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 whembly wrote:
I think when we're all old geezers reminencing the past, Dubya would be a "middle of the pack" President.

Nah, because even the mediocre presidents have something positive going for them. Some major piece of reform agenda that improved the nation. If, hypothetically, his tax reforms had led to Laffer curve had worked, then we would say that the Iraq war was a giant balls up, but on the other hand he put in place reform that changed taxation across the developed world. But it didn't work, and it was very stupid to even try it. And so we look elsewhere for some kind of reform, and there's what? So far we've had a foreign aid spending program, and No Child Left Behind (which I think few would want to argue was a great success).

I do think you make a good point about Bush starting from a position of assumed illegitimacy. It made his reforms much more difficult. But we're talking about Presidential legacy here, you don't get to make excuses. The only question is what the President got done, no matter the obstacles. Obama doesn't get to complain about facing an incredibly hostile opposition, he just has to deal with it. Lincoln faced a freaking secession, and so he just got on and won a war. That's the standard.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:


I don't know what New York is like but L.A. one of the bigger left capitals in the usa was so much different in real life and deserves far more criticism than it gets. It's segregated, dirty, polluted, filled with graffiti, over-crowded, the people are fake and the shows are faker (audience being forced to clap and laugh like some real version of a laugh track). Basically Los Angeles sucks and I wasn't even in the bad areas which are really bad.

I thought all this was common knowledge. Everyone knows LA is just, in general, a terrible place, regardless of political leanings. I've never known anyone who was like "oh man, I wanna move to LA" past the age of like, 16.

way to be judgmental, and stereotype millions of people...
those of us blessed to be from L.A. , and especially those of us lucky enough to be from the South Bay (the Beach Cities), love our cities, and do a lot to keep the beaches beautiful...
L.A.'s graffiti murals are some of the best urban art outside of NYC, and our movies influence global culture...
our ethnic diversity has a rich heritage, and brings together people of many nations...
after 25 years of globetrotting, i still feel that L.A. is the center of the world, and wouldn't have wanted to grow up anywhere other than Redondo Beach...
i love L.A.!!!

cheers
jah

 Ghazkuul wrote:
Where as we currently have President Obama, who is one of the best public speakers around, of course he is also the idiot who said that Muslims invented the Printing press.......

Of course, he said no such thing, but don't let that stop you.


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 Breotan wrote:
In my lifetime, I'd rank the Presidents as follows, top being best bottom being worst.

Reagan
Nixon
Clinton
Bush Sr.
Bush Jr
Ford
Obama
Johnson
Carter

Yes, in the last 50 years, the bottom three Presidents are all Democrats. Many people would claim bias on my part and it is true

Well, it's hard to call partisan bias on a list that has Clinton in the number 3 spot. I don't think I'd personally agree with that list (well, except for Nixon, greatest modern president) but it seems evenhanded.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The greatest presidents in history probably are Lincoln and FDR.

Add Washington to that and I think you've the three that lead pretty much every academic list on the subject.

I actually think Washington gets too little credit for forming a nation out of war, without needing to kill loads of people. Washington assumed the presidency at the same time the Jacobins were taking power in France.

over simplified it, he said that muslims were responsible for "our mastery of pens and printing;" Pretty sure the chinese beat the muslims. Or was a new discovery made?

You're moving the goalposts upon being called upon saying something untrue. So, I'm not going to play intellectual calvinball with you.

Given the Muslims got the Printing Press from China, doesn't seem like goal post moving to me. And really it was a European who made it practical.

Or does being the middle man mean you get the credit?

 Ouze wrote:
You're moving the goalposts upon being called upon saying something untrue. So, I'm not going to play intellectual calvinball with you.

Well more along the lines of forgetting what his exact words were during that speech, he said pens and print not print press. But it does not change the fact that he was wrong.

