Who's the worst American president ever?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
In Buchanan’s defense, was the Civil War avoidable? Perhaps some compromises could have kept the union intact for a matter of several years, but is it realistic to think that anything Buchanan could have done would have done anything but delay the inevitable?
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But even if the Civil War wasn’t avoidable, that doesn’t absolve Buchanan from doing nothing to stop the situation, or - and maybe more importantly - from refusing to take action once the situation developed. Remember that the deep South seceded in December of 1860, nearly four months before Lincoln was even sworn in. Buchanan’s response was to give a speech denouncing the decision to secede - and to state that the Federal government had no power to prevent it. Gee, no wonder NC, VA, TN, AR, and TX followed suit with attempts by MD, MO, and KY.

22

[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
Accurate but perhaps not totally relevant. Bush’s avoidable war has killed more people than the perhaps unavoidable US Civil War.
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Now change the name to Lyndon Baines Johnson and add 55,000 people and it’s just as accurate. How is it that LBJ gets so much love when he more than any other precipitated a war that killed so many? Jesus, even if you believe that Bush started a war for oil it STILL had more purpose than Vietnam.

23

[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
Now change the name to Lyndon Baines Johnson and add 55,000 people and it’s just as accurate. How is it that LBJ gets so much love when he more than any other precipitated a war that killed so many? Jesus, even if you believe that Bush started a war for oil it STILL had more purpose than Vietnam.
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Of course accurate Iraqi civilian death counts don’t exist. But 600,000 is a figure widely bandied about a few months back. Did Vietnam kill as many civilians?

For the record, I don’t think Bush started the war for oil. I think the motivator was to prove himself to be better than his father, and certainly better than his father thought of him. Sr didn’t overthrow Hussein, so Jr had to one-up him.

[QUOTE=John Corrado]
But even if the Civil War wasn’t avoidable, that doesn’t absolve Buchanan from doing nothing to stop the situation, or - and maybe more importantly - from refusing to take action once the situation developed.
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Absolutely. Buchanan was a stinker. I’m just saying trade anyone for Buchanan and history would be more or less the same, trade anyone for Bush and history is dramatically different.

24

[QUOTE=John Corrado]
But even if the Civil War wasn’t avoidable, that doesn’t absolve Buchanan from doing nothing to stop the situation, or - and maybe more importantly - from refusing to take action once the situation developed. Remember that the deep South seceded in December of 1860, nearly four months before Lincoln was even sworn in. Buchanan’s response was to give a speech denouncing the decision to secede - and to state that the Federal government had no power to prevent it. Gee, no wonder NC, VA, TN, AR, and TX followed suit with attempts by MD, MO, and KY.
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Much as I support your argument here, I do have to draw an exception – my own adopted state. NC was fiercely divided, but Unionists eked out a slim majority over “Seceshs” until Lincoln announced that loyal states would be required to put up troops to force the seceders back into the Union. That tipped the balance to Succession – and, in the last analysis, made the Civil War the drawn-out bloodbath it was. Consider what it would have been like if there were a minimum of 150 miles of Union territory between Virginia and the rest of the Confederacy.

25

[QUOTE=ASAKMOTSD]
According to this book, it seems that Woodrow Wilson might actually be a better choice. If you look at the US invasions into Cuba, Nicaragua, Mexico, Russia (yes, Russia), and others I might say that he has GWB beat. Then there would be Wilson’s intentional segregation of the US Government, the support for the KKK, etc. Yep, seems like GWB is a right upstanding individual by comparison.
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Not to mention his being a puppet for Edward Mandell House.

:smiley:

26

[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
Of course accurate Iraqi civilian death counts don’t exist. But 600,000 is a figure widely bandied about a few months back. Did Vietnam kill as many civilians?
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Are you kidding? Even the low estimates have the civilian death toll in Vietnam as three times that. It’s not even close.

27

[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
Accurate but perhaps not totally relevant. Bush’s avoidable war has killed more people than the perhaps unavoidable US Civil War.
[/QUOTE]

It’s all in how you look at it. I’m just placing some weight on failing to keep the country together, which sounds like the most basic part of the President’s job in some ways. Doors makes a good point, too. I don’t think you can pin Vietnam on any individual, but how many people died over there? Three million?

