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WORST PRESIDENT EVER (vote)
8/12/2005

Posted on 08/12/2005 3:25:54 PM PDT by hang 'em

Who is/was the WORST U.S. PRESIDENT EVER? Carter? Clinton? Make your choice and state your reasons.


TOPICS: Your Opinion/Questions
KEYWORDS: communists; cowards; fishattack; hillarytopsthelist; itsreagan; jimmycarter; killerbunny; morons; perverts; psychopaths; rapists; slickwilliehandsdown; sociopaths; totalitarians; traiters
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To: sono

Well Jimmy Carters grain embargo damn near bankrupted all of the farmers in the midwest and what did we gain? The countries we embargoed just buy from south america now.


541 posted on 08/23/2005 8:02:49 PM PDT by Newbomb Turk
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To: Newbomb Turk

Arguably, the real reason Ronald Reagan looks great is that he followed Jimmy Carter. Of course, there I go again ...


542 posted on 08/24/2005 5:52:24 AM PDT by sono
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To: hang 'em

Woodrow Wilson by far the worst. His administration led to a MASSIVE INCREASE IN FEDERAL POWER

Federal Reserve
INCOME TAX
League of Nations (now the UN)
FTC
Got us into WWI to bail out the NY bankers who had financed France and Great Britian
Direct election of Senators


543 posted on 08/24/2005 6:14:09 AM PDT by hubbubhubbub
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To: hang 'em
My top fice in order, worst first:

Johnson
Bubba
Jimmah
Roosevelt (Franklin, not Theo)
Kennedy

I wasn't thrilled with GHWB (even though I did vote for him), but he's certainly not in the top five.
544 posted on 08/24/2005 6:18:43 AM PDT by LIConFem (A fronte praecipitium, a tergo lupi.)
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To: hang 'em; lizol; Vorthax; Polak z Polski; Grzegorz 246; Lukasz; JoAnka; warsaw44; ...
Carter prepared the way for the peaceful dismantling of Soviet system. He actively supported dissident movements and he changed the Soviet image of America from a war-mongering capitalist power to a human rights based friendly nation.

Soviet establishment lost propaganda war because of Carter. Ronald Reagan had something to build on.

545 posted on 08/24/2005 6:23:54 AM PDT by A. Pole (" There is no other god but Free Market, and Adam Smith is his prophet ! ")
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To: Einigkeit_Recht_Freiheit
How are you justifying Lincoln? Unless, of course, you are an unreformed racist.

Lincoln did the greatest damage to the black and to the country. The slavery would be abolished without bloodshed within a short time as the institutions of slavery and serfdom were being removed in EVERY civilized country at that time.

But if done peacefully, gradually and by consensus it would lead to the enfranchisement of blacks and granting them the same land and resources for startup as white settlers were getting.

In addition the original sovereignty of the sates would be preserved and federal government would not become the main dominating center of American political life.

546 posted on 08/24/2005 6:30:49 AM PDT by A. Pole (" There is no other god but Free Market, and Adam Smith is his prophet ! ")
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To: A. Pole; All; Terriergal; beachn4fun; Owl558; Kitty Mittens; snugs; Old Sarge; ishabibble; ...



“There are things that can be seen and unseen. I in fore I in fore view this history of this; of two ex presidents of United States of America. Ex President “Carter” has predisposition United States of America to future terrorist attacks; Ex President “Clinton” allowed this to happen; et fore why?. Carter 1976-1980 = Carter has misunderstood danger of policy of appeasement and allowed Brezniev lunch attack on Afghanistan: in fore why: Carter failure to understand Khomeini intentions; to allow Shah to be deposed and situation in Iran that had has followed; in fore allowed Brezniev to view United States of America in weak and unable to fight position. Brezniev didn’t know Ronald Reagan will not allow him to continue; in fore situation did have changed dramatically under; may God bless his soul; former President Ronald Reagan. Ex President Clinton is a man for himself; it’s only him he cares: no one else; at fore it his ambition to be viewed as a man of great; in fore he is responsible for biggest lost of life of Americans in terrorist attack then any United State President was in history; this man God will judge in accordance of his guiltiness. His arrogance; his self-promotion; his absolute misunderstanding of what is happening; and fore what I had read about new evidence; truth ness under him he had know; et fore terrorist are planning attack; he do have ignored; a fore: his political motivation; in fore I do say this makes him a worst person; and highest treason of any President; Prime Minister etc.. Who do have held office to committed a crime against its own nation.”


thank you


547 posted on 08/24/2005 2:19:43 PM PDT by anonymoussierra (Nie b¹dŸ pochopny w duchu do gniewu, bo gniew przebywa w piersi g³upców)
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To: hang 'em

Clinton. I hear there were others sort of like him long ago before I was around though. Maybe in personal proclivities they were similar, but I have a hard time believing these other previous presidents would have sold US classified info to our FRIENDS much less our enemies.


548 posted on 08/24/2005 2:46:13 PM PDT by Terriergal (What is the meaning of life?? Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.)
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To: HangnJudge
Herbert Hoover, the architect of the great depression

He wasn't responsible for that. I thought the war in Europe/bombing of London was more responsible for that.

