Posted on 02/21/2018 9:44:30 PM PST by Kaslin
When "presidential politics experts" ranked all presidents, past and current, the headlines typically focused on Trump’s position at the bottom of the list. After one year—a year with a booming economy, increased business and consumer confidence, and significant gains on the foreign policy front—they have concluded that Trump is the worst president of all time. There’s no chance of any partisan bias there, right?
Trump's record is certainly up for debate, but even famed liberal pollster Nate Silver wrote off the rankings as partisan garbage in a tweet. "It speaks poorly to the field of presidential scholarship that political scientists have Trump ranked as the worst president of all time **after only one year on the job**, below presidents who e.g. helped blunder us into the Civil War & Great Depression." Trump has, so far, presided over the most optimistic year for Americans in the last decade. His tax cuts were initially highly unpopular, but those poll numbers shifted as soon as the paychecks came. His foreign policy victories are numerous, including the defeat of ISIS, the end of the era of appeasement of North Korea, and the hardening of diplomatic relations with Iran after its repeated abuses of former President Barack Obama’s good will. His only crimes were being rude on Twitter and defeating Hillary Clinton.
But, what is more disturbing than their confident lambasting of Trump after only one year is their placement of Barack Obama after eight long years of a miserable, divided America filled with stagnation, corruption, and terrorist attacks. They placed him tenth on the list. This ranking is not isolated either. A 2017 C-SPAN survey of presidential historians put Obama in 12th place. The desire to inflate Obama’s historical standing is widespread.
Were these experts blissfully unaware of Obama's failings and scandals? Perhaps some of these so-called scholars might have been ignorant—the media did its best to\ conceal the dirty details of Obama’s fatally unethical and ruthlessly unconstitutional administration—but, that's no excuse. An expert is supposed to be an authority on a particular subject, and not at the mercy of biased media reporting or their own political leanings. They’re supposed to do research, read from primary sources on all sides of any argument, and come to objective conclusions.
But, to demonstrate the absurdity of these rankings, let's discuss some of the things that apparently these scholars believe gives a president top-ten status:
Obama was also plagued by more than two dozen scandals including: Fast and Furious, Benghazi, the IRS scandal, the VA scandal, Solyndra, the OPM hacking scandal, the GSA scandal, the Iran Ransom scandal, Uranium One, Project Cassandra, the FISA abuse scandal currently being unraveled… just to name a few. Sure, many in the media claim Obama was “scandal-free”, but any presidential scholar worth their salt can’t write off every single scandal as inconsequential.
Considering these facts, how can any presidential expert believe Obama is a top ten president? Did these experts forget all about these, or conveniently ignore them in order to perpetuate the narrative that America’s first black president was also one of the nation’s best—standing alongside Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Reagan and Truman? Are they so easily influenced by the media and popular culture that they’ve forgotten how to be objective analysts of history?
One final note: a truly honest and objective historian will always tell you that a real assessment of any leader cannot be made for decades after he leaves office because distance grants them a more balanced perspective and allows them to see the impacts of his legacy on future events. An objective assessment of Obama’s presidency might be decades away, but the foundation is being laid down now to inflate his successes and cover up his failures and scandals. There’s a saying that “history is written by victors,” and, in the past, that may have been true. But, today, history is written by the media, pop culture, and academia—and all three are conspiring to write a history in a true Orwellian fashion.
None of the other Presidents won the Nobel Prize without having to accomplish anything. Not one of them.
That makes THIS guy Numuero Uno:
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Rencency bias. And he’s an idiot.
0bongo is not a top 44 president.
The 0bomb is arguably at number 45 of 45.
He’s not even in the top 10 of the bottom 11.
Seriously.
Did you say bottom? Because that's the imagery I conjure up whenever I think about this traitorous carbuncle on the bottom of the U.S., dripping off of it just like the other product. There is no category of president adequate to describe the lowest of the low fecal product he is.
He’s the worst, and it isn’t close. Of all the people who have ever held the office he’s the only one who actively hated the country.
And let’s not forget about the asterisk that may belong next to his ranking, whatever number it is!
Polls only quantify ignorance. By any rational metric, Zero was abysmal as a president, but tops as a traitor/mole.
Agreed! A person who hates our country by definition is not a top President.
JoMa
More like the bottom of the list.
Odumbo barely earned a participation award.
Whether or not you pretend that Barack Hussein counts as a president, he is not among the top 40 to occupy our White House. Where he ranks in that bottom few is open to debate, but I consider the traitorous usurper to be well below James Buchanan. At least with the first civil war we mostly recovered within a hundred years; I’m not optimistic that we can do as well with the legacy left by the communist tyrant.
I always considered him to be number 2.
If we’re talking ranking, though, he sure lifted Jimmy Carter’s spirits.
Obama is black. That’s all “experts” need to know.
Even if you’re a dem who liked Obama I don’t see how you can give him such a high ranking.
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