Abraham Lincoln is my second choice after Franklin Roosevelt. I like strong leaders who achieve things. Lincoln freed the slaves, restored the Union, and set the United States on the path to become the richest and strongest country in the world.
Cite?
:rolleyes: Everything in American history since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution here took place “simultaneously with capitalism,” including the crass and heartless exploitation of the Gilded Age, and including the increasing inequality and decline in working American’s purchasing power over the last 30 years.
To call something “NPR level analysis” is quite a compliment, you know.
Well, America has been an empire since about the time of the Spanish-American War, but actual imperialism clearly is not what WillFarnaby is thinking of.
I guess you could make a case that the Mexican-American war was an imperial land-grab, but even still, didn’t Lincoln oppose the Mexican-American war?
I like FDR too, but I think the change from a slavery-based order to a ‘free’ capitalist one was a bigger and more radical change (economically and socially) than the change from unregulated capitalism to social democracy.
I guess beating the Nazis goes to FDR’s credit too, but he didn’t do that single-handedly, unlike Lincoln with the Confederacy.
Certainly the Japanese internment was not his finest hour, though again you are talking about an action ratified (wrongly, of course) by SCOTUS. I am willing to overlook war actions to a slight degree, as I do with Bush and Obama’s drone campaigns.
For the record, Roosevelt did not “imprison a race of people”. He signed an executive order which gave broad authority to military officials and they interned the Japanese (and only on the West Coast). That’s really just a nitpick though.
That’s my issue though, is when Democrats with great domestic accomplishments do terrible things, it’s unfortunate, but doesn’t detract much from their legacy. If a Republican President commits a far lesser crime, he’s Hitler reborn. I have never seen any real daylight between the Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy and the propensity to go to war. When Democrats attack Republican foreign policy, it strikes me that it’s really about their domestic policies.
I think the difference between '00 to '08 and '08 to now is pretty striking regarding the ‘propensity to go to war’.
I’ll acknowledge that Iraq is an exception. That was a war that only a faction of the Republican Party could have initiated. But it is an exception and that particular faction has been sidelined as the party rediscovers its isolationist impulses in response to that debacle.
Well, Lincoln did have an army and navy to do it for him. He was, after all, only single-handed in beating back the undead menace.
If we are going to give “single-handed” credit to the president for winning wars (a bizarre concept), I’ve got to go with FDR. Using that standard, he did beat Imperial Japan all by himself, while fully supplying the Western European allies, a lot of the USSR’s supplies and a lot of the fighting on the Western Front, a lot more than it took to beat Tojo. While in a wheelchair. Also, let’s not forget that FDR provoked the war with Japan, getting the US to fight a real fight for freedom by embargoing all US oil sales to Japan. This was visionary.
Of course, as fans of SNL history will recall, FDR didn’t win the war single-handedly, as Eleanor Roosevelt could fly and lead bombing missions for the US Army Air Force.
And wasn’t Lincoln a kick-ass vampire killer?
Then why is it Pubs and neocons who are now demanding military action against ISIS?
Isis is Al Qaeda and falls under the original AUMF. Plus you don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory even in a war we shouldn’t have fought.
That is no answer.
:mad: And that is sunk-cost-fallacy bullshit! We’ve had quite enough of that since 2003!
This is nonsense. There were no ‘jaws of victory’. We were never close to victory.
I don’t know about that. I don’t give Truman shit for dropping the bomb and I wouldn’t have given him any extra shit for doing what FDR did. On the other hand I would have given any modern POTUS shit for the Japanese internment, as I did for Gitmo.
Originally Posted by Stringbean View Post
Trying to stack the Supreme Court because they kept striking down your Unconstitutional legislation is single greatest shame in our country’s history.
I’ve only frequented this forum off and on for about 15, 18 years but I think this (by this Stringbean person) is perhaps the very dumbest statement I’ve ever read here.
It doesn’t appear that John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, et al got that memo. Judging by repeated calls to intervene in the Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, etc.
Granted, I got that list from a recent The Daily Show (late June '14). But to be fair, Mr. Stewart doesn’t invent the hypocrisy, he just highlights it with funny graphics and the verbal equivalent of one of these :smack:
I wouldn’t say that FDR’s court-packing scheme was a worse shame than slavery… but it was still awfully bad. If it had gone through, we wouldn’t today be talking about 15 justices as the new normal, because it wouldn’t have stopped at 15. Rather, every time the Presidency changed hands, the new President would pack the court with enough new justices to give his side a solid majority. The Court would effectively cease to exist as an independent branch of government, and just be absorbed into the executive branch, and we’d have two-thirds of the strings of government in the hands of one man.
And we don’t actually have an American empire, but if it weren’t for Lincoln, we very well might have. It’s hardly far-fetched to imagine that one of the hundreds of nations we would have had without him might have had an authoritarian and expansionist bent, and would have conquered the rest of the fragile and fragmented splinter nations.