Worst President Ever?

phattonez said:

Yeah, I guess you're right, but he did have more power than a president with the opposing party in congress.

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Reagan, with a hostile Democrat Congress, did more in his first year than the Messiah has accomplished with a single-party government.

Reagan didn't play basketball.

Scarecrow Akhbar said:

Yeah, I noticed that. But not one person has called on it and pointed out that the 16th and 17th Amendments pre-dated his assumption of office.

Makes ya kind of wonder how strong their confidence in their knowledge is.

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:rofl
It's already been pointed out to you that the president has absolutely NOTHING to do with constitutional amendments anyway. So it really doesn't matter if he was in office or not.

Makes ya kind of wonder how strong your confidence in your knowledge is, since you apparently did not know this.

phattonez said:

The other difference in WWII worth mentioning was that there was a clear aggressor.

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there was a clear agressor in WWI. Germany's von Moltke Plan caused the Germans to rush into France, through neutral Belgium, to forestall any attack from the West while preparing to confront the Russians in the East before the Russians could mobilize.

The machine gun prevented the successful conquest of France in the time allowed, and the war bogged down into the trench nightmare stagnation it became famous for.

FDR was engaging the US Navy into combat with German U-boats in the summer of 1941 without Congressional authority. Look into the USS Greer incident.

EpicDude86 said:

Yeah, WWI we just had some financial stakes in (Did the Brits ever pay us back btw?) In WWII ze Germanz started blowin' our **** up.

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And you don't think that was a result from Lend Lease or Cash Carry?

And do you not consider the fall of France and Great Britain detrimental to our financial stakes in the 1940s?

Kandahar said:

:rofl
It's already been pointed out to you that the president has absolutely NOTHING to do with constitutional amendments anyway.

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Wasn't a relevant comment and clearly not specific to the actual flaw in my assertions.

The President can effectively campaign for and against Amendments. He did get Prohibition passed.

phattonez said:

The other difference in WWII worth mentioning was that there was a clear aggressor.

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You're talking about Pearl Harbor?

Lightdemon said:

And you don't think that was a result from Lend Lease or Cash Carry?

And do you not consider the fall of France and Great Britain detrimental to our financial stakes in the 1940s?

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I was trying to be sarcastic. I should have put more emphasis on the financial part.

EpicDude86 said:

I was trying to be sarcastic. I should have put more emphasis on the financial part.

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Smilies my man, use them! :mrgreen:

Lightdemon said:

Smilies my man, use them! :mrgreen:

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lol, right. I'm still trying to gauge how much sarcasm is enough for the forums. I don't want anyone taking me too seriously then having a ****fit.


:lol::lol::lol:

Scarecrow Akhbar said:

No, I never said the Messiah was born in a closet.

I'm not even claiming the mud hut.

I want to know why the Messiah promoted a forgery on the Internet as his "proof" of citizenship.

That's not too much to ask.

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But.... but, that makes you a birther or a racist.

Anyone that questions The Anointed One is one or both.

Ps. No, that is not too much to ask.

Kandahar said:

Meh, they all get a bad rap. None of them was particularly terrible. LBJ and Nixon especially...for all their faults (which shouldn't be ignored), they accomplished some great things.

Ford was only there a couple years, and didn't really do anything noteworthy...good OR bad. And as for Carter...He certainly wasn't a good president by any means, but I think the worst you can say about him is that he was ineffective. He didn't do anything truly terrible with reverberations lasting for a long time.

None of them compare to the absolute morons in the White House from 1849-1881 (Lincoln excepted). That era was not one of the United States' finest moments.

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Jimmy Carter did no lasting harm?????

We just don't get it. The Left in America is screaming to high heaven that the mess we are in in Iraq and the war on terrorism has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the so-called "dim-witted cowboy," has created the entire mess.

The truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the ayatollah Khomeini.

Carter viewed Khomeini as more of a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution than a founding father of modern terrorism. Carter's ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, said "Khomeini will eventually be hailed as a saint." Carter's Iranian ambassador, William Sullivan, said, "Khomeini is a Gandhi-like figure." Carter adviser James Bill proclaimed in a Newsweek interview on February 12, 1979 that Khomeini was not a mad mujahid, but a man of "impeccable integrity and honesty."

