And The Worst President Ever Award goes to...

This is only the beginning. His incompetence is catching up with him. So are his lies.

Bob

Quite the contrary, people remember Bush quite well. After all, he placed second in this poll. As for killing thousands of civilians, perhaps you prefer Obama's method of killing them a few at a time?

www.cnn.com/2014/05/20/politics/drone-strike-memo-release/index.html

Bob

That is an unsupported expression of your feelings, not evidence. Do you have any facts to back that up?


Everyone has faults. Are you claiming that their faults are greater than those of Bush and Obama? If so, please supply supporting evidence.

The fact is that Obama:

1) increased the U.S. debt more than any other president, including Bush

2) violated the Constitution (which he had sworn to uphold) more than any other president

3) is probably the worst manager to ever sit in the oval office.

 The fact is that, while he likes the idea of being president, he doesn't like the job itself. He has surrounded himself with "yes men" because he cannot stand to talk with anyone who disagrees with him. A wealthy client of mine is an Obama supporter. She even gave a fundraiser for him. she told me that she had lunch with a high official in the Democratic party and that he told her just sits in the corner at cabinet meetings with his arms folded and says nothing. Obama doesn't like the work of being president.

Say what you will about Clinton, but he was still meeting with Newt Gingrich and finding common ground with him to help govern the country while Gingrich was trying to have Clinton impeached! Obama hardly ever meets with members of his own party.

Bob

How about this?

Ruinous wars started under Bush Jr: 2
Ruinous wars started under Obama: 0

Please tell me how anything Obama did was worse than Bush Jr's war on Iraq or the invasion of Afghanistan.


Reagan certainly did. I don't think Obama can brag to have initiated anything approaching Reaganomics or the Star Wars program, both of which proved ruinous to US governmental finances.

And that's before we go into the actively immoral and unethical portions of Reagan's presidency, like the Iran Contra Affair.


Really, there are only two ways I can explain Reagan's enduring popularity in the US.

1. US Republican propaganda really is that powerful, or
2. The US public really loves presidents who financially ruin their country for dubious political gains


Not true:




More than Bush Jr?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_act


What criteria you are using to judge the management quality of a US president?

For years you've been talking about how the War in Iraq was illegal and incompatible with libertarian principles. Then when Obama finally ceased direct military involvement in Iraq, you complain that the occupation should have continued? So now suddenly when Obama is in office, the military occupation, which you yourself have denounced at more than one occasion here, suddenly isn't as bad as Obama's decision to pull out?

You've become the caricature of a US right-wing pundit, Bob.

Funny, I seem to remember the 1980's as a time of prosperity and a booming economy.

Of course you did. Consumer debt was booming, and was not yet at unsustainable levels. But today's economic misery in the US is the direct effect of Reaganomics - the idea that you can have your cake (large government spending projects) and eat it (few taxes).

Didn't you claim you were in favor of "fiscal responsibility" once? Or at least for "small government"?

Was Reagan's charming smile so hypnotic that you forgot all that in the 1980s?


I don't know, supplying your own enemy with illegal weapons so you can finance an organization of literal mass murderers strikes me as somewhat more extreme than most.

Then again, I never understood the American public's uncritical adoration for Reagan in the first place.



You are right, unsustainable deficit spending also seems to be popular, especially among people who claim to be "small government".

Yes.



Right. The war killed thousands of innocent people. But by withdrawing too quickly, Iraq fell into a civil war where thousands more are being killed. A slower withdrawal would have prevented that.



As bad as Obama's decision to SUDDENLY pull out. The U.S. government is not only responsible for the thousands of deaths in the original unjust war. They are now also responsible for all of the deaths in the present civil war. I am all for the U.S. troops getting out of Iraq. Perhaps if they had done so more slowly, the thousands now being killed might have been saved.

I am certainly not a supporter of the Iraq invasion and I am in favor of ending all U.S. military involvement. But there is a right way and a wrong way to withdraw. Obama went about it the wrong way.



I am pleased to see that you agree with me that large government spending and low taxes will lead to disaster.

Yes. That was one of the bad things Regan did. Regan was certainly no libertarian. But his tax cuts did stimulate the economy. All Obama did was to bail out General Motors and the large banks.

Actually, Regan wasn't the first big spender. That title goes to Lyndon Johnson was the first one to say that we could have both "guns and butter", the Vietnam War and increased social spending with the "War on Poverty." Both wars were lost.



Not at all. I'm not a Reagan fan and never was. Regan was no small government libertarian in spite of his rhetoric.  One thing you missed here: Regan was directly responsible for the U.S. wars in the Middle East. Eisenhower kept the U.S. military in check with low budgets. Ike figured correctly that as long as we had a nuclear deterrent, we didn't need a large conventional military force. Regan massively built up conventional forces for no good reason. Conventional forces were not needed to counter the Soviet threat. The direct result was that both Bushes now had a big army to play with. And they used that army to start unnecessary wars.





Before that, the USA was committing its own mass murders. Perhaps you missed my earlier post. Here it is again:

"From 1898 to 1931, Smedley Darlington Butler was a member of the U.S. Marine Corps. By the time he retired he had achieved what was then the corps's highest rank, major general, and by the time he died in 1940, at 58, he had more decorations, including two medals of honor, than any other Marine. During his years in the corps he was sent to the Philippines (at the time of the uprising against the American occupation), China, France (during World War I), Mexico, Central America, and Haiti.

In light of this record Butler presumably shocked a good many people when in 1935 — as a second world war was looming — he wrote in the magazine Common Sense:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism [corporatism]. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

That same year he published a short book with the now-famous title War Is a Racket, for which he is best known today. Butler opened the book with these words:

War is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

He followed this by noting: "For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out."

Butler went on to describe who bears the costs of war — the men who die or return home with wrecked lives, and the taxpayers — and who profits — the companies that sell goods and services to the military. (The term military-industrial complex would not gain prominence until 1961, when Dwight Eisenhower used it in his presidential farewell address. See Nick Turse's book The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives.)

reason.com/archives/2014/06/29/wars-still-a-racket

Read more: unfacts.freeforums.net/thread/1162/war-racket#ixzz37035EpsC




I never adored Regan at all. The only good thing he did was to lower taxes.


But I never supported Regan's deficit spending, or that of any other president. The Republican Party is the Hypocrite Party. They talk about small government, but the record shows they have done more deficit spending than the Democrats! That may change now, however, with the deficits that Obama is piling up.

Deficit spending is popular among both major political parties because it enables them to pay off their supporters and shift the eventual disaster to future generations. That disaster, however, is closer than they think.

Once again, I am gratified to see you agree with me about the results of unsustainable deficit spending.

Bob

Would it have made a difference if they had stayed a few months more? A few years?

You are missing that Iraq was already in a state of civil war during the US occupation. At no point did the US military, or the Iraqi central government, manage to end hostilities between Sunnites, Shiites and Kurds, and I have so far not found evidence that an extended schedule for withdrawal would have improved things to the point of stability.

Polls are ridiculous...who did they poll? How many did they poll? So many reasons they're skewed.
And I see they voted Reagan as the favourite? Good lord....lol

How is that possible when hostilities started when the occupation was still ongoing?

Bob, ISIS didn't even exist until early 2014, which is two and a half years after the US left Iraq.
Your timeline is out of whack.

And violent confrontations between Shiites and Sunnites never completely stopped, they just became increasingly underreported by US mainstream media. This is what 2011 looked like in Iraq, right before the US withdrew:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_in_Iraq