The Worst US President of All Time - According to SYM (no spam)

[Dowaco]

I am not saying Bush is exempt from criticism because he is still in office, I am saying that you cannot compare his presidency to one that has been chewed, digested and excreted by history.

Nearly everybody loved him in 2002 and many of the same folks hate him now. If you took this poll three or four years ago he would be on the best list. Which is also unfair since the events of the last four years had not unfolded yet.

Even his most zealous detractors should be able to agree that Bush should get an incomplete rather than a failing grade.

[Chimaera182]

Who's nearly everyone? Nearly everyone didn't love him in 2002, and those who were swayed into that camp only did so because of the recentness of 9/11. That isn't a fair way to guage how much a person is loved or how good a leader they are; those are extenuating circumstances, and anyone who was in that position would have seen exactly the same upswelling of partiotic fervor (this kind of swelling of pride in one's leaders has past precedent; two examples fresh in my mind are with Nicholas II: one of the reasons [not the chief reason] for the starting of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904 was to instill love in the czar and unite the Russian people [this of course backfired and nearly caused the deposing of Nicholas nearly a decade earlier]; another was at the start of WW1, and patriotic feelings were running strong and the common Russian was confidant in Nicholas II; and yet, Nicholas II had quite a lot of faults which helped to facilitate his overthrow). Just because people may have mistakenly loved Dubya (nearly everyone my eye) doesn't mean he was a great president then.

[Xandax]

<snip>
Even his most zealous detractors should be able to agree that Bush should get an incomplete rather than a failing grade.

But you often get graded for the work done so far as well. Thus you can very well recive a falling grade before the end, as it then indicates you need to "up yourself" to recive a passing grade.
It works that way many places in both life and educational systems (when pulling in the word "grades").

In my job when I get evaluated, I do so amongst others on the things I've accomplished thus far, and what I did not accomplish. This is held up against possible future possibilities, however if I keep underperforming, I'll be sacked eventhough I might have great potential. It is no different for a person in the eye of the public. A sport-start for instance, often gets evaluated on what he accomplishes as well as his potential. Fail often and he'll be benched untill proving himself again. In various educational institutions, if you miss to many classes, fail to many tests or completely do not hand in papers, you'll be evaluated on this even if you potentially could get straight A at the exames.

It is not an anti-Bush thing or a president thing, but it is the way the world works and the way we as people evalute performance. You should never in my view avoid evaluting people on a regular basis and "judge" their "office" (whether it is common work, educational, sport or anything else) based amongst other things on that.

Also - a good indicator of future actions are past actions.

[Dowaco]

Looks like Bush is on his way back to a positive approval rating (44% approve, 51% dissaprove 5% unsure) Maybe now he will be leading 44 percent of the country. Like I've said before, the public has a short attention span. By election time I predict he will be at 50/50 again.

Latest Gallup poll
Bush approval rating rebounds in new poll - Yahoo! News

This gamebanshee poll was not intended (I presume) to be a popularity contest but an historical consideration of what various presidents did while in office and how it affected us as individuals, the country and the world.
I maintain that Bush should not be considered as worst or best until this can be determined. If you want to take a short term view then you have to dissect all the president's tenures and compare Bush 2005-2006 to Nixon 1968-1969, Clinton 1997-1998 and Washington 1887-1888

Sports stars are paid to perform now, today. They stay as long as they perform well because championships are determined in a span of 19 games or 173 games or whatever.
School is about teaching children, not comparing their performance. If a kid needs help, then he should be assisted.
Presidents are elected for 4-8 years and performance is measured in that time frame. There is no championship at the end of that time. Life goes on with no winner weather he was good or horrible.

I understand that you guys hate George W right now. I would guess you hated him from the 2000 election you believe was invalid, but I cannot say he is the worst president of all time unless a World War breaks out or the country goes into another Great Depression or he is found to be sleeping with Donald Rumsfeld (ala Jim McGreevey). There are presidents who are responsible for some of those things but you think GWB is the worst of all time. Let's let history make that call.

[VonDondu]

Having Bush on the list is like saying you are picking the superbowl champion after 10 games. He has not served his time yet. Plenty of time to achieve world peace, cure cancer and repel alien invaders from Tao Ceti.