549 posted on 08/24/2005 2:47:32 PM PDT by Terriergal (What is the meaning of life?? Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever.)
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To: A. Pole
Lincoln did the greatest damage to the black and to the country. The slavery would be abolished without bloodshed within a short time as the institutions of slavery and serfdom were being removed in EVERY civilized country at that time.

A big reason why slavery was abolished in so many countries was the defeat of the Confederacy. It signalled that slavery was definitely on its way out. Spain and Brazil probably would have kept slavery longer if the Confederacy had been successful, and a powerful country run by the "slave power" would be a focus for efforts to spread the institution.

Would we have slavery in North America today without Lincoln? Probably not, it would have been abolished at some point. Though "at some point" might mean well into the 20th century. And even then, abolition might have been purely formal. Does that mean that abolition in 1865 rather than in 1880 or 1900 or 1920 justified the great losses of war? The thing is that you don't see those losses in advance. Had people known that war would take hundreds of thousands of lives, they might well have done things differently, but unionists acted according to the best knowledge that they had at the time.

But that line of arguing's a little insulting. Nazism didn't last in Poland. Nor did Communism. But ought the Poles simply have sat back, folded their hands, and done nothing confident that eventually history or economics would set everything to rights and vanquish the inefficient system? I don't argue that the two cases are exactly the same, but there are similarities. Nowadays, some people assume that left alone, conditions would inevitably have advanced by themselves to what we have now without anyone taking action, and that's just not true.

But if done peacefully, gradually and by consensus it would lead to the enfranchisement of blacks and granting them the same land and resources for startup as white settlers were getting.

That's wishful thinking. Confederates probably would have gotten rid of slavery at some point, but they wouldn't have set up Blacks as equals or given them a share of their own resources.

In addition the original sovereignty of the sates would be preserved and federal government would not become the main dominating center of American political life.

Again, that's wishful thinking. I'm not sure just how "sovereign" the states were in 1840 or 1850 or just how much was really changed in federal-state relations by the Civil War. But the idea that without the Civil War history would just have stopped at 1860 without further changes, looks naive. So does the notion that a real system of "sovereign states" would be better than a more federal system. Government could have grown much as it did over the last two and a half centuries. Or the country could have fallen apart completely into warring states.

"State sovereignty" looks a lot like a recipe for chaos, like Africa today or Poland under the liberum veto. I don't say Lincoln was our best President, just that the arguments of those who think him the worst don't hold up very well.

550 posted on 08/24/2005 4:08:09 PM PDT by x
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To: nicollo
Thanks for the response. It was interesting to hear about how the assassination attempt affected the election returns. You know the territory a lot better than I do. A lot of people play up the differences between Taft and Wilson to make Wilson because they think of Wilson as the beginning of modern liberalism or the end of traditional America. Maybe the underlying currents are too strong and deep to partitition off things so neatly. The tides carry the statesmen of different parties and factions along to places where they wouldn't otherwise have gone.

Teams and tribes probably have a lot to with it. If you were a liberal Democrat and a professor, Wilson was the first of your kind to be elected president. Maybe you even went to Washington or Paris with him. So you taught your students that this was the dawn of the new day, and they might believe you and go to Washington with FDR. And the same would be true of their students and Kennedy/Johnson. This generational sucession was a big part of American liberalism. It was it's founding myth, at least until Carter and Clinton dropped the ball.

If you were a conservative, you'd see Wilson as the beginning of a bad trend, and judge him accordingly. So Taft comes out as the anti-Wilson, and has to be built up. The alternative -- that there was nobody in American politics to oppose trends like the Income Tax Amendment or direct election of Senators or the Federal Reserve -- is too hard to take.

Personalities also must have been important. It's hard to think of Taft being quite as self-righteous, self-centered, arrogant, and domineering as Wilson was at the end of his presidency. So we form an image of Wilson's whole Presidency based on his second term. What if Wilson had been defeated in 1916? Perhaps he wouldn't have been so much the liberal hero or the conservative villain as he later became, and perhaps the ideological differences between the parties wouldn't have developed until later.

How important was Wilson's "presidential" style -- addressing Congress directly and giving it an ambitious legislative agenda? How much of a departure from earlier Presidents was it? Presidential activism certainly does make him look like the precursor of FDR and Johnson, and helped to establish the oppositions of American politics: Wilson Democrats vs. Taft Republicans rather than Cleveland Democrats vs. Roosevelt Republicans. Even TR looked less a proponent of presidential power than Wilson. How did a supporter of "Congressional Government" come around to such a position?

551 posted on 08/24/2005 4:13:01 PM PDT by x
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To: x
A big reason why slavery was abolished in so many countries was the defeat of the Confederacy. It signaled that slavery was definitely on its way out.

Not true my dear. The slavery in other countries was abolished BEFORE the Civil War. Even serfdom in Russia was abolished just as Civil War started (serfdom in Russia was the last remaining in Europe). And slavery was eradicated much earlier than serfdom!

