too. 
As far as I remember the economic and political displacements still continue (I welcome anyone with facts on this). I think most of the major starvations have not recurred in that period, mainly because of outside help from China (who was getting tired of folks coming across the border because they ran out of tree bark to eat). Due to economic reasons, I’m guessing that if the same criteria are used for the high body count in Iraq on North Korea (i.e. people who died because of poor health, lack of care, lack of essentials, etc etc) then Little Kimmy would STILL most likely have a larger body count…but maybe not too. I doubt such a comprehensive study has ever been done in North Korea for obvious reasons.
You could twist and turn in all manner of ways to make Bush come out on top…but I really don’t think a rational assessment would put him in the top spot.
-XT
Excellent way of putting it. Although it ain’t over till it’s over. GWB may still see some of his ideals take place.
Slavery? Where the hell did you pull that analogy from? I don’t think any single political leader ever caused slavery,…but I believe one (Lincoln) did do a pretty good job of trying to end it.
And hell yes the Iraq war is worse than the Civil War! You oddly scream about slavery, and yet cannot seem to fathom that the Civil War might have at least been about something relevant, unlike Iraq - Bush’s half-assed, totally useless and needless war causing the loss of US forces, immense financial debt and wasted resources - all the while incurring mass destruction on a country that has since been proven to having done NOTHING to the USA!
Trail of Tears…hmm, both Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib Prison come to mind. Fuck the Constitution and those damned liberals who still believe in human rights.
In addition to the ruination of Iraq, the alienation of respect for America by not only every Middle Eastern country but almost every citizen of every foreign country in the world - he has shown a total disdain for the working class of this country and propogates flat-out cronyism for his fat cat oil buddies.
**Bush has not done one single good thing to make this world a better place. ** Period.
He already explained himself in Post #128 above.
This entire thread would be amusing to me if it wasn’t so sad. George Bush the worst person alive today? Heaven save us from the armchair pundits who are long on opinions but short on both education and perspective.
What has he done lately to keep his position in the top three? Making videos that you can’t dance too is horrible, but so are David Hasselhoff’s.
Points to Dinsdale.
I think the score should be weighted for extend of damage, and deceit of justifications [I refer to ‘freedom’ not WMD].
BTW, I am sick of people who blame Cheney (and Rove) for everything. SHRUB is the president.
And the voters? Not if we are giong to give the damned weak-kneed wishy-washy power-abrograting Congress a pass. We live in a republic; I voted for those people so they could think, reasearch, compromise, and govern!, damn it, not so that they could blow according to every popular wind the sensationlist media decides to hype that week.
Hmmph.
As for the OP, that’s mind-numbingly appalling.
Go read El Hefe’s first post. (Thank you for that, EH)
That assessment, while not perfectly rational, is what many Bush-bashers feel. Bush’s actions have shamed the United States.
Do you really believe GWB has not exhibited the emphasized traits?
Furthermore, he has exhibited at least one other trait that I consider ‘bad’ (I haven’t decided about ‘evil’): the refusal to acknowlege the consequences of his actions.
He is dangerously irresponsible.
I’m not sure what you mean by “emphasized”, but do you really think GWB is, for instance, sadistic? Or cruel?
I agree. But that doesn’t qualify him for the list of History’s Greatest Monsters.
You’re coming off like a bit of a crazy person. I’m a liberal who believes in human rights and is appalled by AG and Gitmo. Does that mean I can’t think the Trail of Tears is worse?
“Hey, Chief John Ross, you have three choices:
(1) We’ll take 200 of your men and put them in prison where we will feed them but bore the shit out of them and not charge them with any crimes
(2) We’ll take a bunch of your people and put them in prison where they will be sexually humiliated. But we won’t kill huge numbers of them, and at least a few of the people involved will actually be tried and convicted for their role in it
(3) We’ll march your entire population across the continent and 4,000 of them will die”
Now, if you disagree, that’s fine. But my opinion does not mean I don’t believe in human rights.
Again, I agree with your underlying sentiment (Bush = bad) but you are going completely off the rails here into unsupportable hyperbole, which just makes you (and, by reflection, me) look like a nutter. Not a single one? Ever? If we pore over every action Bush has taken in his entire life, we will never find a single one that is positive?