Are you suggesting that in the next two years, President Bush will achieve world peace, cure cancer and repel alien invaders from Tao Ceti?

But seriously, Bush has already served one full term. That's enough by which to judge him, and as far as I'm concerned, I've seen enough. He has been given the opportunity to serve a second term. To use your analogy, he has a second shot at the Super Bowl. Why shouldn't we judge a President for what he accomplished (or ruined) during his first term? That's all the time that some Presidents get. If you're going to argue that Bush should have a chance to "finish what he started in his first term", I have to say that's a strange view to take of a Presidential term. What would we say to any President who said, "Don't expect me to get anything done in my first term; I'm saving up everything for my second term."

[fable]

INearly everybody loved him in 2002...

The poll site I linked you to before shows that he was never loved "by nearly everyone," but rather, supported on the sole question of Iraq for some while after the invasion, and even then, not by an overwhelming sample. Please dont place your personal feelings as statements of fact, least of all in an international forum.

Even his most zealous detractors should be able to agree that Bush should get an incomplete rather than a failing grade.

Nicely phrased. You arent actually stating that his detractors agree any rating of Dubya should be set aside until his presidency is finished. Youre only stating they should. You would be hard pressed to find any Bush detractor who agrees with you, however, not after the anti Clinton machine started rolling over his presidency within a year of his first presidency. It seems that those who support an incumbent party are always willing to say "lets wait for his-her term to expire" while never willing to extend the privilege to the opposing party. Me, I figure the elected should always be available for evaluation by those whom they hold power over. And Bush is presiding over a dangerously failed presidency that has been allowed to run roughshod over federal laws for far too long. If any official is allowed to continue in office without evaluation as long as they are in office, the idea of a "free nation" becomes a joke, and a dictator can escape review as long as they cling to power.

[VonDondu]

You would be hard pressed to find any Bush detractor who agrees with you, however, not after the anti Clinton machine started rolling over his presidency within a year of his first presidency. It seems that those who support an incumbent party are always willing to say "lets wait for his-her term to expire" while never willing to extend the privilege to the opposing party...

The Republicans were calling President Clinton a "failure" less than three weeks after he took office because he had failed to fulfill all of his campaign promises. I am not exaggerating. It doesn't surprise me that the same people now say that President Bush needs more time to yield the fruits of his labors. Success is just around the corner!

[jopperm2]

Wow! the shrub is doing "better" than I thought he would on here. I thought for sure that Brother Jackson would take the cake.

As for the complete vs. incomplete presidency debate, I can see both sides. I definitely think all presidents should be scrutinized from acceptance speech until America is forgetten in the annuls of history. Actually, time spent before election should be scrutinized too. So basically age 16 or so on.

I also see the merits of waiting until after a presidency to fully judge it.

Sooo.. I guess what I'm saying is that it is fair to judge a president at any stage of the game, but you cannot expect full historical accuracy from such an excercise. We're not exactly an objective panel of historians and political scientists either though.

Oh, and the only way I can see Dubya achieving world peace, curing cancer, and repelling alien invasion is by killing everyone -- thus ending war and disease at once -- and ruining the planet so much that no alien race would want to come here.

[Magrus]

Wow! the shrub is doing "better" than I thought he would on here. I thought for sure that Brother Jackson would take the cake.

Hmm, I think it may be because most Americans don't pay attention to history outside of the fluff approved for children/student consumption. The Indian Removal act was a good thing! They needed a new place to live, and Jackson helped them find new homes. YAY! Perhaps the Cold War didn't teach Americans as much as they thought it did? Or perhaps the politicians more than the people?

[Kytherus]

For me it was a tossup between Jimmy Carter and Bubba (Clinton). I gave the Nod to Clinton. For the sole reason that he had Monica on her Knees under the same Roof that Lincoln Angueshed over the Civil War and Roosevelt spent Night after Sleepless Night Pondering the Fate of the Free World.

"I did not have Sexual relations with that Woman" :laugh:

IMO, somethings are just not Forgivable

[Chimaera182]

A man gets head and that is a major point against him? I would find doing it in places of great historical import quite exciting; sex in normal public places doesn't thrill me as much as it used to.

