Worst. President. Ever.

Great Debates
141

While no one’s actively picked a fight with me, I’ve heard a lot of anti-US vitriol spouted in the UK and on the Continent, often by people who thought I was Canadian (I have a mild accent, and I don’t tend to disabuse people of their assumptions in this regard). My wife reports similar experiences.

I also seem to spend an increasing amount of time these days apologizing for US foreign policy, particularly with regard to the inevitable war with Iraq, to bewildered Brits who want to know what the hell is wrong with our President.

Europeans are quite happy to accept US television, but not its militarism.

142

quote:

Originally posted by Diogenes the Cynic

This kind of attitude is exactly why the rest of the world despises the US. Unfortunately, arrogant threats and self-important bravado only create more terrorism.

And keep your moronic physical threats out of GD please.

I did not threaten you, as a matter of fact I like your posts and you seem like a nice person. I would only box somebody I trust and have respect for. I was trying to make the point you defend yourself and the attacks will stop.
After the first trade center attack we did nothing. Look what it got us. Lets give war a chance.

I like Bush. I trust him. The things you say are bad about him are the things I think are great about him. I lean to the right just a little.

143

Why are the compassionate lefties all uncompassionate in this thread? Jeez, you guys loose one election and all hell breaks loose.
Your compassionate side only shows when your boy wins?
How bout pulling up your sagging facial tissue and dealing with it. Look on the bright side, if Bush hadnt won Gore would be the worst president ever.

144

BeatenMan,
Sorry, I misunderstood your intent. When you express yourself the way you did in your last post, you come across as much more reasoned and defensible. I know what it’s like to post in anger, though. I go over the top all the time, so I have no room to criticize.

It’s not so much the defending ourselves that I object to, it’s the belligerance towards the rest of the world. There’s a right and a wrong way to say things. I prefer Teddy Roosevelts axiom of speaking softly and carrying a big stick. The biggest, toughest kid in the class may be feared if he is belligerant, but if he is soft spoken and respectful he will be respected. There is a difference.

145

Hey, who wants to bet that as soon as GWB is out of office, we see another one of these threads, with everybody claiming the NEW president to be the worst ever? Frankly, I think you’d have to be a ridiculously partisan zealot to claim Bush (or Clinton, or Reagan) is the Worst President of All Time. Disagree with the man, sure. Call him an actively bad president, okay - I disagree, but okay. But the worst ever? C’mon, let’s have a little perspective.

My knowledge of presidential trivia isn’t wonderful, but of the presidents about whom I know a significant amount, I would say Grant was the worst, if by “worst” you mean “most inept”. If by “worst” you mean “did the most harm”, then maybe Johnson.
Carter, while he has many good traits, was an abysmal president, and did much harm to our national security. Still, I wouldn’t call him the worst.

Nixon was certainly the most paranoid, and did many bad things, but he also did much good, which saves him from being the worst.

Clinton is an awful, awful man, but his presidency was more unremarkable than actively bad. It’s a delicious irony that a man so obsessive about his legacy will likely be all but forgotten within a decade.

Bush the Elder was about as mediocre a president as they come, but had the misfortune of overseeing a recession, and will probably go down in history as less capable than he really was. If there was a ranking of all the presidents, he would likely wind up as number 22.

JFK was a gifted speaker, and a great visionary. He was also a great supply-sider, which is a Fun Fact to throw at any liberal Kennedy-supporter, if you want to watch them squirm. He was likely an above-average president, but certainly far from the best - even of the 20th century.

FDR was a great war-time leader, and a great motivational speaker. He’s also the man most responsible for keeping the Depression going for almost 15 years, though, which keeps him firmly out of any top-ten lists, in my book. And the Japanese internment thing was a bit of a blemish.

Truman? Had the courage to drop the bomb, and helped with the Marshall Plan, but aside from that, he didn’t do much of note. A good, but not great, president.

Don’t know enough about Harding to comment on him in any educated manner, so I won’t.