The politics involved in the Iraq war were significantly more complex than most people are willing to admit. We knew Saddam had extensively used chemical weapons before, and the Bush administration didn't think "we want to remove a violent dictator and install a peaceful democracy" would get much support. "This genocidal maniac has WMDs, so let's remove him and install a peaceful democracy", however, was a pretty easy sell. Meanwhile, the relative peace between Iran and Iraq was mainly maintained because Saddam convinced Iran that he had WMDs. He had to keep them convinced of this so they wouldn't invade, while simultaneously convincing us that he didn't have WMD's. Not to mention the whole reason Saddam was in power in the first place is because the West used to have an extensive history of doing what Bush was accused of (installing dictators for corporate gains). The British started it, by splitting up countries so that multiple ethnic groups were in the same nation, the idea being that they'd be too busy fighting each other to fight the British. After WWII, the British lost their influence and the USA stepped in and continued backing coups every time one dictator got too uppity (there's a reason so many people there hate the West). Then Bush came along and decided it was time to stop screwing over the people of the middle east and establishing a friendly, stable democracy that we could be allies with rather than simply exploit. But with how screwed up everything already was, there was no easy button to magically make everything better, and the rest is history.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The greatest presidents in history probably are Lincoln and FDR.

Sure, but only if you evaluate a president's worth by his ability to expand the role of government.

I've seen a few analyses that claim some of FDR's famous economic policies actually did a lot more harm than good. No idea about the rest of his presidency.

 DarkLink wrote:

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The greatest presidents in history probably are Lincoln and FDR.

Sure, but only if you evaluate a president's worth by his ability to expand the role of government.

I've seen a few analyses that claim some of FDR's famous economic policies actually did a lot more harm than good. No idea about the rest of his presidency.

At the very least many of them are unsustainable. Like Social Security, which only works if you have significantly more people putting into the system then are drawing from it(growing population) and that these people drawing from it aren't going to be drawing from it for 20+ years. It was designed under very flawed assumptions. It didn't take into account smaller family sizes or better medical technology allowing people to survive into their 90s with regularity.

 Vaktathi wrote:
Yes and no. The Soviet Union was already heading on that road, their domestic investment & output had been deficient for many years, it was going to come home to roost eventually. One might make a case that Reagan's policies hastened its arrival and/or a more dramatic collapse, that's possible, but the Soviet Union's economic engine was unsustainable & heading for a reckoning of some sort in the state it was in before Reagan ever stepped into office.

Actually, with access to Soviet records the answer has now come in emphatically as 'no'. The Soviets didn't actually spend any more in response to Reagan's increases. They didn't have any more to spend, so they just did what they always did, they lied. Actual spending remained constant throughout, but they just claimed bigger spending.

The Soviet Union collapsed because it's economic system was crappy, and couldn't match capitalism. And that's kind of the irony of the situation, rather than accept they were proven right about stupid communism was, instead the American right is trying to make it all about something Reagan did.


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 Grey Templar wrote:
I don't think you can fault Bush for following poor intel. Thats the people feeding him the bad intel's problem, not his. The President is supposed to act on what he's given, if he had to do his own checking he'd never get anything done.

That defense only works if Bush and his administration were passive receivers of the information. But they weren't, they were actively engaging the intelligence community, directing to them to make the case for WMDs in Iraq.

And when people spoke out about this, that the Bush admin was cherry picking and contorting evidence to build the case, then the Bush admin came down on them like a stack of bricks.


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 Ghazkuul wrote:
We found TONS and I mean literally TONS of chemical weapons, nobody cared because the public heard WMD and attached that label to Nuclear weapons and ONLY nuclear weapons. If it wasn't radioactive it wasn't a WMD.

There's a bit of irony here - WMD was originally used for nukes only. It was only during the Clinton administration that the term was used to describe Iraq's stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, an expansion of the term they deliberately made in order to escalate the perceived threat of these weapons and so maintain support for their sanctions and supervision programs.

 Ghazkuul wrote:
actually the first use of WMD was referring to the bombing of Guernica, Spain with conventional weapons. It was then later attributed to chemical weapons during WW1, it wasn't until after WWII that nuclear weapons was added to WMD. During the Cold War it became synonymous with Nuclear weapons for obvious reasons.

The term was used by a guy one time, as a description of events, not as a new piece of jargon. And then not used again, until the development of nukes as weapons on a scale of power unlike anything else. Nukes changed how politics and war operated, and that necessitated a new term.