I still dunno who I'd rate as worst president in history thus far.

[VonDondu]

For me it was a tossup between Jimmy Carter and Bubba (Clinton). I gave the Nod to Clinton. For the sole reason that he had Monica on her Knees under the same Roof that Lincoln Angueshed over the Civil War and Roosevelt spent Night after Sleepless Night Pondering the Fate of the Free World.

The same roof under which George W. Bush tells fart jokes on a daily basis, and where his father George H. W. Bush took showers with his dog?

If you're really going to judge a President's tenure in office by his personal behavior, then why stop at what he does in the White House? Would you excuse Clinton if he had conducted his extramarital affair outside of the White House? And if you're really bothered by the fact that he lied about sex, what about all of the other Presidents who have lied about sex? If it hadn't been for the reprehensible behavior of Linda Tripp and Kenneth Star, Clinton wouldn't have been caught. And what about the things that Presidents have done before they took office? Do those things count? Or is the White House the only place where moral crimes can ever be committed?

I wouldn't know how to judge the most disgusting President of all time. But I've heard enough disgusting things about a lot of them to know that "honor and dignity in the White House" is just a myth we like to believe in. To take a minor example that I personally could never forgive (which isn't really all that important in the grand scheme of things), George Bush Sr. let his dogs chase and kill the squirrels in the Rose Garden that his predecessor Ronald Reagan had tamed by feeding them by hand. If that doesn't tell us something about Bush's attitude and character, I don't know what does.

[Magrus]

For me it was a tossup between Jimmy Carter and Bubba (Clinton). I gave the Nod to Clinton. For the sole reason that he had Monica on her Knees under the same Roof that Lincoln Angueshed over the Civil War and Roosevelt spent Night after Sleepless Night Pondering the Fate of the Free World.

"I did not have Sexual relations with that Woman" :laugh:

IMO, somethings are just not Forgivable

If Clinton had been hammering on goats in the Oval Office and did what he did with the economy, I'd still think he was a good president. There were like, actual jobs in this country then and stuff. People make fun of me for being a nerdy drunken pervert, but I am damn good at my job. What I do outside of work has no effect on that.

[fable]

If Clinton had been hammering on goats in the Oval Office and did what he did with the economy, I'd still think he was a good president. There were like, actual jobs in this country then and stuff. People make fun of me for being a nerdy drunken pervert, but I am damn good at my job. What I do outside of work has no effect on that.

That's well put, in your inimitable fashion that's always a pleasure to read. By contrast, I couldn't care less if an official is as prim and proper as a dead fish mounted over a fireplace: if they can't perform the job successfully, they're still an utter failure. Not a hint of scandal ever touched Gerald Ford or Calvin Coolidge, for example, but they had nothing to offer when in government.

Clinton's ethics make me crawl. If he ventured too close to me, I would probably fumigate the premises, based not on Lewinsky (though Clinton showed lamentable taste, there) but on a host of small stories I have good witnesses on. But he did his job amazingly well, especially when you consider that he had a Congress that from his first day in office was out for his blood any way they could get it.

[Magrus]

That's well put, in your inimitable fashion that's always a pleasure to read.

:laugh: Thanks, I think. Most politicians are power hungry people, and tend to have reprehensible morals. The higher up the person gets in the government, those two qualities tend to become more and more pronounced. Still, I'd prefer a sleezeball that does his job well to a goody-two shoes that can't do the job. The problem that leads to is, what are the sleezeballs doing with their power that the average guy does not know about?

[jopperm2]

Well put, Magrus. I do think that a person's behavior is something to consider though. It's not the most important thing, but I do think it counts.

Mostly this is because it affects how the rest of the world and even people in this country think of the office and of Washington in general. When I was in France during Clinton's years, the French girls I talked to all liked him because they thought he was attractive and not afraid to "get the job done," if you catch my drift. They didn't know anything about his politics at all, but he was some sort of pseudo sex-symbol.

What if he decided to go to war? Would the rest of the world take him as seriously? Probably a lot of world leaders would. I'm not so sure about their constituents though.

For those that are wondering how they could find him attractive, I asked the same question. Their reply was "he's better than monsieur Chirac!" I suppose that's so.

