I shed real tears for people who are truly suffering, who are so oppressed by circumstances beyond their control that they can’t help themselves. I have little compassion for people who are victims only of their own crappy choices.
I suppose that means you don’t admire me. Next time I have a moment to reflect, I promise I’ll try very hard to care.
Not only Grant, but most of his administration, can be lumped into the worst ever.
Sorry to try to get this thread back on track.
Pardon me? There has been no greater master of poetry than he. I consider his Jesus the Son of Man to be as authoritative in spiritual teaching as the Gospels, if not more so. I intended it as the highest compliment.
Oh. Well, that’s very different.
(Boy, there is just is no graceful way out of a double faux pas, with a backflip and a half-gainer…not only spurn a sincere compliment, but insult the donor as well.)
OK if just stand here and bleed for a while?
Mind the carpet!
Ross Perot. 
There were conservatives in the late '90s insisting that Clinton was going to send the ATF to their homes and confiscate their guns, that Clinton would declare martial law and make himself el Presidente for life, that Clinton had a secret death squad from Arkansas out to kill his political enemies, yadda yadda yadda. If that’s not tin-foil-hats-ville, I don’t know what is.
I’m sure other Dopers with better memories than mine can list more examples.
No, I think they hate him for some things that he did do. You see, he raised taxes, the thing that was supposed to drive the economy into ruin. Instead it took off, and we wound up with the first surplus in ages. Now Bush did what the conservatives said was going to improve the economy, and it sat there like a lump. (yes, it is improving now, but it always rains after the rainmaker does his stuff. If it takes three months, he still claims credit, right.)
Lets look at the last few.
Nixon, while he was a paranoid loonie, didn’t steal the '72 election - he would have won without Watergate, which makes it especially pointless. Besides that, he opened China, signed the Clean Air Act, and was in many respects a decent fellow.
While LBJ was responsible for Vietnam, he also got the Civil Rights Acts passed (something Kennedy couldn’t do) and did a number of positive things.
Bush I did a very competent job with the gulf war. Reagan was far more pragmatic than people give him credit for - as mentioned he did raise taxes as the deficit mounted. Ford and Carter, while nothing to write home about as Presidents, certainly never started any wars or lied to people.
Some older ones: Hoover certainly mishandled the Depression, but remember there was no economic theory then telling him what to do. He was not an evil person, he made his name as the leader of relief for displaced people in Europe after WW I. Harding and Grant were surrounded by crooks, but that’s not enough to be the worst. Andrew Johnson, if you remember, got impeached for trying to reunify the country., which was following Lincoln’s direction.
I can kind of see Jackson and Buchanan being in contention - but we’re down to a select few at this point. Buchanan did nothing, true, but things were too far along at that point to stop. I never thought about Jackson being the worst, but I can see the argument.
I tend to rate people who did nothing to help (like Pierce) lower than people who actively make things worse (like Bush.)
Hey! I voted for him! (I’m so ashamed… 
)
I knew someone who honestly and devoutly believed that Mr. Clinton had a squad of black hat hackers stashed away in a secret installation. They were going to swing into action at midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, breaking networks, destroying systems, releasing viruses, wiping financial databases, etc. Everyone would naturally assume that the ensuing nation-wide chaos would have been purely the result of the Milennium Bug, and Mr. Clinton would have an excuse to declare martial law and rule the country with an iron fist.
He was deadly serious about it.
And he was a senior research scientist at a DOE National Lab.
To me, its a gradual rise in the surrealism index, the news, the actual facts, get so strange that reality itself is never quite in focus, the edges aren’t crisp, perspective is lost…
The crazy stories about Clinton just sort of bounced off, you knew those wild stories about cocaine and land deals were nonsense, but Bill Clinton doesn’t care about money, he only cares about politics and pussy, and you know that, that’s true, that’s reliable.
But a couple years back, if you had told me that GeeDubya was going to send Colin Powell to the UN with a pile of bogus bullshit so he could attack a country that not only hadn’t done anything to us, but most likely couldn’t if they wanted to…Yeah, sure, right. Get a grip, the guys center right against center left, big whoop, still prefer Gore but its not like Bush is crazy.
But the lies keep coming off, its like watching the ugliest stripteaser in human history, ugly enough to make a blind man cry, just when you recover from the last one, off comes another and plops to the floor with the demure grace of a used condom flung out the window of a pickup truck in honky-tonk parking lot…
We need to know that there’s a limit, that there’s shit just too weird to happen…
No. Clinton was.
We’re all blown away by your incisive analysis. Care to elaborate?
My grandma believed something similar. She’d heard a preacher on the radio talking about it, and called to let me know that Clinton had hundreds of thousands of “Red Chinese” stashed in box cars all over the country, waiting for the “signal” to “take over.”
“Grandma,” I said. “He’s already in charge! Why would he need to take over? And what would he do differently if he did?”
My grandma then went into a litany of how Clinton would close all churches, take away all private property, destroy all firearms so folks couldn’t fight back, usher in Communism, and execute those who dared to disagree. She seemed to see Hillary as a Madame Mao fugure who was as eager as her husband to destroy the country just for the hell of it.
