12-30-2016, 03:14 PM
(12-30-2016, 01:06 PM)Bronsin Wrote: We are getting rid of the worst President in history right now. Bill Clinton won with only 43% of the vote because Ross Perot split the Republican vote being an independent, and started that whole ball rolling back in '92. Go ask the Isreali's what they think of Obama, or anyone else in the Middle East for that matter.
All of this projecting of what's going to happen under a Trump presidency, and no one has any real idea of what will actually happen, but we do have the ability to see what was promised from Obama, and what has transpired. Total garbage. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
We have already seen the appointments of the President-Elect. We have all seen his character. We know what we are getting now --- a government that will represent wealth and corporate power at the expense of everything else.
Are we such a debased People that we deserve a new serfdom or a new peonage just to keep us in line with a Master Class that has appointed itself supreme arbiters of all political and economic reality?
...Worst President Ever? I'd say that ignoring intelligence reports that could have been used to thwart the 9/11 attack, sponsoring an economic bubble that led to the worst economic meltdown since 1929, bungling the federal response to a natural disaster, and lying to start a war for profit are all far worse than anything that Barack Obama did.
http://www.ifyouonlynews.com/politics/hi...fographic/
Obama comes nowhere close to this:
The comments that many of the respondents included with their evaluations provide a clear sense of the reasons behind the overwhelming consensus that George W. Bush’s presidency is among the worst in American history.
“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”
“With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,” said another historian. “When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of area: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.”
One historian indicated that his reason for rating Bush as worst is that the current president combines traits of some of his failed predecessors: “the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover. . . . . God willing, this will go down as the nadir of American politics.” Another classified Bush as “an ideologue who got the nation into a totally unnecessary war, and has broken the Constitution more often than even Nixon. He is not a conservative, nor a Christian, just an immoral man . . . .” Still another remarked that Bush’s “denial of any personal responsibility can only be described as silly.”
“It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,” concluded one respondent. “His domestic policies,” another noted, “have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”
“George Bush has combined mediocrity with malevolent policies and has thus seriously damaged the welfare and standing of the United States,” wrote one of the historians, echoing the assessments of many of his professional colleagues. “Bush does only two things well,” said one of the most distinguished historians. “He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches. His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.”
Four years ago I rated George W. Bush’s presidency as the second worst, a bit above that of James Buchanan. Now, however, like so many other professional historians, I see the administration of the second Bush as clearly the worst in our history. My reasons are similar to those cited by other historians: In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States enjoyed enormous support around the world. President Bush squandered that goodwill by taking the country into an unnecessary war of choice and misleading the American people to gain support for that war. And he failed utterly to have a plan to deal with Iraq after the invasion. He further undermined the international reputation of the United States by justifying torture.
Mr. Bush inherited a sizable budget surplus and a thriving economy. By pushing through huge tax cuts for the rich while increasing federal spending at a rapid rate, Bush transformed the surplus into a massive deficit. The tax cuts and other policies accelerated the concentration of wealth and income among the very richest Americans. These policies combined with unwavering opposition to necessary government regulations have produced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Then there is the incredible shrinking dollar, the appointment of incompetent cronies, the totally inexcusable failure to react properly to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, the blatant disregard for the Constitution—and on and on.
Like a majority of other historians who participated in this poll, my conclusion is that the preponderance of the evidence now indicates that, while this nation has had at least its share of failed presidencies, no previous presidency was as large a failure in so many areas as the current one.
- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/48...u0YGy.dpuf
The closest analogue to Barack Obama as President is Dwight Eisenhower, with whom I see clear similarities of temperament despite very different curricula vitae. The generational theory of Howe and Strauss seem to suggest that a mature Reactive (Washington, John Adams, the post-Civil War Gilded Presidents at their best, Truman, and Eisenhower) are practically never the greatest Presidents, but they can calm the public mood. Ike was a senior military officer with no law degree, and Barack Obama is a lawyer with no military experience, but both showed effectiveness in what they were not expert because they respected and heeded precedent.
Obama wanted to be the new FDR... and he instead became the new Dwight Eisenhower. The only problem: Ike had a good successor. Donald Trump isn't John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He isn't even Richard M. Nixon.
Mark my words: President Donald Trump will be singularly awful, a real-life Berzelius Windrip (the bad American President in Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. He is a demagogue and a sociopath. His attitude toward people who 'failed' to vote for him is "You losers! I will make you pay for your folly!"
He is a hollow, cruel, vindictive person unable to recognize the legitimate disagreement of others. He is more attentive to his self-esteem than to anyone not in his inner circle. He shows through his speech that he has no connection to levels of thought beyond elementary education. He has made outrageous statements about ethnic and religious minorities.
Do you think he's going to grow into the job? I don't. The only common change that I have seen in people past 60 in their behavior (unless they take up a new hobby) is a downward slide into dementia.
Of course I dread his reactionary agenda. But I see far worse in his character -- the dictatorial style, the reckless contempt for truth, the meanness, the pettiness, the need for sycophants -- and this would still all be dangerous if he were a liberal. I see much in common between him and... Fidel Castro. But Castro is a Commie, and Trump is an ultra-capitalist in his beliefs? Castro believes that a capitalist social order is exactly what Donald Trump wants it to be -- an exploitative, dehumanizing, inequitable, and corrupt social order. The difference between the two in philosophy is that Castro excoriates what Trump considers the social optimum.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.