1.) Ronald Reagan--Badass actor, tough but suave, and tear down this wall!
2.) General Eisenhower--won WWII, warned about the mil complex, NASA, roads
3.) John Adams--he united the States of America + gave us the Navy!

I would also like to note that Thedore Roosevelt was against censorship at all times. Which actually got a lot of senators and others mad at him. He in fact fought against Wilson's WW1 censorship.

If your FDR/Bush comment was restricted to the Supreme Court rulings on the constitutionality of those two actions, then I withdraw my objections about that remark. 

And your other parallel is not accurate.  It's denying citizenship, marriage, and property ownership to people just because you hate them, versus imprisoning them because lots (but not all) of your advisors deem them a security risk ... and you don't like them.  My other point is that just because one racist is able to get away with more racist shit than another racist doesn't make the first racist more racist per se. 

Furthermore, I'm not aware of any quid pro quo involved in the enlistment, that is, there was no promise of not going back to the camps after serving in the military.  And even if there were, if people were allowed (not forced) to reduce their sentences by joining the military, would that make those who joined "practically slaves"?  The fact that the imprisonment is wrongful (in the case of the internment camps) doesn't somehow make the prisoner into a slave.  Are you saying that all prisoners are "practically" slaves?  I see a lot of lawsuits in the future!

Maybe I am.  What I read talked about how it was mostly done via social pressure on a "voluntary" basis.  I'll have to look this up later as I'm about to leave for work. 

P.S.  Good for TR.

The "information" FDR had about the Japanese beign a threat was about as on the level as Bush's "Weapons of Mass Destruction" reports on iraq.

It was a direct willingness to not listen to the overwhelming evidence to the contrary that led to the action.

Those imprisoned for no reason... when there was no credible intellegence to brand them as so yes. FDR's intellegence on Japanese Internment is analagous to Bush's intellegence of Iraqs weapons of mass destruction.... pretty much all the evidence was in the opposite, but FDR(and Bush) didn't want to hear it because they wanted to do it. Amusingly as I search for direct names... I find myself finding more and more law breaking roosevelt did I didn't know about. Though the "volentary" censorship. That wasn't so much the case for any of the smaller newspapers or other media sources that were anti war, socialist and the like... I mean what do you think happened when people didn't censor themselves enough. FDR almost had Marines storm the Chicago Tribune and shut them down because of a story they wrote, and only didn't because apparently the japanese didn't catch it.

Though I really would like to know what your limit is Final Fan.

When is an act so horrible that the president committing it is unredeemable no matter how much good he does?

Is it a holocaust type event? With presidents like Andrew Jackson being considered negative?

For me Japanese Internment was far far too close to that kind of event.

"Lets get that race we don't like and put them in a small contained area... and shoot them if they try and leave... and just leave them there."

What would of happened had WW2 dragged on? Didn't Japanese Internment give Bush the precedent he needed for Guantanamo. (Well i guess you could argue Lincoln did, looked up on him, he won't be on my top 5 list either. It was already shakey depending on how much he knew about Civil War prison camps.)

JFK

I think the world is too complicated to work out a formula on what exactly it would take to make someone's bad actions completely poison my opinion of him no matter what good he did. I'll take it on a case by case basis thank you very much, and the internment is extremely troubling to me and lowers my opinion of FDR quite a bit but does not completely poison it. (But I do hate Andrew Jackson.)  Censorship troubles me also but I am inclined to judge FDR there against other presidents during major wars which makes him look a lot better.

I, in turn, would like to know why exactly the "wrongful" in "wrongful imprisonment" makes the imprisonment equivalent to slavery when rightful imprisonment is not. Or is it "okay" slavery because they committed a crime?

In any case, I think it was very poor word choice when you supported your argument that FDR is racist by saying that he "practically enslaved" Japanese Americans, when you mean that he wrongfully imprisoned them and you believe all wrongful imprisonment is practically slavery.

woah woah woah Halogamer. INSTITUTED the MIC, not warned of, He made it so. In doing so he did state that this "with this institution, which is new.... we should guard against, wether sought or unsought, from affecting our liberties and democratic processes" which is a forthought, but he was the one who brought in (or at least signed off on it) to bieng. My point is he wasn't against the idea of it. He was for it.