Worst US President?

[HaVIC5]

Recently, I've heard many people claim that the current US president, George W Bush, is the worst president that us Americans have ever had. While I only see a very few, scattered successes of his presidency, and consider him extremely incompetant, I can think of plenty of others who have caused this country a great deal more harm. What about you? Would any of you say he's the "worst" president (interpret "worst" as you please)? Who else would be deserving of that title?

[ringworm]

there are PLENTY of others far worse than Bush

he's bad, but not close to the worst

[Chrysostom]

Surely Nixon is the worst?

[Chrizzle fo' Shizzle]

Yeah I'm pretty sure the answer is Nixon, though I would love to say FDR

[Africa]

Andrew Johnson.

Btw there is absolutely no way to tell if George Bush is the worst, it takes a long time to gain perspective.

[coheneran]

All of them.

[Der Übermensch]

Reagan or Grant.

[Africa]

All of them.

Leave America now.

[coheneran]

Fine. I don't pay taxes anyway.

[Africa]

You bastard!

[Der Übermensch]

Nixon is the worst
Nixon was a crook and horribly unethical, but he wasn't bad per sé... Look at Clinton, lack of a moral core doesn't mean you can't be a good president.

[ringworm]

I didnt know he was? :)

[Africa]

Andrew Johnson, for being completely out of tune with the nation, mishandling reconstruction, pardoning confederates, perpetuating racism and injustice to African-Americans, among other things.

[griftadan]

All of them.

ftw

washington was cool though.

to name a few bad ones, the lincoln/johnson tag team weren't to great for starting the long trail to the end of federalism, hoover/FDR for ****ing us during the great depression and continueing to kill federalism, LBJ for all of his bullshit, and bush for aiding in screwing us over in innumerable ways.

[italic zero]

Nixon was a bad person, not a bad president. The only really bad presidential thing he did that I can think of is bombing Cambodia and Laos.

[coheneran]

ftw

washington was cool though.

to name a few bad ones, the lincoln/johnson tag team weren't to great for starting the long trail to the end of federalism, hoover/FDR for ****ing us during the great depression and continueing to kill federalism, LBJ for all of his bullshit, and bush for aiding in screwing us over in innumerable ways.

Didn't FDR's New Deal help raise America out of the Depression (along with WWII arms industry)?

[griftadan]

the economy rose despite the new deal, and the arms production was basically a band aid which ended as soon as the war did.

[Apollyon]

#31 - Herbert Hoover

As my high school history teacher used to say, "Hoover sucks."

[EinzingerIsGod]

Harding was pretty useless but I'll go with William Henry Harrison simply because he didn't do anything.

[Africa]

the economy rose despite the new deal, and the arms production was basically a band aid which ended as soon as the war did.

Yes yes let's completely ignore the social implications of FDR's presidency. Historians and scholars on average rank FDR #2, Lincoln #1.

[italic zero]

ftw

washington was cool though.

to name a few bad ones, the lincoln/johnson tag team weren't to great for starting the long trail to the end of federalism, hoover/FDR for ****ing us during the great depression and continueing to kill federalism, LBJ for all of his bullpoop, and bush for aiding in screwing us over in innumerable ways.
why do you say federalism when you mean the opposite?

[griftadan]

Yes yes let's completely ignore the social implications of FDR's presidency. Historians and scholars on average rank FDR #2, Lincoln #1.

hey and i'd like to discuss that with them

why do you say federalism when you mean the opposite?

what?

[DekWannaBFlea]

Bush is pretty bad.......I'd put him in the top 10.

Johnson, Pierce, Buchanan, Harding and Nixon are the top five for me.

[Africa]

hey and i'd like to discuss that with them


... and get owned.

[Syncratic]

James Buchanan.

He could've prevented the Civil War, that bastard.

No wonder he's the only president to hail from Pennsylvania.

[Danish]

Ronald Reagan.

[Mr. Ron]

Then only president I liked was Washington, he had the right idea and was a total badass.

[HaVIC5]

I'm going to say one that isn't normally thought of - Truman. The Cold War and all of the conflicts arising from it can essentially be blamed on him.

[CardCheat]

That Jackson fellow was a douche to my Native American counterparts, but he had a lot of positive effects that outway that.

I would have to say that Bush is one of the worst, I just find it hard criticizing the decisions made by presidents back in the day. They might have made sense to me at the time.

[Hababi]

Johnson, Pierce, Buchanan, Harding and Nixon are the top five for me.


That's a pretty good list--just sub Nixon with Grant :p

I can't imagine Bush not being in the bottom 10. But no one will ever reach the complete and utter incompetence of James Buchanan.

[John Paul Harrison]

That Jackson fellow was a douche to my Native American counterparts, but he had a lot of positive effects that outway that.