Off the top of my head, I think what he means by “emphasized” is the three traits on your list that he emphasized by placing in a larger font when he quoted the fragment. Careful examination will reveal that he did not emphasize “sadism” or “cruelty”.
I don’t think I’m going to cast a vote in this pageant.
j666, a word of advice: bolding and underlining tend to be more effective tools for denoting emphasis in quoted text than increasing the font size from 2 to 3, or even italicization.
I’m actually pretty happy with the progress this thread has taken. All I ever need to do to show how unbalanced some of the SDMB population is on the subject of Bush is link to this thread.
I put “ability-to-dehumanize, lack of empathy, dishonesty” in a larger font. Did that not show up on your screen?
Anyhow, yeah, as I get older I do think irresponsibility is a very serious character flaw, especially if you’ve gotten your damned silly self elected president of the most powerful military in the world!
But, I agree that the title of TWPITW can not be bestowed, because no one set the qualifications (such as even currently alive, or not).
However, people (including yourself) are suggesting lots of qualifications that do suit the Shrub.
The only one that might not apply to him is that he willfully determined to do evil, and I maintain that evil done by irresponsibility and willful ignorance may be worse.
Oh
yeah?
The key word there, however, is “some of”. If your point is “there are some people on the SDMB who are nuts-when-it-comes-to-Bush”, you are right, and no one would argue. If your point is “the majority of people on the SDMB are NWICTB” or “the consensus of SDMB liberals is being NWICTB” or (to borrow Shodan’s ever-ambiguous terminology) “the usual suspects are NWICTB”, then you are on shakier ground.
To restate one of my favorite laws of SDMB dynamics, when a whole lot of people hold position X, which you disagree with, and a small number of people very vocally hold position Y, which is an exaggerated and ridiculously stretched-beyond-reason version of position X, it’s easy to feel like a whole lot of people hold position Y, even though that’s not true. (To digress, I think there are at least two factors which make this law true… one is that people like to feel victimized and in-the-tiny-minority, the other is that people like to believe that everyone who disagrees with them is dumb.)
Oh, it did, I just didn’t see it.
And I certainly think Bush is fairly dishonest. As for the other two, I’m not sure. Does Bush actually not care what happens to Iraqis? If somoene says “a bomb went off and killed 1000 Iraqi men, women and children” does he feel no guilt or remorse? Or, rather, is he so stubbornly convinced that his plan will help them out in the long run that he continues to believe that it is worth it, even if he in fact does have human compassion for them?
Honestly, I can’t prove anything either way, but I think his actions are adequately explained by faults like irresponsibility, excessive stubbornness, and selectivity-of-input, without having to resort to he-doesn’t-care-about-human-life.
Really? Worse? I think that’s one of those saying that sounds nice and has metaphorical meaning, but when you really come down to it, is just kind of silly. So the old guy who drove his car into a farmer’s market and killed dozens of people, who was clearly criminally irresponsible, is WORSE than a serial killer who killed dozens of people? The old guy should burn in hell longer and hotter?
Someone who (irresponsibly) drives drunk and hits a car, causing it to turn into a fireball, causing an innocent family to die in miserable burning hellish pain = bad. Someone who kidnaps an identical familiy and tortures them with a blowtorch, causing them to die in precisely the same amount of miserable burning hellish pain = MUCH MUCH MUCH WORSE. At least, imho.
(When you say it’s “worse”, I suspect that what you mean is something along the lines of "well, someone who would kidnap and blowtorch-murder a family is so irredeemably evil that we can’t even relate to them, they’re outside the realm of what we can identify with, there’s no point in discussing what motivated them because it’s so alien to us. What should they have done differently? Not be insanely evil? What lessons are there to learn? However, someone who drives drunk is someone we CAN identify with, someone who should have known better, someone who could have made easy decisions differently and not caused such horror. Thus, we are more ANGRY at the second person. That doesn’t mean the first person isn’t more evil, however.)
Oh, and by the way, “There’s this president I support, and a lot of people are claiming that he’s the worst person in the world. Ha! Those exaggerating fools have lost all sense of proportion! He’s CLEARLY not the worst person in the world. Why, he might be arguably only the 2nd or 3rd worst president in US history. They are so PWNED!” seems like a weird thing to be elated about.