 Ghazkuul wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

 DarkLink wrote:
We did actually find WMDs

Not of the sort we had gone to war in search of, and not of the sort that justified the war in the first place.

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/no-wmds-in-iraq/

Aye, they pull more chemical weapons out of farms in France every year than they found in Iraq.

A couple forgotten gas shells was hardly a WMD stockpile or active weapons program that necessitated an invasion and 8 year occupation.

Tell that to my old SSgt who received chemical burns over a large % of his body due to finding a large Cache of Mustard gas. Or you can tell that to my old Sgt who was a NBC Marine during the invasion and was routinely called out to dispose of captured chemical weapons.

We found TONS and I mean literally TONS of chemical weapons, nobody cared because the public heard WMD and attached that label to Nuclear weapons and ONLY nuclear weapons. If it wasn't radioactive it wasn't a WMD.

Were there some weapons? Sure. I'm not saying that we didn't find *anything*.

My point was there there was nothing even remotely resembling what was described and attributed to Saddam's regime, even ignoring the whole Nuclear thing. I think the grand total number of US service personnel with injuries related to chemical weapons is something like 14 or 17, with, IIRC, zero deaths. Not to take away from any personal tragedies, but these weapons accounted for a statistically irrelevant number of casualties.

We found weapons which had been buried years beforehand, in many cases back to the Iran/Iraq war, forgotten and/or lost, and most no longer useable due to corrosion or other damage (at least as anything other than improvised weapons). We did not find active weapons production, did not find functional & well maintained state arsenals, we did not find secret stockpiles ready to be turned on Saddam's enemies.

Whatever the Intel was, it was obviously so poor as to be completely wrong on every level, and acting on it was either incompetence of the highest order, or it was used to justify an action they'd already wanted to do regardless.

 jah-joshua wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 flamingkillamajig wrote:


I don't know what New York is like but L.A. one of the bigger left capitals in the usa was so much different in real life and deserves far more criticism than it gets. It's segregated, dirty, polluted, filled with graffiti, over-crowded, the people are fake and the shows are faker (audience being forced to clap and laugh like some real version of a laugh track). Basically Los Angeles sucks and I wasn't even in the bad areas which are really bad.

I thought all this was common knowledge. Everyone knows LA is just, in general, a terrible place, regardless of political leanings. I've never known anyone who was like "oh man, I wanna move to LA" past the age of like, 16.

way to be judgmental, and stereotype millions of people...
those of us blessed to be from L.A. , and especially those of us lucky enough to be from the South Bay (the Beach Cities), love our cities, and do a lot to keep the beaches beautiful...
L.A.'s graffiti murals are some of the best urban art outside of NYC, and our movies influence global culture...
our ethnic diversity has a rich heritage, and brings together people of many nations...
after 25 years of globetrotting, i still feel that L.A. is the center of the world, and wouldn't have wanted to grow up anywhere other than Redondo Beach...
i love L.A.!!!

cheers
jah

Having lived most of my life in the area, I make no apologies.

 DarkLink wrote:
The politics involved in the Iraq war were significantly more complex than most people are willing to admit. We knew Saddam had extensively used chemical weapons before, and the Bush administration didn't think "we want to remove a violent dictator and install a peaceful democracy" would get much support. "This genocidal maniac has WMDs, so let's remove him and install a peaceful democracy", however, was a pretty easy sell.

I think there's also something to be said for the selling of "we're going in to finish what Sr. started"


Which of course, is utter nonsense. Bush Sr. IMHO, had a better understanding of things from the outset, and fully believed the old addage "better to deal with the devil you know, than the devil you don't" Obviously, we knew even way back when Bush Sr. was in office that Saddam was a bad dude, and generally did some bad things to "his" people. But we also kind of knew that there were worse things around in the sand that Saddam kept a tight lid on.

That being said, I'm not blaming W. for the rise of ISIS/ISIL. His role was actually somewhat insignificant, IMO. This is because while he was in office when we signed the original deals with a timetable for our departure, it was Maliki and Obama who were unable to renegotiate a new deal. In that, I think that Maliki and Co. probably are about 70% at fault, simply because they refused to come back to the table, and refused to admit they were fethed once we left.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Given the Muslims got the Printing Press from China, doesn't seem like goal post moving to me. And really it was a European who made it practical.