[Magrus]

Yeah...a number of girls that I asked about their votes the first time Bush Jr got elected admitted to voting for him just because he was "cute". They regretted doing so thoroughly when he got elected and said "I never thought he'd win, I just voted for him because he was cute! Ugh, stupid people voting for him." UGH. Stupid people. That kind of made me wonder what would happen if a super model or porn star actually made it into the elections for the presidency though. Chances are, we would end up with the war on bad hair days if that ever happened.

[Chimaera182]

I know. This is part of my problem with democracy in the U.S.; I don't feel that the people are properly informed enough about anything, which is how we can wind up with someone as reprehensible as Dubya on the "throne." They vote him in just because he agrees with them on one or two points (let me rephrase that, he "says" he agrees with them on one or two points), and this somehow makes him better than the opposition. Or he got voted in because he looked "cute." Is this how we're voting our president's in? I remember some snide jokes being made after Clinton's election on how he got into the office just on his looks and his charm with women (a rather callous, sexist remark if ever I saw one; because of course women would vote a man in based on looks alone because they don't have a man's intelligence to vote in someone credible ). We vote in these people based on the most foolish things, and we call it democracy despite the fact that we virtually are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, and we have to make that decision based on something so infinitely unimportant. It reminds me of Lenin, in some way. In this History of Modern Russia class of mine, the teacher mentioned how Lenin wanted it to be a democratic process all the way... after all, everyone would vote Bolshevik all the way, because according to Lenin world revolution was at hand. When they didn't, he did away with the duly-elected parliamentary council (which was mostly staffed by social revolutionaries and constitutional democrats, not at all the staunchest supporters of Lenin and bolshevism). He felt that the peasants could be educated into a revolutionary force with full democratic freedom, but until then they would have to be "guided" by Communist Party members.

That's pretty much all we have now. We are "guided" into choosing one of two people, neither of which are really people we might find ideally suitable for the job of presidency. We are forced to choose from a pair of candidates which don't entirely appeal to us, so we have to latch on to one or two ideals that we assume they agree with us on. I swear, fascism is more honest. I wish people had to take some kind of test before voting to at least indicate they know something about the issues at hand. People voting for someone who's cute... god that's just dispecable.

[Dowaco]

(a rather callous, sexist remark if ever I saw one; because of course women would vote a man in based on looks alone because they don't have a man's intelligence to vote in someone credible )

I remember women voting for JFK because he was cute.
Presidents have been voted for because of their looks since the Kennedy-Nixon debate was televised in 1960. Running for President is nothing more than a PR campaign. The sad part is that for all the fluff and posturing that goes on in a campaign, the people we elect have a really serious and important job to do.

Clinton was not only good with women, a trait that helped get him elected, he made the pusuit of them a hobby that interfered with his work. It baffles me that women's organizations always stood by Clinton despite his degrading treatment of them. Is visual sex appeal more powerful than integrity? The hansome rogue battling the mean pompous aristocrats may be an image that attracts some women.

Presidents like Reagan and Bush who are not counted among the intellectual elite, rely on a staff of talented individuals to run the country while they provide the image that goes on TV. The same can be said of most presidents, Democrats and Republicans. This country is too big to be ruled by one man or woman but politicians know their demographic and they know why people vote. Its style not substance.

[fable]

Presidents have been voted for because of their looks since the Kennedy-Nixon debate was televised in 1960.

Much further back than that. Both Harding and Roosevelt were considered dashing men who got the "ladies' vote" because of that. But then, there has always been a section of any electorate, regardless of sex, whose lack of brains can and has been used to justify dictatorships.

Running for President is nothing more than a PR campaign.

No. Just because the last pair engineered for Dubya by Carl Rove have been notorious for lack of content and filthy tactics doesn't mean any or all previous campaigns have been like that. They have varied in content, and some have been notable for their clear statement of issues and their serious discussion. I can provide some suggestions for reading material on this, if you'd like.

Clinton was not only good with women, a trait that helped get him elected, he made the pusuit of them a hobby that interfered with his work.

What is your source for this? I personally detest the man, but I don't go around restating the neo-con sleaze they state that passes for Clinton biographical material. If you're going to make accusations of this sort, please back them up.