Who do you think is the greatest US president and why?
I’m still thinking about who I’ll pick, I’ll post it once I’ve decided.
I think you have to break up the country’s existence into periods, and select the best of each era. For instance, it doesn’t take much thinking to conclude that our greatest foundational president was Washington, since he was a key figure in the Revolution and served to bring rival factions together.
Lincoln preserved the Union and as a by-product relieved us of the blight of slavery. He brooked overwhelming unpopularity without a flinch, rooted in conviction etched in a man of depth who felt his nation’s agony personally and worked to deliver it from it’s darkest hours.
Theodore Roosevelt empowering of interstate authorities to set limits on railroad rates, his push to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act, which laid the foundation for modern consumer legislation, and broadening of executive power to convert land to federal forests were all expansions of executive power. In foreign policy he built a formidable navy, proclaimed American intolerance over Latin American encroachments, and used aggressive diplomacy in acquiring the Panama Canal Zone.
FDR presided over the end of the Depression, the victory in WW2, and served 3 terms and won 4 elections, all the time broadening the role of government, in “New deal”, Keynsian programs, where government was the employer of last resort and built the safety net. All the while, he misunderstood the growth of Stalinism, which his successors sought to contain.
Reagan reversed the policy of containmenrt, and boldly sought to defeat what his predessors had been content to co-exist with. When the choice was between bankrupting the Soviets through deficit financing of an arms race, he ate crow and ran up the defence budget. The result was, with the cooperation of a Polish Pope and a breakaway movement in Poland, the Soviet Empire began to erode. Gorbachev was forced to retreat from keeping pace militarily, and Prestroika gave way to the dissolution of the Transcontinental Concentration Camp, formally under Reagan’s successor. Islamo-Communism anyone?
And let’s not hear that Soviet communism would have gone away anyway. Maybe credit should go to Carter for doing nothing in the preceding term?! Even his critics admit Reagan’s approach hasted its departure by about 20 years; in those 20 years a USSR and militant Islam could have cooperated in unimaginable ways against the West.
I think Richard Nixon was pretty good. He broke the mold and created a new mentality toward presidential ethics. You gotta love a groundbreaker.
I like William Henry Harrison, he only served 32 days before he died, and everyone knows that the only good politician is a … well you know.
LOL. Yeah, and how about the man who preyed on the reverse coattails of his moral legacy, our worst ex-president who ushered in Khoumeini, believing the Ayatollah to be a benevolent sage? The president who deserves credit for doing nothing as the country slipped into “malaise”, paving the way for my favorite president, despite my progressive leanings. The last man worthy of the office, RWR, who reversed the policy of containment, and helped me overcome my nausea from seeing Jimmy the Weak hug and plant a wet one on the face of the Soviet dictator. Long live the Gipper. A true, freedom loving conservative that this secular progressive loves and misses
Ronald Reagan ended the cold war and spread nuclear technology throughout the world.
Is that how North Korea got the plutonium? From an Alzheimer’s ridden Gipper smuggling her high grade uranium and straving her population? Did he mastermind Iran’s nuclear production plants and is he plotting to put dirty bombs into terrorists’ hands from the grave? If we had a Reagan now, we’d be fighting an effective war against terrorist cowards instead of dashing off on fool’s errands just to make sure there are no WMD, like they told us. Reagan had no blood on his hands and your idol is disgrace to his legacy. Reagan belongs to us now, those who love freedom and respect peoples’ right from meddlesome, incompetent leaders. You can take Bush and have Carter too, the presidents who ran on a pledge to restore honor.
All I’m saying is that the fall of the USSR, which is often attributed to Reagan, resulted in nuclear technology spreading. And the phrase “fool’s errand” is getting pretty stale. Did you just learn that or something? You say it in every post.
Since you’re mindful of fallacies Scott, you should beware of the one you’ve fallen into. So, I can both satisfy your fondness for clear thinking and win one more for the gipper. You think that since Reagan’s time nuclear weapon’s have been at risk of falling into the wrong hands? I’ll rebut that with facts bellow, but all I really need say is “POST HOC ERGO PROPTOR HOC”.
Alright, Bush’s failing was an error of prudential judgment, and not necessarily a flaw of underlying principle. But to fail to anticipate factional rivalry, once free of the fist of Saddam, and to invade with minimal numbers, anticipating a brisk and painless transition to a post-Saddam Iraq, was a miscalculation of monumental, historical, unthinking misfeasance of incompetent statecraft, that calling it a “fool’s errand” is besides being hackneyed, generous. Bush is a developmentally stunted fool that an unconscious half of the electorate entrusted with power. The president should at least be a grown-up. He is not mature enough to see and admit when he has made an error, and leave himself accountable. That is typical of people at a much earlier stage of moral development: adolescent or childhood.