Or does being the middle man mean you get the credit?

It means a president can give a carefully worded answer to promote your contribution 'mastery of pens and printing'. What does that mean, were they just neater?

But from there, predictably, the right wing noise machine will ignore careful, specific wording, and just invent what they wish Obama had said, so they can complain about it. Because that's how this stupid, stupid game works.

 Ghazkuul wrote:
over simplified it, he said that muslims were responsible for "our mastery of pens and printing;" Pretty sure the chinese beat the muslims. Or was a new discovery made?

Being responsible for doesn't mean they invented it - it was brought to us through them.

The old muslim world both invented new things and preserved a lot of ancient knowledge from earlier times. In a time when christian monks copied old manuscripts without knowing what they said (they even wrote "it's Greek, don't read it" on pages with Greek original text) the muslims both taught and used sciences that only came to Europe much later, often through reconquered Spain. Algebra, alchemy, medicine - and probably a lot more. They've stagnated now and have significant problems, not all of their own making (as in how the European powers divided the ME into states with no regard for ethnic or religious groups). But at their height they were the center of enlightenment.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:

 DarkLink wrote:
We did actually find WMDs

Not of the sort we had gone to war in search of, and not of the sort that justified the war in the first place.

http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/no-wmds-in-iraq/

Aye, they pull more chemical weapons out of farms in France every year than they found in Iraq.

A couple forgotten gas shells was hardly a WMD stockpile or active weapons program that necessitated an invasion and 8 year occupation.

I don't think you can fault Bush for following poor intel. Thats the people feeding him the bad intel's problem, not his. The President is supposed to act on what he's given, if he had to do his own checking he'd never get anything done.

The intel wasn't poor, it was obviously fabricated (remember the "dodgy dossier") and furthermore was not supported by the UN Mission findings or US technical experts on WMD manufacturing.

However, Bush did not take that decision by himself. He was encouraged by his administration and Blair.

Spetulhu wrote:
And you can't really claim he's stupid either - stupid people don't get to fly real fighter jets. His way of speaking, both the dialect and the vocabulary, is what made him seem a bit simple.

Yeah he seemed simple because he typically just spoke rather then having speeches prepared and all that. I'm not saying he didn't have speeches because he did but he p preferred to just speak off the cuff. My oldest brother met him twice and said as a person he was awesome. He hung out with the other Marines at the embassy my brother was stationed at, like actually just hung out shot the breeze and even had a beer with them.


I think he was a pretty decent President, not great, debatable about being good, but definitely a decent one. Compare his term to others, he was thrown a pretty crazy curve ball and I think he handled it how he should have

 Ghazkuul wrote:

There's a bit of irony here - WMD was originally used for nukes only. It was only during the Clinton administration that the term was used to describe Iraq's stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, an expansion of the term they deliberately made in order to escalate the perceived threat of these weapons and so maintain support for their sanctions and supervision programs.

actually the first use of WMD was referring to the bombing of Guernica, Spain with conventional weapons. It was then later attributed to chemical weapons during WW1, it wasn't until after WWII that nuclear weapons was added to WMD. During the Cold War it became synonymous with Nuclear weapons for obvious reasons.

IIRC, In most US jurisdictions (and I think under certain international treaties) a WMD is actually defined as any weapon capable of killing two or more individuals over a dispersed area with a single 'action'. In other words, any sort of explosive device would qualify.

 Frazzled wrote:
(Breotan points noted above)

Fair points. I may disagree but I like the methodology.
A discussion of Presidents rankings might be more appropriate on another thread, but I'd put Johnson higher: Civil RIghts Act, War on Poverty programs.

No surprise to see one Texan defend another Texan

GW Bush waved a greeting at Stevie Wonder. Draw your own conclusions from that

Rich kids from Connecticut do seem to be Texan some times.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Rich kids from Connecticut do seem to be Texan some times.

Yeah, but he still waved at Stevie Wonder

I don't care if you're from Mars. That was a bad blunder

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Rich kids from Connecticut do seem to be Texan some times.