Jackson deserves a bit less credit than he gets.

[italic zero]

hey and i'd like to discuss that with them



what?
I think that you mean federalism as the power of the federation as a whole, that is, a conglomeration of states, as opposed to the authority of the federal government, but historically the word has been used to describe supporters of a strong federal government.

[DekWannaBFlea]

That's a pretty good list--just sub Nixon with Grant :p

I can't imagine Bush not being in the bottom 10. But no one will ever reach the complete and utter incompetence of James Buchanan.


I don't know man Nixon was pretty bad....the only thing I can think of that he did for this country is the opening up of U.S. to China.


And i think the impact of Bush has only hit the bare surface of bad things to come. I mean come on.....the debt, the middle east......those have derailed our country drastically.

[Iskandar]

On an ideological basis, Reagan.

[italic zero]

I don't know man Nixon was pretty bad....the only thing I can think of that he did for this country is the opening up of U.S. to the U.S.


And i think the impact of Bush has only hit the bare surface of bad things to come. I mean come on.....the debt, the middle east......those have derailed our country drastically.
I assume you mean china. here's some things he did you might like

Domestic policies
Although often criticized (or applauded) as a conservative by his contemporaries, Nixon's domestic policies often appear centrist, or even liberal, to latter-day observers. As President, Nixon imposed wage and price controls, indexed Social Security for inflation, and created Supplemental Security Income (SSI). The number of pages added to the Federal Register each year doubled under Nixon. He eradicated the last remnants of the gold standard. Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), promoted the Legacy of parks program and implemented the Philadelphia Plan, the first significant federal affirmative action program, and dramatically improved salaries for U.S. federal employees worldwide. As a party leader, Nixon helped build the Republican Party (GOP), but he ran his 1972 campaign separately from the party, which perhaps helped the GOP escape some of the damage from Watergate. The Nixon White House was the first to organize a daily press event and daily message for the media, a practice that all subsequent staffs have performed.
Nixon is credited with creating the modern day Imperial Presidency, in which the presidency retains a high level of control over government policy and decisions. In the early 1970s, Nixon impounded billions of dollars in federal spending and expanded the power of the Office of Management and Budget. These encroachments on the power of Congress led to the passage of the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
On January 2, 1974, Nixon signed a bill that lowered the maximum U.S. speed limit to 55 miles per hour (90 km/h) in order to conserve gasoline during the 1973 energy crisis. This law remained in effect until 1995, though states were allowed to raise the limit to 65 miles per hour in rural areas around 1987.
Committed to wide-ranging bureaucratic reforms, in a last-minute bid to save his presidency, Nixon signed a significant reform of the federal budgeting process and granted wide authority to Congress in shaping the final budget.

School integration
The Nixon years saw the first large-scale integration of public schools in the South, after the region had stalled in compliance with the 1954 Supreme Court's Brown ruling. Strategically Nixon sought a middle way between the segregationist George C. Wallace and liberal Democrats, whose support of integration was alienating white ethnics. Nixon concentrated on the principle that the law must be color-blind. "I am convinced that while legal segregation is totally wrong, forced integration of housing or education is just as wrong."[15] Though Nixon thought of appealing to southern whites by slowing school desegregation, he decided to enforce the law after the Supreme Court, in Alexander v. Holmes County (1969), prohibited further delays. Nixon's Cabinet committee on school desegregation, under the leadership of Labor Secretary George P. Schultz, quietly set up local biracial committees to assure smooth compliance without violence or political grandstanding. By fall of 1970, two million southern black children enrolled in newly created unitary fully integrated school districts. "In this sense, Nixon was the greatest school desegregator in American history," historian Dean Kotlowski concluded.[16] In the North, meanwhile, the Brown decision did not apply directly, but in city after city federal judges started ordering busing programs to integrate schools, a policy Nixon opposed.

Nixon and the U.S. space program
On July 20, 1969, Nixon addressed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin live via radio during their historic moonwalk. Nixon also made the world's longest distance phone call to Neil Armstrong on the moon. (All U.S. moon landings, and the attempted moon landing of Apollo 13, took place during Nixon's first term.) On January 5, 1972, Nixon approved the development of the Space Shuttle program, a decision that profoundly influenced U.S. efforts to explore and develop space for several decades thereafter.

[HaVIC5]

That's a pretty good list--just sub Nixon with Grant :p

I can't imagine Bush not being in the bottom 10. But no one will ever reach the complete and utter incompetence of James Buchanan.
Yeah, Lincoln was sandwiched in between some serious douchebags. But that said, I don't know if I could call them the worst.

I guess worst can mean one of two things, 1) most incompetant and 2) ideologically eskewed. When I think worst, and this is just me, I tend to think number two. Nixon was competant, but ethically corrupt. Polk was deft at running the county, but had goals that were expansionist and to some extent imperial.