No, bloody Civil War was very bad and the following abandonment of American blacks who did not get any help to stand on their feet not any better.

The main thing Lincoln achieved was the destruction of the sovereignty of states and creating powerful central government.

552 posted on 08/24/2005 7:07:00 PM PDT by A. Pole (" There is no other god but Free Market, and Adam Smith is his prophet ! ")
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To: x
Nazism didn't last in Poland. Nor did Communism. But ought the Poles simply have sat back, folded their hands, and done nothing confident that eventually history or economics would set everything to rights and vanquish the inefficient system?

Nobody attacked Nazism. It was Nazism which attacked others, overextended itself and was crushed by the Soviet Communists (with the help of USA and England). Communism was not overthrown by force, it was the "history or economics" which "set everything to rights and vanquish[ed] the inefficient system" from inside. We must live on parallel universes, Sir.

553 posted on 08/24/2005 7:11:43 PM PDT by A. Pole (" There is no other god but Free Market, and Adam Smith is his prophet ! ")
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To: hang 'em

Johnson


554 posted on 08/24/2005 7:15:35 PM PDT by chasio649
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To: hang 'em

CARTER: Because I'm fairly young, and my frame of reference is limited. But he pulled the Persian rug out from under the feet of the Shah, and you can trace all this fundamentalist Islamofacist crap right back to Khomeini.

CLINTON: Number 2, for obvious reasons.

GEORGE W BUSH: Quickly moving up the list. Five years in, and our borders are still porous. And, all evidence to the contrary, he continues to insist that "Islam is a religion of peace." (Did like the tax cuts, though. The economy is doing very well, in spite of what we read in the MSM.)

BEST? RONALD REAGAN (I know this wasn't asked, but I just had to throw it in.)


555 posted on 08/24/2005 7:17:49 PM PDT by kevao
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To: swampfox98
"Carter was stupid but Johnson was pure evil"

I've note the vast majority of the votes are for southern Democrats. All of these individuals were white males who grew up poor and in the south. Knowing how LBJ mismanaged the war in Viet Nam and got a lot of good men killed for nothing, it is possible it was all pay back for the *Civil War*?
556 posted on 08/24/2005 7:45:33 PM PDT by investigateworld ( God bless Poland for giving the world JP II & a Protestant bump for his Sainthood!)
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To: lunarbicep
Clinton traitorously sold our vital military secrets AND Long Beach Harbor to Red China for personal gain.

He should be hung.

557 posted on 08/24/2005 7:48:17 PM PDT by bannie (The government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.)
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To: x
Thanks for your thoughts. You are dead on with this:
What if Wilson had been defeated in 1916? Perhaps he wouldn't have been so much the liberal hero or the conservative villain as he later became, and perhaps the ideological differences between the parties wouldn't have developed until later.
Absolutely. His first term was nothing more than a Cleveland term or the other. WWI saved his political a$$, first in opposition to it, and then for involvement in it. What the WW liberals love is his 2nd term, absolutely. They'd have so little to go with otherwise -- especially this, your excellent characterization of his 2nd term:
self-righteous, self-centered, arrogant, and domineering...
That character was there during the 1st term, but, as with TR's 1st term, the political hedge moderated excess.

As for Wilson's "presidential style," I'm not sure the State of the Union address given at Congress really changed much. It was dramatic, however, and thereby cannot be ignored. (Btw, Taft holds that modern honor of a Prez addressing the Congress directly, for he presided over a joint House-Senate session in honor of the deceased VP Sherman in 1912.) Wilson was a very, very good speaker. I think it only added to his general political advance and agenda. The Dems were on a roll, and he rolled with it.

And, certainly, his "style" most definitely was an extension of the TR model. I'd add Taft and McKinley to it, for both of those used the presidency effetively. McKinley's management of the Span-Am war was superb and dramatic. Taft employed modern transport, media, and commmunication to great effect and the deliberate purpose of bringing the presidency to the American people. More Americans saw Taft during his presidency than had they seen of any other president.

Furthermore, Wilson was acting on Taft's lead for more Executive-Legislative coordination. Taft even proposed a constitutional amendment to give Cabinet officers permanent, non-voting seats in Congress. He wanted greater coordination and discussion, which was part of the period's efforts to remove politics from government.

Anyway, I agree entirely that the moderns of any period read themselves into history whenever and wherever they can. Absolutely, and that's why to me history is so fascinating. I know I'm guilty of it. Unlike others, however, I'll admit it...

558 posted on 08/24/2005 8:25:04 PM PDT by nicollo (All economics are politics.)
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To: Extremely Extreme Extremist

I'm surprised you don't have George W. Bush on that list.


559 posted on 08/25/2005 7:22:16 AM PDT by ohioWfan (If my people which are called by my name will humble themselves and pray......)
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To: kevao
OH, my! You DO have Bush on your list!

ROFLOL! Insanity, man! Insanity!!

560 posted on 08/25/2005 7:26:46 AM PDT by ohioWfan (If my people which are called by my name will humble themselves and pray......)
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