Yeah, but he still waved at Stevie Wonder

I don't care if you're from Mars. That was a bad blunder

Yeah its as bad as when you go to shake a guys hand, because that is what you do when you meet new people, and realize after the fact that he lost his hand to an IED and can't shake it. So you quickly change hands to shake his other hand.

When you see someone you wave, its a common occurrence and basically just a nicety. Its a blunder on his part but its an exceptionally small one and the way the media and the left ran with it for years just made me have nothing but contempt for both the media and the political parties we currently have.

btw im a Moderate, every survey I have taken has put me almost dead center. Bush was better then Obama, Clinton was Meh, (letting Osama go really bugged me) and Bush Snr was great, I mean how can you not love a president who throws up on the Japanese Ambassador

 Ghazkuul wrote:
Bush was better then Obama, Clinton was Meh, (letting Osama go really bugged me)

What can you really say to that? I mean, I can show evidence that he made a good faith effort - he launched airstrikes in Sudan and Afghanistan, he oversaw the creation of Alec Station and Able Danger, and so on - but as always, I suspect that facts won't be able to penetrate that layer of thick fudgey bs that allows you to write off, presumably with a straight face, the presidency that tried in good faith to kill Bin Laden and the presidency that actually did kill Bin Laden, in favor of the one that shut down Alec Station, that shut down Able Danger, and said he didn't really think too much about OBL 6 months after 9/11 - in his haste to abandon the search so we could instead invade the wrong country?

What can you say to that kind of logic?

 Ouze wrote:

 Ghazkuul wrote:
Bush was better then Obama, Clinton was Meh, (letting Osama go really bugged me)

What can you really say to that? I mean, I can show evidence that he made a good faith effort - he launched airstrikes in Sudan and Afghanistan, he oversaw the creation of Alec Station and Able Danger, and so on - but as always, I suspect that facts won't be able to penetrate that layer of thick fudgey bs that allows you to write off, presumably with a straight face, the presidency that tried in good faith to kill Bin Laden and the presidency that actually did kill Bin Laden, in favor of the one that shut down Alec Station, that shut down Able Danger, and said he didn't really think too much about OBL 6 months after 9/11 - in his haste to abandon the search so we could instead invade the wrong country?

What can you say to that kind of logic?

That's all useless information. You can't deny common sense that every knows with reason and logic, those things are just warm fuzzies.

 Ouze wrote:

 Ghazkuul wrote:
Bush was better then Obama, Clinton was Meh, (letting Osama go really bugged me)

What can you really say to that? I mean, I can show evidence that he made a good faith effort - he launched airstrikes in Sudan and Afghanistan, he oversaw the creation of Alec Station and Able Danger, and so on - but as always, I suspect that facts won't be able to penetrate that layer of thick fudgey bs that allows you to write off, presumably with a straight face, the presidency that tried in good faith to kill Bin Laden and the presidency that actually did kill Bin Laden, in favor of the one that shut down Alec Station, that shut down Able Danger, and said he didn't really think too much about OBL 6 months after 9/11 - in his haste to abandon the search so we could instead invade the wrong country?

What can you say to that kind of logic?

Spoiler:

I feel like now would be a good time to dig out my "OT is reasonable?" image macro...

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Rich kids from Connecticut do seem to be Texan some times.

Johnson was as Texan as one can get.

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Rich kids from Connecticut do seem to be Texan some times.

After reading Frazz's post, I now realise you thought I was talking about Bush and not Johnson.

Points and laughs at Co'tor Shas




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 Frazzled wrote:

 Co'tor Shas wrote:
Rich kids from Connecticut do seem to be Texan some times.

Johnson was as Texan as one can get.

Could have been remembered as one of the great presidents for his social reforms and civil rights acts, and of course, a Johnson that didn't get bogged down in Nam, would easily have won a second term and do the world a favour by keeping Nixon away from 1600.

But, if we didn't have Watergate, the career of Dustin Hoffman might have stalled, if he hadn't done that all the president's men film, and we wouldn't have got Marathon Man...

Tricky trade off

Indeed. Your logic is flawless.