Truman, in my opinion, was especially bad, and not just because his approval rating when he left office was lower than any approval rating Bush has ever had. Truman's foreign policy boiled down to an aggressive crusade against communism for the expansion of American interests overseas, escalating tensions with the Soviet Union and the communist bloc. Truman's decision to drop the bomb on Japan wasn't just to "save lives" - it was a desparate attempt to conquer Japan before the Russians did (Russia had declared war on Japan two weeks earlier and had already conquered Manchuria by VJ day). He set in motion not only a policy of "containing" communist revolutions due to fear instilled by the ridiculous "domino theory", but also "rolling back", essentially conquering ideologically incongruent nations - a policy far more extreme than Bush's "Pre-Emptive" war doctine.. These policies had disastrous implications for American foreign policy during the 20th century, and have the potential to be even more devastating during the 21st.

[BOG180]

I was watching some news show this morning and they said there was poll that people took, it said theres an alarming number of people who think George Bush is one of the worst presidents. As someone said earlier, it'll be a while before we can truly judge his presidency. I don't really think he's that bad, but I don't know **** about politics.

[Akira]

I was watching some news show this morning and they said there was poll that people took, it said theres an alarming number of people who think George Bush is one of the worst presidents. As someone said earlier, it'll be a while before we can truly judge his presidency. I don't really think he's that bad, but I don't know **** about politics.

I think he is beyond awful, but I agree it is too early to gauge how bad his presidency is. Let's at least see how long our men and women are still dying and Iraq, then judge.
But as of now he's basically just played GI Joe with the world, tried to privatize social security and get rid of fags.
Not much of a presidency.

[AA-12]

Clinton by a ton. I love his style though :p

[Akira]

Clinton by a ton. I love his style though :p

Worst president?

So he got a blowjob. Get over it. I'd rather have a president who cheats on his wife than a president who uses false information to start an unwinnable ar any day.

[DekWannaBFlea]

Clinton by a ton. I love his style though :p

HE is not even close to the worst. Nice try though.

[Twin Human Highway Flares]

I'd rather have a president who cheats on his wife than a president who uses false information to start an unwinnable ar any day.

How I wish more people would realise this.

[Hagbard Celine]

I'm sticking by Truman for using atomic weapons to obliterate civilian targets

[simplephotographinthesun]

van buren
tyler (his own party basically said STFU to him because he sucked so much)
grant
johnson

[Smokey D]

Truman, in my opinion, was especially bad, and not just because his approval rating when he left office was lower than any approval rating Bush has ever had. Truman's foreign policy boiled down to an aggressive crusade against communism for the expansion of American interests overseas, escalating tensions with the Soviet Union and the communist bloc. Truman's decision to drop the bomb on Japan wasn't just to "save lives" - it was a desparate attempt to conquer Japan before the Russians did (Russia had declared war on Japan two weeks earlier and had already conquered Manchuria by VJ day). He set in motion not only a policy of "containing" communist revolutions due to fear instilled by the ridiculous "domino theory", but also "rolling back", essentially conquering ideologically incongruent nations - a policy far more extreme than Bush's "Pre-Emptive" war doctine.. These policies had disastrous implications for American foreign policy during the 20th century, and have the potential to be even more devastating during the 21st.

That being said, Truman's actions saved at least two countries from falling under the influence of the Soviet bloc. Whatever can be said about the US and its western allies, it's a pretty big stretch to say that that was a bad thing.

[griftadan]

I think that you mean federalism as the power of the federation as a whole, that is, a conglomeration of states, as opposed to the authority of the federal government, but historically the word has been used to describe supporters of a strong federal government.

in a strict political science definition, it means the former. usually the term to describe the latter is federalist

[griftadan]

... and get owned.

only one way to find out, but sense i don't really know of any on hand, why don't you give some reason why they're so great?

[Hababi]

That being said, Truman's actions saved at least two countries from falling under the influence of the Soviet bloc. Whatever can be said about the US and its western allies, it's a pretty big stretch to say that that was a bad thing.

Yes. Truman's one of my favorite presidents for this reason--he had success. And he wasn't dishonest, either--Polk also had success, but was completely Machiavellian and orchestrated an aggressive land grab.

While Truman had an incredibly low approval rating when he left office, opinion has since shifted on him. People appreciate him now, because they see his successes. I don't see that the same will happen with Bush...

I don't see how it can get worse than incompetence. A lying (Nixon), scheming (Polk), philandering (Clinton) president, who also is skilled at running the nation (which all three were) is still better than an incompetent buffoon, who, even if personally moral (Grant), or especially if not (Harding), mucks things up.

[AA-12]

Worst president?

So he got a blowjob. Get over it. I'd rather have a president who cheats on his wife than a president who uses false information to start an unwinnable ar any day.

