Posted on 02/17/2008 10:45:07 PM PST by Dawnsblood
Carter - Had no backbone, except when he decided to display his wrath for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by taking out his vengeance on our Olympic athletes by withdrawing our team from the Olympic games held in Moscow.
Polk - Our army had totally & utterly defeated the Mexican army and occupied Mexico City. All of Mexico was ours for the taking, and if it had been annexed into the USA the corruption that had plagued Mexico since Spanish occupation would have been gone, and we wouldn’t be dealing with a great many problems today due to that ever-thriving corruption.
Nixon - Republican in name, and a BIG government stalwart. The Nixon Administration was the birthing place in time that gave us huge deficits, additional government agencies, and dishevel in the Middle Class.
first of all, Clinton was mostly a do-nothing president,
for non-presidential reasons, limited by Congress and
personal issues.
................................
bad Presidents, IMO
LBJ
Carter
(the following are before my time)
FDR, bungled war effort and aftermath
Buchanan (not sure why, but bad)
Harding
As bad as Carter and Clinton were, they have to compete with some really disasterous presidents.
I know that my pick of Lincoln flies against popular opinon of "he saved the union" and "he freed the slaves" but both of those he did at such terrible cost -- and the consequences of not doing those may not have been nearly as bad as made out to be.
Nixon did a lot of things, it is just they were all liberal. He started the modern enviornmental movement, opened relations with china, ended the vietnam war etc.
What about Deetente, SALT I, affirmative action, ending the gold standard, a nuclear India and Pakistan, a failed strategy in Vietnam, expanding the welfare state, and damaging the American people’s respect for the Presidency? Watergate was also a leading cause of the Church and Pike Committees that permanently weakened US intelligence.
See my last post. I added a few more to the list.
These are three appropriate choices. Though I think the author might have done better to choose a “worst” president from each of these three epochs: pre-Civil War, Civil War-World War I(I), and post World War I(I).
Pre-Civil War, Buchanan is a good choice.
From 1865 to WWI, one could argue for Andrew Johnson...(though in reality, BOTH of these guys are also dimmed by Lincoln.)
Carter was an absolutely awful President. I think that is why he is so bitter today.
The House impeached him, the Senate tried him.
And if my recollection is correct, even though he was elected back into the Senate, didn't he die before he could take office?
Your ridiculous. Carter was clearly the worst. Go back to taking hits on your bong. Clinton at least had a very strong economy and stock market.
Jimmy Carter wrecked the economy, shut down the nuclear industry, wrecked the national intelligence establishment, nearly wrecked the military and sold out many of our allies. During Carters time the frontiers of tyranny advanced and freedom wained around the world. I’ve got to give the number one slot to Carter.
2 and 3 are a toss up. Could be Buchanan, Polk, Grant, Lyndon Johnson or Nixon.
There could also be a category of “Worse Screw-up By A President” for which the nominees are... About everyone. Any number of otherwise non-terrible presidents have made grievous mistakes - Captain Truman gutting the military while Stalin built his up, Wilson and the suspension of rights during WWI and the Versailles treaty afterward, Harding, who reversed Wilson’s abuses but was caught up in Teapot Dome, etc., etc., etc.
#1A—F.D. Roosevelt, the camel’s nose under the tent of socialist expansion in America. If not for WWII, more people would find him the most reprehensible of all the presidents no matter what the other’s flaws. If not for him, bottom feeders like the peanut farmer, the rapist, and EL BJ would probably have not achieved the notoriety they did.
LBJ made third on this list. Only reason Clinton isn't up there is we have not yet fully reaped all the disasters he sowed as President. Remember, Clinton is the guy who sold US Missile technology to the Chinese Commies.
Civil War (War of Northern Aggression, OK?)
aka, The Late Unpleasantness...
[I love that one...]
1. Clintoon
2. Carter
3. Lincoln
He was pretty bad, as was his successor Calvin Coolidge.
I won't claim to be an expert on Calvin Coolidge. But I will note that he was the favorite president of Ronald Wilson Reagan.And that's good enough for me to assume that he couldn't possibly be in the Carter/Clinton/LBJ class. Say nothing of Herbert Hoover and FDR . . .
Judge FDR on his first two terms like all the rest, and he's the bum who kept the Great Depression going throughout the 1930s, and didn't prevent Hitler from dominating Europe by the end of his second term (as Winston Churchill would have done in his shoes - at whatever cost).
I’ve been saying for some time that Carter is the worst foreign policy President of my lifetime, and that LBJ is the worst domestic policy President of my lifetime. Not that they both didn’t have their moments in the opposite areas, but those were the ones those two really made their negative marks in.
I know that my pick of Lincoln flies against popular opinon of "he saved the union" and "he freed the slaves" but both of those he did at such terrible cost -- and the consequences of not doing those may not have been nearly as bad as made out to be.
The Civil War certainly was ghastly, beyond peradventure. The trouble was that, as in many wars, the people on both sides grossly underestimated the difficulty of winning and therefore overplayed their hands in the runup to it.The culture of the South was sufficiently different from that of the North that a clash might have been unavoidable, and if you look at the economic trends you would conclude that the South would have won any war of secession ten years earlier - and would have ever more badly overmatched if the war had been delayed still further. Neither side knew what they were getting into. As it was it was the first modern war; if it happened ten years later how ghastly might it not have been?
As to slavery, if you look at the big picture Christianity coexisted with slavery from the time of St. Paul to the time of the Civil War. At that point the American South was anachronistic in being both devoutly Christian and committed to a slave economy. Since then all Christians have opposed slavery, and (due to the domination of two-thirds of the earth's population by the British Empire) Christianity (and no other religious/ethical institution) reduced slavery to its present low estate.
Bill Clinton and the Democrats claim welfare reform as their achievement even after he vetoed the Republican bill twice. Only when Clinton knew Congress had the votes to override his third veto, did he finally sign it.
It started with Carter, and the hostages in Tehran. Plus Carter gave away the Panama Canal, to as it turns out — the Chinese.
I can't see anyone being worse than Carter. Even Obama.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.