And those rankings left me scratching my head, at both ends. But particularly at the bottom. Here are the 10 Preznits that GWB is supposedly better than:
Most of these guys were merely undistinguished, and William Henry Harrison was President too briefly to be bad at it. Seriously, did Chester Arthur, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, or John Tyler leave the Republic in noticeably worse shape than when they became President? And Warren Harding? Pfft. I’ll see your Teapot Dome, and raise you 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina.
There are good arguments that Hoover, Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and maybe Pierce were worse than Dubya. He’s still in the bottom 5, at best.
Here’s the thing. Even the bad presidents weren’t utter disasters to life on our dear Earth. That’s where the yam excels. Screwing up EVERYTHING he touches.
Yeppers. You’d have thought it would be impossible for a President to be THIS bad. It’s amazing, really, in a perverse way.
Compare this with where we were, five months into Dubya’s Presidency. He’d passed his big tax cut for the rich, and he’d appointed a few stinkers to the Cabinet but mostly run-of-the-mill types. But mostly, you didn’t have to think all the time about what sort of fresh hell he was bringing. You could think about politics for awhile, then think about other stuff. Or vice versa. That’s generally how it works, no matter who is President. We’ve found the exception to that rule.
You know, yesterday I typed up a post that was something to the effect of “**Clothahump’s **busy but he asked me to pass along a message: ‘hurrrh durrrh Obama worst president duhhhh derp!’” but I deleted it, thinking it was poor form to call you out in a thread you weren’t even participating in, and attribute something brainless to you that you might not actually say.
That’s how predictable you are. And thank you for setting me straight.
Honestly, I think you’re really badly missing the point.
I have NEVER heard or read a liberal say “You know, I was wrong about George W. Bush. He was a terrific President.” What they’re saying is “Donald Trump is such a nightmare I’d rather have George W. Bush. He was bad, but not nearly this awful.”
It is interesting, though, that W is rightly vilified for the pointless and costly Iraq War, and yet the same people who vilify him will often rank LBJ high, despite him being the man who really got the United States into the even more costly, awful Vietnam War.
The guy’s in favor of electrocuting gays to turn them straight, for one example. For another, he does have connections and experience and determination. Incompetent evil is better than the competent kind, wouldn’tcha say?
LBJ’s domestic policies, especially in civil rights, make up for a lot of things, including foreign policy that most of the country supported for a long time. He was … complicated.
Mike Pence is quite unlikely to electrocute gay people as President. Perhaps more importantly, he is also much more unlikely than Donald Trump to incinerate all gay people, as well as everyone else, in a nuclear war.
Oh sure. And Nixon accomplished a lot of good things too, including opening up China and starting the EPA. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t also a paranoid anti-Semitic crook.
This. The Vietnam and Iraq wars were both horrible. The difference being that LBJ had a hefty stack of positive domestic achievements to counterbalance that disaster. Bush had Katrina.
ETA: That doesn’t mean I’d rank LBJ high. If we could split him in two, the domestic LBJ would be a top-5 President, after Lincoln, Washington, FDR, and Jefferson, from my POV. And the LBJ who escalated the Vietnam War would be in the bottom 10, IMHO. So overall, I’d probably put him in the top half, but not by much.
Among that set of humanity who think, like you do and have whined and cried about being reprimanded for, that the racial and the ethnic and the bigotted slurs like “towel head” and “wet back” are something normal to be used and you are something other than a hateful weak bigot for using them.
And even aside from Watergate, Nixon sabotaged LBJ’s Vietnam peace talks, and kept the war going for another 4 years.
So Nixon’s got all the downside of LBJ, with the additional downside of Watergate, and while Nixon had some good accomplishments, they’re hardly on the scale of LBJ’s.
Why bother, now that we’ve established that we can cut out the middleman and install such a creature as President without waiting for a failed “heartbeat”?
Suspended habeas corpus
Slave owner
Locked up 100,000 innocent Americans
Slave owner
Oh Americans.
Im kidding, I know what you mean.
Oh and LBJ was a racist, serial sexual assaulter. Seriously, if i go around pulling out my dick and showing it to everyone I’m gonna get put on a list.