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http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1181813077590&pagename=JPArticle/ShowFull

And he is still at it.

Why is Herbert Hoover not on this list? He was absolutely dreadful.

phattonez said:

It's not the same situation. South Carolina was a part of the Union, and Fort Sumter was a part of South Carolina.
When they seceded from the Union, then shouldn't they have gotten all of the land of their state?

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Fort Sumter didn't belong to the state of South Carolina in the first place; thus, it wasn't part of the "land of their state".

You're basically arguing that secession is illegal.

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What? How did you possibly reconstruct what I said into that?

phattonez said:

You're basically arguing that secession is illegal.

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Secession was illegal.

There's constitutional duty of the president to suppress rebellion, and he can suspend the privilege of habeas corpus to do so.

Scarecrow Akhbar said:

Secession was illegal.

There's constitutional duty of the president to suppress rebellion, and he can suspend the privilege of habeas corpus to do so.

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Yes, secession was illegal, BUT the POTUS certainly does NOT have the privilege of suspending the right to habeas corpus. Many presidents have violated this, yes, but it was never a legitimate right to begin with.

vauge said:

You do realize that Lincoln suppressed free speech, squashed habeas corpus, and use the government forces to kill American citizens - right? All big no-no's to the constitution.

Those small mundane "facts" are always glossed over. :roll:

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No president, at least not since Jackson, has ever followed the Constitution word by word. Thus, doing something against the Constitution does not automatically make one the worst president ever. Also, just because a president did some bad things doesn't mean they didn't make up for it in other areas- you'll notice that even liberals will admit that FDR treated Japanese Americans unjustly, yet they forgive him for it anyways because there was a major war going on, and extreme actions, justified or unjustified, will inevitably be taken in a war of such a scale. The Civil War, to the Americans, was on an even bigger scale than WWII, so extreme actions would be taken then too.

Also, since I don't think anybody is claiming that the Confederates were "American citizens" I don't know why you'd claim that Lincoln used government forces to kill "American citizens".

Aunt Spiker said:

Oh yeah - that's just aweful, he passed the 19th Amendment :roll:

You mother would make you eat that.

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Yeah, go back and read the thread.

I always get the 18th and 19th confused. In fact, the 18th was driven by woman...women who couldn't vote. Look at all the damage the 18th caused, it even saddled the country with Kennedy's in politics.

vauge said:

You do realize that Lincoln suppressed free speech,

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So'd Wilson, but Wilson wasn't facing the dissolution of the nation, he simply couldn't tolerate adverse opinion.

vauge said:

squashed habeas corpus,

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The president has the authority to do that in times of rebellion....oh, wait, the seceding states...they were in rebellion, so the nation was confronted with...a rebellion. So Lincoln did nothing wrong there.

vauge said:

and use the government forces to kill American citizens - right? All big no-no's to the constitution.

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The President is required to suppress rebellion. The people that wrote the Constitution were under no illusiong that rebels used flower power to promote their causes. Rebellions usually wind up with dead people laying around somewhere.

Again, Lincoln not only did the right thing, he did the legal thing.

Remember, the South started the rebellion, not the North.

Dav said:

Also, since I don't think anybody is claiming that the Confederates were "American citizens" I don't know why you'd claim that Lincoln used government forces to kill "American citizens".

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Lincoln never acknowledged that they succeeded. They continued to be citizens of the United States according to him.

Dav said:

Also, since I don't think anybody is claiming that the Confederates were "American citizens" I don't know why you'd claim that Lincoln used government forces to kill "American citizens".

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The Confederates were American citizens.

Criminals, but citizens.

Scarecrow Akhbar said:

Yeah, go back and read the thread.

I always get the 18th and 19th confused. In fact, the 18th was driven by woman...women who couldn't vote. Look at all the damage the 18th caused, it even saddled the country with Kennedy's in politics.

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Yeah, but at the same time, it is kind of complicated and not really something that we can go and say, "oh, terrible President!" or "oh, terrible congressmen!"

