Well, thanks to a link outside any of those bloggers, there’s an answer.
Interesting list, eh?
(Put in the Pit because you know it’s gonna end up here anyway.)
Jimmy Carter is the most evil person in US history? Really? They think that?
God, these people are morons.
How, precisely, did the website word the question? I am not familiar with any of those blogs, but perhaps those people thought the question only referred to political figures? Also, I am not from the US, so the only people I recognized on that list are the more famous political figures.
Interesting that John Wilkes Booth made the list but Lee Harvey Oswald did not. I guess killing a Democrat president isn’t so bad.
Booth tied with Margaret Sanger - because the world was so much better before birth control and sex education.
Ahem…the poll was “Who is worst?” Worst does not = evil.
And Conservatives rate Richard Nixon as worse than Alger Hiss!
Irony is such a hoot.
It was a pretty stupid list to begin with.
I think there should be a list of worst amateur poll results.
So, is it bad because it reflects such a horrible lack of historical knowledge and perspective, or because it doesn’t reflect the views of conservative bloggers? If it’s the latter reason, how do you know that?
Because, the Carter economic policies were so good… :rolleyes:
Actually, the criticism against her focuses on her racist eugenics philosophy, but that was pretty much all the rage with the smart set of the early 1900s-30s. After the 1940’s, it kinda fell out of favor for some reason.
However, I will defend her on one point- as far as I’ve been able to find out, she was anti-abortion.
I read Townhall columnists & Christian bloggers linked to Internet Monk- never heard of any of these that are listed.
I’m surprised no one listed Edward Mandell House or any Rockefellers.
Jimmy Carter, the guy who has taken up the gauntlet for Habitat Humanity and done more to promote international peace than all the former presidents combined, is worse than Timothy McVeigh? For real, for real?
If the voters were intelligent, they’d actually rate Richard Nixon and LBJ next to each other. Both were pretty progressive when it came to the poor (something most people do not know about the former). But I guess we should be grateful that they put Richard Nixon on the list in the first place. Now if only they had voted for Reagan and Oliver North, I might think they had some modicum of political awareness.
Where is Lee Harvey Oswald? Without him, we might have been stuck with a very handsome and charismatic leader but otherwise weak when it came to such things as assistance for poor people and civil rights. His assassination made it possible for LBJ to take the reigns and launch his Great Society programs, as well as spurring the very momentous Civil Rights Act of '64. Which is why he’s presumably on the list, right? See, if these people actually knew how historical events are connected to each other, then they would most certainly have Oswald on the list. But apparently Obama, with his hopey-changey health care programs and stimulus packages, is a worse person than a presidential assassin who didn’t even make the list!
I guess if they put down any Civil War figures (except for John Wilkes Booth), they’d be acknowledging their sympathies. So they decided to stay out of that mess, even though that period of time was the most important one in this country’s history.
Worse. List. Ever.
never mind.
I see this get thrown around a lot by anti-choice propaganda cites. The insinuation is usually the Hitler-type eugenics but I never see anything in legitimate sources about this. All I know is that she was for promoting birth control, especially for poor women who were basically chattel and their children who had a bad life ahead of them. As far as I know she wasn’t into killing undesirables. Also, sterilization was only for people with serious problems like schizophrenics, etc. Certainly not something we would do now but this was a common opinion among not just the “smart set” until very recently.
I doubt any so-called conservatives give a shit about anything other than her promoting birth control and their association of Planned Parenthood only with abortion.
It’s nice to see that Richard Nixon is included. I’ve always been amazed that he is considered a conservative.
The big surprise is Margaret Sanger. I don’t spend that much time on conservative blogs, but I can honestly say I can’t remember her being mentioned even once. And since surveys show that conservatives have slightly more sex and slightly better sex than liberals, this makes me think this whole survey thing is bs.
This “poll” doesn’t reflect the views of anyone other than those who participated in the poll.
But that won’t stop many of the ignorant around here from hooting and hollering about it (see above and below).
All it actually means is that, of the people who were in on the poll, who are a self-selected suite of bloggers having very little to do anything else, these are people they picked whom they, personally, happen to not like. It means no more than that, which is why it’s meaningless.
Well, at least Nixon made the list! (I don’t agree his place on it, but at least he’s there)
Not necessarily. Sanger on eugenics.
And:
Another quote:
Epilepsy is NOT schizophrenia, nor is “feeblemindedness” (I’m assuming she’s referring to the mentally retarded).
You can admire someone while at the same time acknowleding their faults. Look, I’m pro-choice, and I agree that Sanger did a lot of good. BUT, I’m not going to pretend that she didn’t preach eugenics. In her defense, she was a product of her time.
You’re absolutely correct, although it does seem relevant to add that these are 43 popular (whatever that means here) self-identifying conservative bloggers. One might properly draw the conclusion that it’s a semi-accurate barometer of “conservative” noisemakers, assuming the 43 are actually representative.
There’s a piece on salon.com that refers to both this poll and a piece by “liberal” blogger Matt Yglesias. The point of the article: the entries on the list are all political choices. So, for instance, Charles Manson doesn’t appear, nor does Jeffery Dahmer. In a nutshell, the current state of political discussion ranks Jimmy frickin’ Carter (and everyone else on the list) as worse than serial killers.
Can I get a shoutout for “Dexter Morgan – 2012”? Campaign slogan: Experience Real Political Bloodlust…
The actual list is pretty ridiculous, but it is really, really unfair to try to make anything out of the results as published on that site.
So basically 43 people got an email that said “who are the worst figures in American history? Name up to 20.” And they are ranked on that page according to who got the most mentions, which is a very different thing from a comprehensive survey of who “conservatives” really think is the worst, second worst, and so on.
The individuals who responded to the polls appear to be morons, certainly, but is it really surprising that a little more than half of them included Carter or Obama in their lists? It’s not exactly a question begging for in-depth analysis.