And 2 nation have enterred the nuclear club since RWR’s term. Pakistan tested Nuclear weapons believed to be of Chinese design in !998 on Clinton’s watch. North Korea tested her’s on GWB’s watch. While he was making sure there were no WMDs in Iraq. Yep, none in Iraq. Phew. No instance of nukes for sale from the former Soviet Union has surfaced.
1)Developmentally stunted? I don’t even know what that means.
Minimal forces? Then you agree that we’re not taking a big military risk.
That’s confusing to me.
Painless transition… Sometimes war is necessary even when the public
doesn’t have the balls to fund it. That’s when you have to lie to them for
thier own good.
2)Of course we’re not going to advertise soviet arms deals. They’re kind of a strategic ally.
That was the folly in the invasion. That it could done at minimal risk. The admin thought that once Saddam was deposed there be “dancin’ in the street!/Communication, throughout the nation/Are you ready for a brand new beat?/Cause summer’s here and the time is right for dancin’ in the street” Well, that was based on an ignorance of the history of the region, not to mention a rose-tinted view of human nature.
Russia is a strategic partner? Do you follow the pronouncements of the current administration you hold in such esteem? Cheney, among others, has urged using NATO as an anti-Russian military alliance and proposed overt support for Putin’s domestic political enemies. This divide between the US and Russia has been aggravated during the Bush Admin. At the end of the Reagan and during the Bush 41 admins, the two countries were on a footing to become allies. As with everything else it touches, the Bush43 admin has blown an opportunity for contructive engagement with a major power and created one more foreign policy crisis to bequeath to its successor. No, Russia is not a stragic ally. YET.
"Of course we’re not going to advertise Soviet arms deals? (Therefore there must be some?) The furtive fallacy
So you’re anti Bush, and you don’t like a rose tinted view of the world? Now I’m completely confused.
My money is on FDR. We need more presidents like him.
Lincoln and Washington also get a nod. But everybody always answers one of those, so their position is a relative given. Jefferson wasn’t a bad one either.
But what about Grant? People don’t give him enough credit. You want to talk about groundbreaking, boy, he set the precident for Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Taft, you name it.
To the poster who suggested that the USSR and militant Islam would join forces . . . wtf? Militant islam is by-and-large the child of American influence (at the very least America provided the fertilizer). You know, funding the Taliban and all that. Godless Communism and Militant Islam are antithetical.
When it comes to confronting a common enemy, religious differences have never stopped believers and infidels from making common cause. The Soviets were active in Catholic Latin America and officially atheist China aided Pakistan in developing nuclear weapons. Egypt under Nasser accepted military support from the communist USSR. Geopolitics, Xunzian, makes for strange bedfellows. When America is the enemy, do you think a terror organization is going to cherry pick its allies?
Now, let’s deal with your delusional nonsense about America being the author of militant Islam. The central tenent of Islam is “jihad”, that is, “holy war”. Do you think Bin Laden engineered al Qaeda as a vehicle to avenge past American violations on the Islamic world or to redress for American imperialist plunder of his region? Because never has Bin Laden called for a fairer redistribution of wealth. He’s hardly in a position to, coming from one of the world’s richest families, who live in Saudi Arabia, where wealth is distributed to the royal family in most part.
It is important to be clear how Muslim “extremists” are actually extreme. The are extreme in the faith. Extreme in their devotion to the word of the Koran and the hadith (the literature recounting the sayings and actions of Mohammed). This is what leads them to be extreme in their belief that modernity and secular culture are antithetical to moral and spiritual health. They are certain that the exports of Western culture are driving their wives and children away from God. They also believe our unbelief to be the ultimate sin, meritting death when it impedes the spread of Islam. These passions are not analyzable to “hatred” in any ordinary sense. How many of these hatred-ridden soldiers of God have been to America or even met an American? What’s more, they have relatively meager grievances with American imperialism than is the global norm. Their oil might still be under the stand, were it not for Western MNCs.
Muslim extremists suffer from a fear of cultural contamination. Beneath their murderous passions lies a consuming feeling of “humiliation” humiliation over the fact that their civilization has foundered while they have had to watch a sin-loving, godless people become the masters of everything challenge set in their way. They may want to deny it, but they know this feeling is a product of their faith. And the outrage that results is not that of the poor deprived of life’s necessities, but of a people who believe themselves chosen, subjugated by barbarians. Bin Laden hardly wants for anything. He has never called for an equal distribution of wealth. Even his call for statehood for Palestineans seems an afterthought, stemming more from anti-Semmitism than solidarity with Palestineans. His call is for eradication of the West, not a Palestinean homeland, and 911 was not an act of war but what I’ll try to explain.
