Posted on 06/27/2010 6:55:12 AM PDT by Publius772000
Reagan trounced Carter/Mondale in the 80/84 presidential elections. I was thinking more in those terms.
Bless you. I had not the energy for yet another foray into the NeoConfederate revisionism battles.
It’s a bit closer now... Obviously, in a subjective poll, you’ll get people’s opinions based on their experience and not necessarily based on their understanding of the big picture. I think both Washington and Reagan were great in their time periods. The difference was the Washington was absolutely vital to future generations. The jury is still out, historically speaking, on Reagan’s importance to future generations.
I think that’s a bit harsh, given the circumstances with which Lincoln was dealt. Many of the powers he assumed were done so because of insurrection. You can make a case that he played a game of duplicity in regards to his views on the Confederacy—one moment he treated them like a foreign combatant, the next like a band of rebels.
In winning, however, a lot of his transgressions were essentially erased by public opinion in the North, where the history was written. Had Lincoln failed and the war effort collapsed, as it nearly did on several occasions in the North, he would necessarily be viewed differently.
To call Lincoln a Marxist is a bit anachronistic, however, as Marx’s signature work Das Kapital wasn’t published until 1876, though his ideas were circulating throughout Europe.
Agreed. And we need another leader of Washington’s character, judgement and determination now.
Awkward that TJ personally held a couple hundred people in fetters. preventing them from pursuing their private interests. With some of them very likely his own children.
Actually, no. While I think the CSA was one of the worst causes in history for which to fight, the issues you list were not among the reasons.
I don't believe JD ever got a suspension of HC throughout the South. Too much resistance from CSA congressmen and governors. In fact, GA and NC governors, among others, quite openly and successfully defied him.
For the CSA to survive, it had to at minimum recognize that survival trumped civil rights of (white) men. It was unwilling to do so. It fell, killed as some said at the time, by a theory that states and civil rights trumped all.
There was plenty of oppression of opposing views in the Civil War south, but most of it was driven by popular or state action, not CSA.
To answer the poll question, I’d break it down by centuries:
18th - Washington, for his leadership in establishing an utterly new system of government.
19th - Lincoln, for successfully defending that system of government against its greatest challenge (to date).
20th - Reagan, for defeating the greatest foreign challenge against that system of government.
Ok, clearly Thomas Jefferson is just part of "white" history and unworthy of any discussion. Please educate me on the greatest President, or does that require that you HAVE an opinion, and no just another yapping FR little dog.
State-ist crap. The North was on the offense. Nobody characterizes the South as on the offensive. Nice try. Does anyone doubt the good ole US of A could of survived/thrived without 11 stars in the blue field. No one doubts that. You main lined the kool aid. Lincoln was a cold hearted butcher that jumped on the abolitionist bandwagon in mid war when he was running out of Irish immigrants to throw into his useless war slaugther machine. Around 1862, his cleaver need fresh meat so he got "religion" and armed the black man. Nice guy.
Lincoln rots in hell.
TJ quite obviously only believed in unfettered freedom for some, despite his amazing rhetoric about "all men are created equal."
You are perfectly free to believe TJ our greatest president despite his blatant hypocrisy, but others have the right to believe this hypocrisy seriously damages his status as a great man.
Washington also held slaves, but spent the last decade or so of his life putting his affairs in order, with great effort, so they could all be freed on his death.
TJ chose instead to lead a life of great luxury and died deeply in debt, forcing his creditors to sell his slaves to reimburse themselves, probably separating families in the process.
For this reason, among many others, I consider Washington a much greater President, and man, than Jefferson.
And there were occasions where Jeff himself did call for and approve of large scale arrests of the suspected such as the East Tennessee bridge burning case. Reb lovers cry about a suspected bridge burner being detained in Maryland by the federals, but ignore the hanging of suspected bridge burners in Tennessee by the Confederates. In Jeff Davis's slavery empire, dissent was often fatal.
You are also quite correct. There were numerous incidents involving mobs and vigilantes in the South attacking Unionists or suspected Unionists, with little of the same virulence occurring in the North, outside of the border war between MO and KS.
I didn’t mean to imply that southerners always respected the rights of dissenters, simply that Jeff Davis himself didn’t do much trampling on rights. Of white people, that is. The CSA was the embodiment of trampling on rights of black people.