That about sums it up, I guess. I’d give Grant and Johnson the tie for Worst. President. Ever. They were both god-awful, but in such diverse ways, that it’s hard to rank them relative to one another.
Jeff

146

“Well intended”? But wasn’t the Bay of Pigs an effort by the US to impose regime change on a sovereign state through armed conflict? I’m a little surprised to hear you describing it in such benign terms, given your current stance on world affairs.

147

Hey, you caught me in a real self-contradiction, Dewey, good catch. Ok, I withdraw the “well-intended” part.

148

I believe it was Tallyrand who said “It was worse than immoral. It was a mistake.”

Possibly the central flaw in US reasoning about Cuba was the blind conviction that a Socialist revolution simply couldn’t be a popular movement, it simply had to be something imposed by the evil machinations of the Soviet Union. These goons actually believed that the anti-Castro forces would be the spark to set off a popular uprising. Most likely, it was doomed from the git-go, but JFK totally wimped out when crunch time came, and witheld air and sea support. Better he should haved stayed out of the shit pit in the first place.

Further, JFK’s reputation as a liberal champion of civil rights is wildly overstated. The real heavy lifting was done by the giant Jekyll/Hyde of American politics, LBJ -a flagrantly racist champion of civil rights. Go figure.

149

Godddammit, there you go being all reasonable. You’re ruining all my fun. :slight_smile:

150

nonoggin, get off my case. You bloody well know what I mean. Disagreeing is fine, but you don’t have to hyper-analyze my briefly written statements. I now realize that you are one of “those” people…

151

Ps. I love you :wink:
and grant was the worst president ever.

152

More proof that at least a few on the right know the difference between real democracy and the Shrub’s (and Congress’s: both parties) version:

http://www.cato.org/current/terrorism/pubs/levy-martial-law.html

153

IMHO. Judging Bush on matters terrorism and Iraq right now is far too presumptuous. We don’t know the long term ramifications of what he is doing right now, we don’t even know how much of the stuff we are dealing with now is foreign policy failings in Clinton. The same is true of the economy. What blame Bush has for what we are seeing now is something that we can only analyze after a ways through the business cycle. We barely can analyze decisions made during Bush I and Reagan. We can certainly venture guesses, but guesses are little more than opinion. IMHO, I think he is going about it all wrong, and in some cases disasterously wrong, but again it is my opinion. Give it a generation or so to judge Bush on these things.

This is not to say that there are things that we cannot judge him on. Some decisions undertaken within the first year of his presidency are certainly paying dividends right now. Let me mention four off of the top of my head.

  1. North Korea. Remember all of that talk of Missile Defense, rogue nations with ICBMs and the like in the sunny days before 9-11-01? Bush and Rumsfeld jury-rigged foreign policy to form an environment permissive for NMD development. One aspect was that Bush poured cold water over rapprochement talks between the two Koreas (cite). Granted, he succumbed to political pressure and started talking about meetings towards September 2001, but then the shit hit the fan. In 2000, Madeline Albright met with Kim Jung-Il. We had a policy of engagement, and the freeze between the Koreas had perhaps begun to thaw a bit with an unprecedented meeting between the two Koreas. All of this stopped dead when Bush came along. And see where it has led us now.
  2. Israel. Bush maintained, and for the most part has kept a strictly hands-off policy towards Israel. This has led to two years of regression in Israeli/Palestinian relations after the second intifada began. You may blame this on Sharon, but Sharon is no more warlike than Netanyahu, and Clinton forced Netanyahu to sit down and sign some pretty important peace accords. So we have been left in a closed loop of violence and retribution with no realistic exit for the past two years. Life in Israel, life in Palestine has become far worse and there is no end to the tunnel. Say what you will about Clinton, but he cracked the whip when it came to getting Middle East leaders to take their heads out of their collective asses and find a way to at least talk. While there has always been setbacks, there have always been initiatives and progress, usually catalyzed by the Americans. Two years has seen only setbacks.
  3. Enron. Much of the malaise of the economy is due to the criminal greed of the numerous accounting scandals of the past few years. What is needed is a visionary change – new rules and concepts by which business models cannot tweak the numbers to this degree. Add to this meaningful, justified punishment for the criminals who perpetrated this, and we could fix this problem for good. With the current administration’s close ties to industry, this problem will just be patched over and left to fester until it is out of memory enough for it to begin again.
  4. Homeland Security. This has been mentioned above, but I will just add one thing. Bush is in a unique position where he can create a bureacracy through government restructuring that will be hard if not impossible to dismantle. He will also be able to guarantee its legality either with the current right-leaning Supreme Court or the appointment of just one or two Justices. This could represent a serious, irreversible impingement on our Constitutional rights. But Bush has created an environment where it is unpatriotic and unAmerican to say anything about it.