I was flabberghasted. I tried to point out that there probably aren’t enough box cars left in the US to hide hundreds of thousands of Red Chinese, and that the logistics of providing food, and sanitation to those in the boxcars would be a staggering undertaking which the public would most likely notice. Secondly, Communism was unlikely to be ushered in by the wealthy elite-- those who have the most to lose, and thirdly, that she shouldn’t believe everything she heard on the radio.
“But he’s a preacher!” she protested.
She also blames the state of the current health care system on Hillary Clinton. I tried to point out that the Clinton plan was voted down and not implimented, but she still insists that Hillary has something to do with why her health insurance has gone up in price.
I love my grandma, but she drives me nuts with this crap. She’s a person of average intelligence-- it just stuns me that someone could believe such far-fectched and ludicrious theories.
I told her that if she wanted some really good conspiracy theories, she should start listening to what’s being said about George Bush-- but all of those stories are automitically false, because she knows that George is a “good person”, and refuses to believe he may have lied to us.
I think you are confusing “feeling bad” with “psychological damage”. There’s a huge gulf of a difference, and I would hope you can see the difference without me thinking up some horribly graphic examples.
Sure, there’s a difference. But it’s still a flawed argument. There’s much more milage to be had from the insurance and social wellfare angles.
Yeah, he raised taxes, and the result was a great economy, full employment, rising wages for everyone, and a surplus. The nerve of the guy, showing that voodoo economics was crap.
Following this obligatory George W. Bush tirade, I’ll condescend to announce my carefully considered choice for worse president inflicted on the United States.
When George Bush ran for President I thought the choice was between a center-right candidate in Bush and a center-left candidate in Gore. I also thought that Gore was in trouble because he lacked fire and spark and a batch of people were ready to express their disgust with the sleazy personal life led by President Clinton (another center-left guy) by just dropping out of the political process for one turn. When Bush started cozying up to the Bobby Jones university types I dismissed it a simply throwing a bone to a constituency that had to be appeased by throwing them a rhetorical bone. When Bush, promised to restore honor to the White House I knew that it was code for he wasn’t going to solicit a hummer on public property and I thought that it wasn’t a bad idea, not central to the executive governance of the country, but a refreshing idea, none the less. When he talked about drilling for oil on the North Slope of Alaska I figured that it was rhetoric and that the project had too many obstacles in front of it to come to fruition. When he condemned use of US forces for so-called nation building I knew that it was code for isolation and I knew that events would probably overwhelm his isolationist tendencies. When he talked about failed policies in the Middle East I figured that he might have the resolution and Congressional backing to bang some heads together and force both Israel and the Palestinians to get reasonable. When he talked about tax cuts I figured that the country could probably afford some changes, but also figured that Congress would require any tax breaks be equitably shared out.
I did not expect that President Bush would commence with a (IMO) cynical campaign to convert the reasonable American values of fair play and equality of opportunity into a campaign for religiosity in public life and narrow sexual morality. I did not expect the greater share of tax breaks to be shoveled off to the people who least needed them. I did not expect him to give Sharon and LeKuid a blank check in dealing with the Palestinians. I did not expect him to pig headedly continue with a demand for tax breaks when the projected federal surplus became a howling shortfall. I certainly did not expect to see the country go roaring off on a foreign adventure in pursuit of a tangential and disputed objective in Iraq at far too great a cost in the nation’s blood, treasure, honor and credibility. I did not expect to see him strutting about like a Banty rooster triumphing over illusory victories.
When he claimed to be a unifier I did not expect that he would spend the whole of his administration trying to turn the country into warring camps of them and us.
I thought that Bush would be a reasonable, careful and well advised national executive, not unlike his father. That’s not what I got. I got pig headed and impulsive claiming to decisive. I got sanctimony and religiosity, not a commitment to what I hope are the fundamental concepts of ordered liberty that I like to think are the things that make this country worth the effort. If there is an anger hotter than that of a spurned lover it is the anger of an elector who has been sold a bill of goods.
As far as the worst President goes: James Buchanan, the man who saw the crises of the Civil War coming and flat did nothing to effect a compromise of the competing interests and who by inaction actually encouraged the fire eaters to participate the crises. He was a man who would not make a decision and when the time came to act protested that he was not given time to think and pray. If there was ever a case of a man who sewed the whirl wind it was President Buchanan.
You can gripe about Andrew Jackson and US Grant and the series of non-entities who followed Grant, and Wilson and Harding and Hoover all you want, but you cannot escape that each of those men implemented policies which were favored by the country then, no matter what you may think of them now.
How about Rutherford B. Hayes and his withdrawal of the troops from the South, which might have crippled Reconstruction?
I’ll have to look up more cites, but even Leonard Bernstein in his musical *1600 Pennsylvania Avenue * had Julia Grant lament in song “Those little black hopes have been dashed!”
BTW, he was another guy who lost the popular vote (by about 200,000) and won the electoral.
<nitpick>
I bet you meant “sowed.” As in sowing seeds. As in "as ye sow so shall ye reap. "
</nitpick>
But I agree with your point about his probably being if not the worst, right up there in the top 2 or 3.
Too many people with the grand knowledge of perhaps 3 presidents at most are very quick to leap on the one they disagree with as “the worst ever.” I repeat my first reaction to this: You think the current one, or his predecessor, is the worst, read some history!
[QUOTE=MLS]
I bet you meant “sowed.” As in sowing seeds. As in "as ye sow so shall ye reap. "
QUOTE]
Would you take a job as my proof reader?