Best/Worst Presidents

[rocketpig]

mrstickball said:

#3. LBJ. Created the 'great society', which has ruined our country financially. Took the social safety net and turned it into a pension system that is unsustainable, resulting in trillions of dollars being taken out of the economy and put into government debt. Vietnam.

#4. Abraham Lincon. Suspension of Habeus Corpus. Got us into the Civil War thanks to Fort Sumter. Repaid war veterans by giving them land (Homestead Act) resulting in kicking or killing many, many Indians.

Again, it's impossible to take your list seriously when you include the man who wrote the Emancipation Proclomation and the man who signed into law the Civil Rights Act. I don't worship Lincoln like many others do and he did a lot wrong but he was also put into a terrible situation and the country emerged as a better nation after his term. I'm also not fond of LBJ at all but he did more for equality in this country than any President since Lincoln. The ball was rolling in that direction anyway but he's still the guy who signed the bill. That in itself is enough to keep him off any "worst President" list, just as Nixon opening trade agreements with China and ending the Vietnam War is enough to keep his disaster of a Presidency off the list.

Both you and Samuel are taking an incredibly narrow view of what makes a President "good" (economics and executive power, mainly) while completely ignoring the situations in which these Presidents were placed. This kind of thing cannot be viewed in a vacuum. You have to factor in all the elements that made each President do the things he did. Did Lincoln overstep his powers? Oh, most certainly. Was there another option? I'm not so sure of that. The sheer amount of turmoil during that time almost mandated a strong hand to right the ship. It's an ugly reality of a war President. A real war President, not a "fake war" President like LBJ or Bush who used their executive power unnecessarily to advance their agenda during a manufactured war we shouldn't have been fighting in the first place. On top of that, you're dismissing that those two men, despite their faults, advanced actual "freedom for all" more than anyone else in our history. You can't ignore that. It's kind of respulsive, actually, and very dishonest with who we are as a nation and the tragedies we've caused in the name of slavery, racism, and intolerance. I'm just about the biggest Jefferson fan there is but if I was to take the antithetic, yet just as narrow, view as you're using, I could place him at the top of the worst list for sheer hypocrisy. His belief in slavery was questionable at best. He wrote the Declaration of Independence. Yet, he didn't do a damned thing about inequality during his Presidency and just "let it ride". But I take a larger view of his Presidency than that and realize that, yes, the Louisiana Purchase was beyond his scope of power. But he saw an opportunity, one of the largest and best ever offered this nation, and grabbed hold before it disappeared. We emerged a much better and stronger nation because of it.

And before you start, yes, I realize that the duality between Lincoln freeing the slaves and bringing the hammer down on Native Americans is a little hypocritical. But, as I said, he did a lot wrong but I'm not going to ignore the right he did because of it, much like Jefferson.