911 was designed to instill panic and psychological trauma in the American people, and to do so under the unsteady command of an error prone leader. Al Qaeda could rely on the 24 hour news cycle to burn the image of devastation on the mass psyche and the indiviual constituents thereoff. Every 15 minutes they were devastated again and the day after 90% of Americans bonded with a man on a bullhorn, and that bonding parlayed into a virtual deification of the wrong man at the wrong time. Bin Laden probably predicted Bush’s prudential errors, having known the Bush family and sized up their fortunate son with his none of the right stuff.
The bottom line, Xunzuan, is that 911 was not our just dues for past exploitation. It was an act stemming from a desperate act of religious ferver, carried out in calculating cynical anticipation of the effects on American society and politics
Muslim fundamentalism is based on fear, humiliation and anger, not righteous indignation as you imagine it in you knee-jerk anti-American unthinking response. The fear of modernity seeping into their culture and moving their women and children to question some of the warped beliefs and practices of Islam is, to Islamic fundamentalist, unthinkable. When they see their world lagging pitifully behind a sin-loving enemy who are vastly ahead by any measure, be it scientific, military, technological, economic or healthwise, they are filled with humiliation which gives way to anger, and are disposed to act irrationally, hoping to transform through catastrophic acts of violence what they are impotent to do in any competitive arena. America never bred this suicidal terroristic mania, Xunzian. They also bombed Australians in Mali. What’s your pro-Muslim rationale for that.
Think before you post your unconscious keystrokes. If we still had a cold war enemy, it would exploit any disadvantages we had to damage our interests. Your “thesis” that religious differences bars marriages of convenience falls into no known school of foreign policy analysis. Read up and learn rather than think you’re the teacher, only to find you first need to unlearn what you picked up from someone trying to recall what someone told him that someone who read Chomsky said.
When you don’t know, say nothing and don’t embarrass yourself. Because this is what’s called killing a gnat with a sledgehammer, or exploding a soap bubble with a machette.
I think he means that not Islam itself, but militant Islam is a result of economic and/or other types of American aggression. That seems pretty obvious to most people. You just want to fight Ric. I mean, is the “central tenet of Islam” really holy war? Do you actually believe that?
Yeah . . .
'Cause it was the USSR that funded the Taliban and put them in power. Riiiiight.
There is honestly so much wrong with that post that I don’t know where to begin.
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Why is America the enemy? This is unaddressed and assumed in your post. Generally people become enemies for particular reasons (even if those reasons aren’t reasonable).
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Islam has 5 pillars. Some consider Jihad to be a sixth ‘unofficial’ pillar. Your analysis of Islam is incredibly ignorant. So much so that it frightens me.
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I do agree with your analysis of fundamentalist Islam. That is, for the most part, the ‘stick’ end of religion that gets emphasized in any fundamentalism. Your point?
This, I thought was most revealing, “Think before you post your unconscious keystrokes. If we still had a cold war enemy, it would exploit any disadvantage we had to damage our interests.” This statement is totally 100% true, except that it wasn’t the Soviets backing fundamentalist Islam for that purpose . . .
Honestly, I’ve tried to respond to your post as best I could, but it is really a mish-mash of non-sequiturs followed by vitrolic rhetoric. It is also devoid of any logical coherency. Your overall argument is both unsound and invalid. Shockingly so.
Read the edit and address the whole thing. Yes, “Jihad” in one of its meaning, means holy war. Do you know the other one? Xunzian just took a silly line from what was in the air and posted it, thinking he had a cheap victory. I have an unfair advantage. I’m read and I’m driven to question. He can fight his own battles. Anyway, what’s wrong with debate? He baited me with a falsehood and this is philosophy, “love of knowledge”, not exchange of easy one liners. I don’t post often, but when I do it’s thorough and exhaustive.
suggested reading: Sam Harris : End of Faith. That post was drawn largely from there. Not from air
Good points don’t need poetic or flowery language to make them valid. Usually when I see so much of that I just nod my head.
It is generally considered poor form to go back and re-write a post after people have responded to it.
I’m headed out for the evening. I’ll take care of your post in the morning.
For now, I’ll just point out that Harris is largely incorrect in his analysis because it is far too Hegelian. Given his philosophic stance, a Hegelian outlook is more than a little problematic to start with, but running with that stance in the matter he does teeters on being disingenuous.
Edit: Also . . . how is pointing out that America provided the fertilizer for the problem of radical Islam that we are now dealing with ‘anti-American’ and ‘pro-muslim’? I am neither. Though describing me as ‘pro-American’ and ‘anti-muslim’ wouldn’t be an apt description either.