These are things we can blame on Bush. Add to this minor points on the environment, toadying to business and the rich, and assorted other language foibles, and so far so bad.

154

Pretty important peace accords? That’s ridiculous. The only ‘peace accords’ that are important are those which result in peace, which obviously hasn’t happened. Peace in the Middle East won’t come when a scrap of paper is signed by enough people.
**

So even though most of the accounting shell-game took place during the previous administration, and even though this adminstration has enacted and enforced new regulations dealing with corporate accountability, somehow Bush gets blamed?

155

Yes he is to blame. Because he did a little as he could get away with. Because he gutted most of the reforms less than a year later. The corruption itself isn’t his fault, but the deliberate lack of any credible action to prevent it from happening again is his fault

Also, it’s quite dishonest of you to try and pin the corruption on the Clinton administration. It’s not the Clinton adminstration that was corrupt, it was the business community. If Clinton had known about the failure of the accounting industry, he would have done something. To the extent that he tried to reform accounting (not all the seriously) The republican congress prevented meaningful reform from happening.

Because did his best to avoid acting. And only did the minimum once public opinion turned serverly against his inaction. And then as soon as people stopped paying attention, he effectively undid all of the accounting reform.

Horseshit. Progress towards peace, lessening of tensions is valuable. For the man on the street in Israel or the west bank, Things are demonstrably worse since Bush took office. Peace accord or not, things were better when Clinton with making an effort than with Bush doing his best to pretend the whole thing doesn’t exist.

156

Ugh. Try again. in my 3rd paragraph above

Because BUSH did his best to avoid acting; And only did the minimum once public opinion turned serverly against his inaction. And then as soon as people stopped paying attention, he effectively undid all of the accounting reform.

157

Yep.

Brutus, what was Kenneth Lay, the top fund raiser for the Bush in question? The same GWB II who lied about his connections to “Kenny Boy” saying he was a legacy fundraiser from the time of Ann W. Richards? Is this the same Kenenth Lay who controlled the FERC prior to gouging and rigging California’s energy markets? This the same Enron that has been keeping the Bush administration in lockstep, informed at all times?

Yes, I think that “somehow”, Bush gets the blame, despite his best lies, forced measures, shell games, and half-hearted, underfunded, mislead steps to the contrary. Crazy world, huh?

158

Cite? He “effectively undid all of the accounting reform.”? You didn’t really expect that little comment to just float by, did you?

159

Red Herrings, Ahoy! Courtesy of The Ace of Swords! So Kenny Boy gave some money to Dubya. This translates to Enron’s scheming through out the nineties…how? And for God’s sake, don’t try to pin Gray Davis’ incredibly fucked energy ‘policy’ on anyone but Gray Davis. (OK, and his cronies.) Have the intellectual honesty to admit that the crisis was of his making, through his stupid decisions.

Sure is a crazy world, though. Crazy that somehow, Bush travelled back in time after getting those donations, and helped orchestrate the Enron debacle. Crazy that California’s (Kalifornia?) incredibly stupid energy and environmental policies translate, through some leftist transmogrification box, into Bush’s fault.

160

If you pay attention to this stuff, the evidence that the Bush Administration has undermined accounting reform is clear. I’m surprised that you deny it, is it ignorance? or do you just want to waste my time?

How To Undermine a Law

Pitt remains at SEC after his resignation because Bush doesn’t want an effective SEC

How To Succeed in Killing Reform While Looking Like a Reformer.

Not at all as you well know. Leave the strawmen alone, it only makes you look silly to beat them so.

You ignored his actual argument, which is this:

(see original post for the links).