I am an Independent voter and I’ve always been amazed by how devise the parties have become. Both sides are pointing at each other without realize the old saying, “When you point your finger at someone, three/four? fingers are point back at you.”
I am trying to research which party has had the most scandals, in general, and what the breakdown is per categories, i.e., sex, money, etc… Also, I’m trying to determine which party, historically, either started wars or engaged in ongoing wars/“police actions”, territorial disputes, etc…
Any help would be appreciated.
p.s. As an Independent I have no horse in the race at this time. I have a a family member who is almost radically partisan one way and a best friend who is radically partisan the other way. I keep trying to show them that when it comes to radical partisanship not only are they part of the problem, they are the problem. It’s tearing this country apart at the seams. I just want them to have the facts that they are either blind to, ignorant of, or are in denial of within their own party’s.
“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!!!”
Ray Milland in Network.(I hope:o)
All I can say is that the Republican-Democrat dynamic has undergone dramatic shifts in the last 50 years (let alone 150 from when Lincoln was first elected). Trying to link all but the most loosest of political issues to either party is an exercise in futility. Judge all candidates by what they say, the context they say it in, and their past record.
Given that which party deserves the “blame” for a particular war is debatable (e.g. Vietnam - started under Eisenhower, and escalated to various degrees under JFK, LBJ, and Nixon), let’s move this to Great Debates.
Just to be clear, are you talking all levels? Federal, state, local? Do you know how many total politicians there are in the US? I don’t know, but it’s a shitload.
You aren’t going to get a consensus answer to your questions. Were Wilson, FDR and Truman responsible for the wars during their terms, or did they just happen to be the people at the top at the wrong time?
Scandals are even harder to quantify. Was Sherman Adams accepting gifts less than, equal too or greater than Walter Jenkins being caught with a man in a restroom? DoesBert Lance count as a scandal, since he was acquitted of all charges? Did George H.W. Bush have an affair with a White House staffer, or was that a slander spread by Democrats. . . or maybe spread by Jack Kemp’s campaign? (And does a Republican lying about another Republican, or a Democrat lying about a Democrat, equal to someone in one party lying about someone in the other party?)
This is the polite answer. The blunt answer is that your question is lunacy.
An honest attempt at an answer would require 100 large books to cover the past century and that’s without any context for the scandals or analysis of them.
And it was Paddy Chayefsky, the writer of Network, who said it.
Every President in my lifetime has dropped bombs on someone and deployed troops somewhere. Most likely the trend will continue in the Hillary/Trump/Rubio Administration.
Eh, to be honest only people with an agenda need to debate a lot about Vietnam. It was an ongoing war firstly, predating any American involvement, so no President “started it.” If the question is which President started what is colloquially known as the Vietnam War here in the United States, the simple truth is it’s LBJ. Eisenhower and Kennedy both supported Diệm but the United States supports to some level or another various leaders and countries all over the world. That doesn’t mean we’re fighting a war. It was in March of 1965 that the first deployment of combat ground troops were sent to Vietnam, and in the months preceding this Johnson had also ordered several bombings of the North Vietnamese.
I don’t understand the enduring hesitance people have with clearly assigning blame for getting into the Vietnam War on Johnson, it is simply not logical that Kennedy or Eisenhower bear any of the blame.
It’s true that Johnson greatly expanding the American presence in Vietnam. But I think you can make a plausible argument that Eisenhower made the original crucial decision that led to American involvement when he decided the United States would not accept the Geneva Accords.
To get to your position requires that we limit “start” or “involvement” to the sending of brigade level or higher forces.
That is one way to look at it, but it is still an arbitrary decision.
Ike’s support for the continued separation of the country, including allowing Diem, with no serious experience in governing, to ignore the agreement for national elections and unification is regarded as a key event in the events leading to war.
*“Every President in my lifetime has dropped bombs on someone and deployed troops somewhere.”
*
No bombs were dropped. Maybe that poster wasn’t alive in the 1970s.
But troops were deployed. Although a rescue mission is an unusual definition of “deploy.”
In college (1968) the story I learned was that the root cause of Vietnam (our involvement: the root cause was French colonialism) was that Eisenhower had the 1955 election canceled when it became obvious that Ho Chi Minh would be the winner. Source: Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy. Of course Hilsman was an early architect of our policy that he later regretted and history is divided on him.
Close air support along with combat air patrols were planned as part of the operation. Carter authorized bombing. It just didn’t happen due to the operation falling apart and being aborted before it could happen.
OP’s biggest fallacy is thinking that any number of facts will actually sway his target audience. People who buy heavily into political partisanship are not rational actors. They are more like religious cultists in that they believe things on the basis of faith, not fact.
I could write a book on the sins of Republicans in this regard. The Republican party and conservative voters in general seem completely immune to facts and are heavily driven by religious and moral ideology in which facts and science are not only irrelevant but malicious misinformation. But having said that, I have also seen the same from Democrats. I once heard a person say she supported Hillary “no matter what.” And I’m like, “Really? There is nothing that would make you stop supporting her? So if you found out that eats babies for breakfast, you’d still support her no matter what?”
I think maybe your question falls into the same partisan trap you’re trying to argue against.
Instead of trying to argue that one party or the other does this, or doesn’t do that, you ought to simply point out that people, not parties, make decisions and get into trouble and start wars, etc. The idea that people are driven only by their party affiliation is nonsense, and so party shouldn’t be a factor in deciding how to vote either, or who to blame for anything that goes wrong or credit when they go right.
You guys are confusing the word “involvement” with “engage in warfare.” No one prior to Johnson waged war in Vietnam as President of the United States. We’re involved in Taiwan, that does not mean we’ve ever been to war in Taiwan or over Taiwan. We’re involved in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Israel, Turkey, the list goes on. Being involved in a country where a war is happening isn’t the same as waging war. Johnson ordered the first military attacks, Johnson deployed the first troops there to fight a war. It’s like saying Jefferson started the War of 1812 since he was unfriendly toward the British philosophically, and not you know, Madison–the President who actually was President when that war started. What I don’t get is most wars people understand this is the case. No one says we entered WWII the moment FDR had a negative opinion of Hitler, or even when we started Lend Lease. Everyone says we entered WWII on December 7th, 1941. It’s only Vietnam where people have continually tried to make it murky. I’m not sure if it’s Democrats wanting to try and (desperately) blame Eisenhower (a reserved President on foreign policy who was never for American adventurism), or Democrats who want to protect LBJ because they like the Great Society and don’t want his legacy saddled with what he actually did as President in regards to starting our war in Vietnam.
In standard English, that construction often is used as a shortening of “any of the following cases, including a, b, and c.” The Constitution uses in in the phrase “cruel and unusual punishment.” The courts have consistently ruled that a punishment is forbidden if it is cruel or if it is unusual; it does not have to be both.
I don’t know for sure how ITR champion intended it to be read, but I’m sure that it can’t be read only one way.