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George Washington was the greatest president, without a doubt.
George Washington
The father of our country
A Man of Character, a man of God and possibly the greatest American of them all.
Washington’s greatness is not just that he led the Revolutionary Army to victory in an apparently hopeless seven-year war against the mightiest military power in the world. It’s not just that he presided over the convention that wrote our enduring Constitution which is the fountainhead of our freedom. It’s not just that he was uniquely unanimously elected to two terms as our first President. It’s not just that he made our young republic a reality when he declined a third term as President and transferred the reins of power to our second President.
Washington’s greatness was based on his leadership and character, so acknowledged by the many other great men of his time. Washington is the hero we need today because he is an extraordinary example of a President whose character was above reproach and whom adulation did not corrupt. In Daniel Webster’s words: “America has furnished to the world the character of Washington, and if our American institutions had done nothing else, that alone would have entitled them to the respect of mankind.”
When sensational journalists of his and succeeding generations scraped the countryside for revelations, they did not find even one tale of a tryst behind a haystack or a plundering escapade with the boys. Item-by-item scrutiny of his cash-book and ledger, which were the disclosure records of his generation, do not reveal even one entry that hints of a financial or moral impropriety. His spotless reputation has stood the test of time.
No investigative reporter ever discovered any misdeeds of the kinds that tarnished the reputations of later Presidents. Washington did not have any secret life of womanizing, cheating, building a personal fortune through control of government television licenses, talking in profanities, lying to his supporters as well as his enemies, keeping close friendships with traitors or men of deviant behavior, betraying his campaign promises, making secret deals with foreign countries, accepting campaign donations that smelled of bribery, conspiring to involve our country in war, or stuffing the ballot box to win elections.
Washington never would have accepted the popular line that the personal lives of public officials are none of the public’s business. With Washington, what you saw was what you got; the public man and the private man were one and the same. Representative Richard Henry Lee’s eulogy correctly stated: “The purity of his private character gave effulgence to his public virtues.”
Washington wanted our nation to be bound by the same rules of honor and honesty that should bind individuals. In his Farewell Address he reminded us: “I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs that honesty is always the best policy.”
The famous story about not telling a lie about chopping down the cherry tree has been demoted in modern times to apocryphal status, but we have the record that, as a schoolboy, Washington wrote in his copybook, “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire — conscience.”
With almost no formal education, Washington educated himself by reading. He was not an eloquent speaker, having no special flair with words or his generation’s equivalent of the 20th century sound-bite. Nevertheless, all the college-educated Founding Fathers acknowledged him as their leader.
Washington earned the loyalty of the men who served with him not from stirring their emotions but because of his reliable integrity, incorruptible judgment, and persevering zeal. He certainly didn’t retain their enthusiasm for the American cause because of a succession of military victories — he lost more battles than he won. His leadership and commanding presence enabled him to lead his ragged, ill-clothed, underpaid troops through defeats and retreats toward an improbable victory.
Washington’s total dedication to the duty assigned to him of winning our War of Independence gave him personal peace of mind. His will and self-discipline were his rod and staff; he could persevere in the war against England because he was not at war with himself.
Washington’s code of living was built on the principles of conduct he regarded as the code of gentlemen, laboriously handwritten as a teenager in his 110 Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior. The gentleman’s code was not founded on love and compassion, but on honesty, duty, truth, respect for others, courtesy, and justice, which demanded that he do his utmost and in return receive what he had earned. What he was, he made himself by will, effort, self-discipline, ambition, and perseverance.
There is a sculpture of Washington on horseback at the battle of Monmouth in 1778. It captures a moment during the Revolution when his leadership was put to its severest test. Finding his advance troops in full retreat because of a traitorous officer, Washington galloped through his frightened regiments and saved the day by turning them around and leading them forward to attack the British.
Late in life, Washington himself told an old friend his own explanation of his remarkable success in accomplishing what seemed impossible in the American Revolution. He said he “always had walked on a straight line.” As a youth, he acquired a positive love of the right, and he developed an iron will to do always what is right and honorable.
Today, when there seem to be so few heroes, George Washington is a man for all seasons. He had the strength he needed for the long and dangerous journeys of his incredible life because he always walked that “straight line.”
http://www.eagleforum.org/psr/2002/may02/psrmay02.shtml
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