28

[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
Of course accurate Iraqi civilian death counts don’t exist. But 600,000 is a figure widely bandied about a few months back. Did Vietnam kill as many civilians?
[/QUOTE]
No doubt that figure of 600,000 includes Iraqi civilians who killed each other in the conflict ensuing in the wake of our invasion. If one counts those deaths, than one can attribute the genocide of the Khmer Rouge to our invasion of Cambodia and attribute a far higher death toll to the Vietnam War.

As always, when we do a worst president poll, I nominate Andrew Johnson. AJ vetoed Civil Rights bills, pardoned former Confederates by the thousand, returned their land which had been set aside by law to establish freedom for former slaves on a sound economic basis, blocked the Army from preventing the Ku Klux Klan from instituting a Reign of Terror during the 1868 elections, and in general spent his entire 35-month presidency doing everything he could to ensure, in his words, that African Americans “stayed in the same space in freedom that they did in slavery”.

29

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
Harding was more corrupt.

Jackson was a genocidal madman, but he is justly credited with an important win in the War of 1812 and for opening up American democracy.
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Jackson was not the President in 1812, so what that has to do with his Presidency, I can’t imagine.

[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
Of course accurate Iraqi civilian death counts don’t exist. But 600,000 is a figure widely bandied about a few months back. Did Vietnam kill as many civilians?
[/QUOTE]

The Vietnamese civilian death toll is usually low end guessed at 1.5 million, military deaths (they’re people too) at 1 million. ARVN military deaths are in the order of 230,000 or so. Plus thousands more in Cambodia (counting only the war, not the Khmer Rouge’s post-war genocide) and Laos; 2.5 to 3 million would be a midrange estimate overall. It was one of the bloodiest wars in history.

Vietnam was by any measure a vastly bloodier and more costly war than Iraq has been or has any realistic chance of being, so the question is a valid one; why rip Bush as the worst President for Iraq, but not Johnson for Vietnam? Johnson started the Vietnam War (in earnest) over a lie every bit as preposterous as the WMD claims. It spilled over into neighbouring countries. Millions of civilians were killed, quite a few of them by the USA, and many of those entirely on purpose; the USA didn’t give much of a crap about “collateral damage” back then. The war was lost outright, severely damaging the USA’s credibility and learning its armed forces in a state of disarray and indiscipline that took years to fix. It ignited protests and unrest in the United States itself vastly worse than what we’ve seen since 2003, protests that in fact got a number of people killed. And there was essentially no upside whatsoever to it. Iraq is a fiasco but at least Saddam got what he deserved, the dirty son of a bitch. You can’t even take that away from Vietnam.

I am as opposed to the Iraq War as anyone, but let’s be reasonable; the Vietnam War was an absolute catastrophe, a disaster on a much greater scale than Iraq in terms of lives lost, negative impact on the United States, negative impact on the world, repellent effect on America’s allies, and financial cost. All the Americans killed in Iraq since March 2003 is still less than three months of combat in Vietnam in 1968. It was easily the worst thing that has ever happened to the United States of America; the Civil War was horrific, but necessary and had the right outcome. I think people are starting to forget was a ghastly catastrophe it was. By NO measure is Iraq worse.

So why isn’t Johnson on the list? Oh, I’ll grant that Eisenhower and Kennedy got the ball rolling and Nixon kept playing the tune after 1969. But it was Johnson who pushed war through lies and got the U.S. really heavily involved; what Ike and JFK did could easily have been reversed. And Nixon was handed a bag of dogshit; he deserves blame for not ending it sooner, but even if he’d pulled every American out by March 1969 it would STILL rank as a bloodier, costlier war than Iraq (by the time Nixon took office U.S. casualties were already up to 30,000, Vietnamese casualties vastly higher, likely more than a million.)

30

[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
Are you kidding? Even the low estimates have the civilian death toll in Vietnam as three times that. It’s not even close.
[/QUOTE]
Cambodia and Laos deaths push it to well over any figure mentioned yet.