This was kind of a result of the Cult of Domesticity for the American culture at the time and religious sentiment. Woman's sphere was in the home, and she was given no voice outside of that. Religion mixed with politics, and temperance was the way woman could protect her one and only sphere. To it, women were seen as having the dual responsibility of raising their children correctly and maintain a good household, and alcohol was seen as the vice which attacked it. To some, how could they protect the home and raise their children virtuously if alcohol continued to corrupt the husband and eventually corrupt the children much the same? Women were even blamed for the wrong doings of those that were supposed to be protected via the home. To these women, alcohol was responsible for moral decline, domestic violence, violence outside of the home, and even deaths.

Alcohol was thus the symbol for unjustified attack on the woman's role in American life, and was also the symbol of men keeping women out of public life while at the same time punishing them for its effects on the people living in the home. So, it also cannot be suggested that once American women finally found something they could acceptably speak out against in public (there is actually a great deal of controversy over the act of being an orator), they didn't enjoy their success perhaps with a little too much zeal. So, yeah, these women could have over stepped the sheer importance of temperance once they discovered they could finally have political clout, but at the same time, this was something they heavily believed in, and over time, the public thought it was virtuous also.

Scarecrow Akhbar said:

Secession was illegal.

There's constitutional duty of the president to suppress rebellion, and he can suspend the privilege of habeas corpus to do so.

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The president is never allowed to suspend habeas corpus, or else this country stands for nothing.

Now, forget about the Constitution; why was the North morally obliged to go to war against the South to get that territory back? Also, can you defend the use of the draft in this war?

phattonez said:

The president is never allowed to suspend habeas corpus, or else this country stands for nothing.

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That depends on how you interpret Article 1, Section 9:

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.

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Of course, Article One is all about Congress, so while it can be implied that it was Congress they were referring to, there's nothing that says who has the power to suspend Habeas Corpus in a rebellion/invasion, and frankly, what difference does it make when Congress would probably have voted for the same action the President took, only it would take much longer to get done?

Now, forget about the Constitution; why was the North morally obliged to go to war against the South to get that territory back?

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Nobody, Abraham Lincoln included, made this claim. However, the Confederacy attacked the Union's Federal property; they started the war, not the Union.

Also, can you defend the use of the draft in this war?

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That's kind of an odd thing to ask, seeing as how the draft wasn't completely done away with until the 1970's, more than a hundred years later.

phattonez said:

The president is never allowed to suspend habeas corpus, or else this country stands for nothing.

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You are either wrong, or we are living in denial.

Whereas, It has become necessary to call into service, not only volunteers, but also portions of the militia of the States by draft, in order to suppress the insurrection existing in the United States, and disloyal persons are not adequately restrained by the ordinary processes of law from hindering this measure, and from giving aid and comfort in various ways to the insurrection. Now, therefore, be it ordered, that during the existing insurrection, and as a necessary measure for suppressing the same, all rebels and insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice affording aid and comfort to the rebels against the authority of the United States, shall be subject to martial law, and liable to trial and punishment by courts-martial or military commission.

Second: That the writ of habeas corpus is suspended in respect to all persons arrested, or who are now, or hereafter during the rebellion shall be, imprisoned in any fort, camp, arsenal, military prisons, or other place of confinement, by any military authority, or by the sentence of any court-martial or military commission.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand, and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. Done at the City of Washington, this Twenty-fourth day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-seventh.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN. By the President.

WILLIAM H. SEWARD, Secretary of State.
On April 27, 1861

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War on Terror

The November 13, 2001, Presidential Military Order gave the President of the United States the power to detain suspects, suspected of connection to terrorists or terrorism as an unlawful combatant. As such, it was asserted that a person could be held indefinitely without charges being filed against him or her, without a court hearing, and without entitlement to a legal consultant. Many legal and constitutional scholars contended that these provisions were in direct opposition to habeas corpus and the United States Bill of Rights.

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On 29 September 2006, the House and Senate approved the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), a bill that removed habeas corpus for any person determined to be an “unlawful enemy combatant" engaged in hostilities or having supported hostilities against the United States”

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phattonez said:

The president is never allowed to suspend habeas corpus, or else this country stands for nothing.

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"The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."

What document did this line come from, since you claim it isn't in the Constitution?

phattonez said:

Now, forget about the Constitution; why was the North morally obliged to go to war against the South to get that territory back? Also, can you defend the use of the draft in this war?

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Read the first three words in the Constitution for a clue.