Money is a powerful motivator.
Robin
Cut the crap. You obviously do remember, and no doubt are quite glad of the erasure of the archives.
Just ftr, the “jury” members from Stephen Benet’s "The Devil and Daniel Webster":
Walter Butler, a Loyalist
Simon Girty, a Loyalist
Indian chief Metacomet, referred to as “King Philip”.
Governor Thomas Dale
Thomas Morton, a rival of the Plymouth Pilgrims.
The pirate Edward Teach, also known as “Blackbeard”.
Reverend John Smeet
But that was written a couple of centuries of evildoing ago. Only Blackbeard and maybe King Philip are even known anymore.
Nonsense. I am aware of no erasure. And if I said anything untoward about the Secretary-designate, it was merely heat-of-the-campaign rhetoric, and nothing more. If she’s okay by Obama, she’s okay by me. I still refuse to believe, however, that I allowed your particular misspelling to stew for five minutes without taking appropriate action.
That was wantonly destructive of property, which was the point, but there was nothing in it you could call an atrocity or war crime. “Scorched-Earth” tactics are perfectly acceptable in the canons of civilized warfare.
Much of the property he destroyed was livestock and agriculture. He left behind starvation, poverty, and ruin. That’s not even to mention the people who died trying to follow him to freedom. I don’t intend to argue with you about the ethics of his rampage, as one man’s dead insurgent is another man’s beloved son. But it is without question that he wanted people to suffer, for no reason other than resisting his destruction of their homes and businesses. As he himself boasted, “We are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.” Top ten, in my view. Number four, specifically.
Except that he was completely correct. You cannot condemn him without condemning all the generals and admirals of world war 2. You cannot condemn him without essentially surrendering to bad men everywhere.
Lissener, I am completely on your side as it relates to gay rights, but this is pretty unfair. RickJay also didn’t put FDR on the list, who signed Executive Order 9066, which stripped 110,000 Japanese Americans of all of their civil rights. He also didn’t list that sick bastard who raped and murdered 12 yr old Polly Klaas, or serial child predator Joseph Edward Duncan…but I don’t think that means RickJay is dismissing the life experiences and suffering of these victims. He’s just using different criteria.
You two may have some bad blood or history between you, I dont’ know-but your comments taken at face value seem unjustified.
Your response is positively stunning in its ethical frigidity. No one in my family ever owned slaves, and the same is true of most Southern people. It did not matter to Sherman whether people were already poor and suffereing, or in the case of many, not even involved in the dispute between Northern land-grabbers and Southern land-grabbers. If I must condemn the whole world to condemn him too, then so be it. His deeds are not mitigated by the fact that condemning them is inconvenient or impractical.
House? Read his novel “Phillip Dru: Administrator”- his fictional program for “democratic socialist revolution” in America that set us up for Welfare Statism, Corporate Socialism & Globalism. Also, he was the man who launched the U.S. branch of the Fabian-Socialist Anglo-Internationalist “Round Table”- the Council on Foreign Relations.
Like I said, he may have been a misguided idealist, or as Thomas Jefferson called Adam Weishaupt, “an enthusiastic philanthropist” (which was not necessarily as complimentary as it sounds today.)
So he wrote a badly-written polemical novel hardly anyone reads, then or now. (Which novel, BTW, advocated for progressivism (as the term then was used), not socialism.) BFD.
And what harm has the CFR ever done America?! 
I have a feeling I’m going to regret asking that . . .
Deleted as it’s repeated below
Naw- you can look it up for yourself. G
I did, on Wikipedia. There’s nothing there. And I know from your own accounts in this Forum that you’ve outgrown the John Birch Society crankiness of your younger days, so what’s that leave?
Yes, and it’s remarkable that many of the worst-of-the-worst of all time happened to hold or promote views in direct conflict with those of the poster nominating them.
Edward Mandell House? Are you fucking kidding me? I may as well propose Billy Graham or Sylvia Browne.
My candidates:
John C. Calhoun - Introduced the philosophy that slavery was a “positive good” and thus set the nation on a path to war.
Joe McCarthy - Raised innuendo to a wicked art form.
Rush Limbaugh - Perfected McCarthy’s art, and added outright lying to the palette.
Phil Sheridan - Did to the Shenendoah Valley what Sherman did to the deep South, but his evil had more to do with his treatment of western tribes after the Civil War. (“The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”)
Dick Cheney - Turned the US into a torture state, and tried to set it on a path to becoming a police state.
Aaron Burr - An even more evil VP than Dick Cheney!
I have a problem with including Benedict Arnold on the list, really. Yes, he did get miffed at not getting the glory he deserved for leading the rebel victory at Saratoga while it went instead to Horatio Gates, who choked there, but consider:
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At that time Arnold turned his coat, the cause did look pretty dim, and his decision could easily be seen as that of a patriotic British citizen, if perhaps a little ahead of schedule. (“Treason is simply a matter of dates.” - Talleyrand)
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Without Saratoga, the rebellion would have been over by then anyway. American independence is owed to Arnold as much as it is owed to almost anyone else.
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the Ken Lays, Dennis Kozlowskis, and Bernard Madoffs of the world. Greedy, psychotic liars who wiped out a lot of prosperity for a lot of people solely to enrich themselves.
I’d also like to give special mention to General William Westmoreland and the other top brass of the military during Vietnam. Never has a more callous and ignorant group of men ascended to positions of power in our military at the same time.
Well, he tried to be . . . but it didn’t work out . . . and that was after he left office anyway. (Burr and Cheney, BTW, are the only two VPOTUSes I know of who shot somebody while in office.)
That’s bullshit. Iraq has been an unqualified disaster for America and for Iraq. Iraq is in a state of war which did not exist with Saddam Hussein. How many Iraqis was Saddam Hussein killing? The number of dead, crippled, refugees etc have increased exponentially and America has destroyed and laid waste to Iraq. I cannot think of any other president who was so criminally incompetent.