31

[QUOTE=Freddy the Pig]
No doubt that figure of 600,000 includes Iraqi civilians who killed each other in the conflict ensuing in the wake of our invasion.
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The 600,000+ figure is a number derived from statistical studies. They look at the mortality rate before the invasion and then after. It includes ALL reason for death.

Lots of people have dismissed the Lancet report but it was carried out using the exact same methods that most(including the US) modern countries use to study death rates after natural disasters etc. It is this method that was used after the Asian Tsunami for example.

32

[QUOTE=Airman Doors, USAF]
Now change the name to Lyndon Baines Johnson and add 55,000 people and it’s just as accurate. How is it that LBJ gets so much love when he more than any other precipitated a war that killed so many? Jesus, even if you believe that Bush started a war for oil it STILL had more purpose than Vietnam.
[/QUOTE]

In fairness, LBJ merely intervened in (and arguably prolonged) a civil war that was already going on long before he took office; and his two predecessors had already slipped in the thin end of the wedge of American commitment. He shouldnadunnit. But if not for Vietnam, LBJ would be remembered as the best president since FDR. He had enormously important domestic accomplishments to his credit. Bush has none.

33

I’m sorry, I just don’t see any of this alleged “love” for Johnson (I guess resident libs are Don’t ask don’t tell? :D) Johnson is probably the third-most reviled president in the general populace with regards to perceptions of warmongering/mass deaths.

34

I’d want it judged on not only the problems the person has caused at home, but also for the rest of the world. I don’t know enough about Wilson to judge whether he was worse than Bush but certainly the implications for the rest of the planet from the Iraq war are already grim with the potential to become even more serious if these loons in the current administration pursue a new goal in Iran.

35

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
But if not for Vietnam, LBJ would be remembered as the best president since FDR. He had enormously important domestic accomplishments to his credit. Bush has none.
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If not for killing his wife, Scott Peterson would be considered a nice guy.

36

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
It’s hard to think of another president that was as much and as spectacular of a failure as the current one. Has the man actually accomplished anything?
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More AIDS funding for Africa?

I also give him props for his space policies. No actual accomplishments as yet, but at least he talks the talk.

37

That traitor Washington! :smiley:

38

[QUOTE=Menocchio]
Jackson was a genocidal madman, but he is justly credited with an important win in the War of 1812 and for opening up American democracy.
[/QUOTE]

Jackson was neither a madman nor genocidal (unless you subscribe to a really broad definition of that term). He was pig-headed, vengeful, and and mean-spirited, though. He was determined to remove the eastern tribes, so much so that he pushed his successor to get the job done in a hurried, neglectful way that cost a lot of lives. You could charge Jackson with theft of Indian lands, and criminal negligence maybe, but I wouldn’t describe it as genocide.

And how come nobody demonizes Grant for all the Indian killing that went on at his direction? You want to talk genocide, look at what Phil Sheridan (“The only good Indians I ever saw were dead”) did at Grant’s behest. Now there was some genocide. Jackson at least spared women and children when he was fighting Indian wars.

I think Buchanan gets unfairly blamed for the Civil War. That war was a freight train that was coming down the track no matter who was in office. It was a war eighty years in the making.

It is tempting to vote for Bush, but we need more hindsight. Truman was despised when he left office and is generally admired now. So you never know.

I think my vote goes to Harding for the combination of incompetence and corruption he brought to the office. Grant was pretty bad, too. (Gross corruption, the Panic of 1873, the Indian wars.) But at least Grant partially redeemed himself with some work on civil rights and the creation of Yellowstone National Park.

39

[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
More AIDS funding for Africa?
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Unless things have changed there were strings attached though.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0830-02.htm

Now I’m being Der Trihs :wink:

40

In the spirit of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes, that would be John McCain. A firm supporter of president Bush’s escalation in Iraq, senator McCain demonstartes an even more tenuous grasp of reality than G.W.:

At least Bush is willing to acknowledge that the disastrous course of the war has already turned most Americans sour.