HE is not even close to the worst. Nice try though.

How I wish more people would realise this.

oh no sorry guys i forgot i cant have opinions

[spitfirejunky]

What makes you think he's the worst?

[Hababi]

On an ideological basis, I would imagine that a lot of the nineteenth century Presidents would appeal to you less than Reagan would do.

Yeah, I mean, there's that whole slavery thing :lol:

And Washington and Adams didn't even favor democracy in the sense that we have today.

[ringworm]

What do most think about Carter?

I was young then but he seemed to be a little too honest to be a President or Politician

He gets ragged pretty hard most of the time for being ineffective

[Hababi]

He was definitely ineffective. I find lots of fault with plenty that he did (especially with his cold relations with Israel) but I think he was a fairly honest, well meaning guy. Just a complete screw-up as president.

[DBoons Ghost]

Jimmy Carter did no good, and he did no bad. He was just... there.

Reagan would be the most contested as best or worst. People either love him or hate him. I'm in the middle because I was a teenager when he was President, and I will always hate him for domestic dealings, but I will always love him for international dealings. He did take credit for the inevitable though. People say he got the most done with our international relations, but most if not all he did was going to happen come hell or high water.

I cannot rate Presidents before I was alive, because I never felt the effects of their tenure. Granted, I'll admit I've never truly felt any negative effects of any President's tenure, but I've enjoyed the postive effects of Clinton's run in office. He will always be my favorite.

Dubya is the worst President of my lifetime for sure, but only because of the same disease his father suffered from, as did Reagan. Putting rich people in charge of the country will never work. Ever.

[Chrizzle fo' Shizzle]

Yes yes let's completely ignore the social implications of FDR's presidency. Historians and scholars on average rank FDR #2, Lincoln #1.

FDR basically threw out the the 10th Amendment, which, as far as I'm concerned, would be as bad as George W throwing out the 1st or 7th

Buchanan couldn't have stopped the Civil War; he just really didn't do anything to stop it

Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter was far too idealistic for their positions. Carter's handling of the Iran Hostage situation was disgusting

[stevensonmat2]

No ones mentioned that bath tub filling Taft?

[Africa]

FDR basically threw out the the 10th Amendment, which, as far as I'm concerned, would be as bad as George W throwing out the 1st or 7th


Why?

[Akira]

oh no sorry guys i forgot i cant have opinions

This forum is for backing up your opinions. You can't just say something and not expect people to want an explanation.

[Krabsworth]

Jimmy Carter did no good, and he did no bad. He was just... there.


excellent president right there

[DBoons Ghost]

Well, the boycott of the Olympics as well as the hostage crisis, and his mishandling of the Russian invasion of Afghanitan sucked, by way of the support he offered the Afghans when everyone knew they would stab us in the back anyway.

He also was a bad politician, and couldn't even find some leeway with congress when he needed them.

On the flip side, my mom insists if not for Carter, Social Security would already be gone.

His achievements post-Presidency far outweigh anything he did as President which is pretty bad.

[cbmartinez]

I'd say

Nixon
Bush
Johnson

Are the top 3 worst, in order.

[pedro durruti]

Jackson was a jackass.

[italic zero]

Carter would've been a good president if he worked better with Congress

[Chrizzle fo' Shizzle]

Why?

Because they're all rights guarenteed in the Bill of Rights. When you ignore one, it's as bad as ignoring any of the others

[cbmartinez]

Jackson was a jackass.

He's pretty polar with history fans. I love him, personally.

[Seafroggys]

Because they're all rights guarenteed in the Bill of Rights. When you ignore one, it's as bad as ignoring any of the others

That is a good argument, but not all the admendments are equal in the least. For example, the Roosevelt violated the 10th by transferring power from the state to the federal government. That does not affect any civil liberties whatsoever. In fact, it probably helped civil liberties in the end. Removing the 1st or 7th or whatever does directly attack our civil rights as citizens.

The 10th was designed as a liquid admendment which could be changed at any time.

[BassRevelation]

its not so much bush, but his entire panel. I havent studied every president in depth, but i havent heard of a president of this nature.

[griftadan]

That is a good argument, but not all the admendments are equal in the least. For example, the Roosevelt violated the 10th by transferring power from the state to the federal government. That does not affect any civil liberties whatsoever. In fact, it probably helped civil liberties in the end. Removing the 1st or 7th or whatever does directly attack our civil rights as citizens.

The 10th was designed as a liquid admendment which could be changed at any time.

um having a strong system of divided power is a civil liberty, thats why its in the bill of rights.

[Iskandar]

On an ideological basis, I would imagine that a lot of the nineteenth century Presidents would appeal to you less than Reagan would do.
I'm not really familiar with them save the more obvious ones, but perhaps.