I agree that George W. Bush should be included. He is at least as bad as Obama, if not much worse. His Presidency was a laundry list of abuses and war crimes and corruption, but Obama has built on those abuses, war crimes, and corruption to the Nth degree. Of course, this exposes the Republican hatred for Obama as completely phony, since Obama and Bush are barely distinguishable from one another in terms of the actual substance of their policies. As for Lincoln, I believe he is the worst President in US history by far. He basically overthrew the US Constitution and the Republic for which it stood. He turned every American in the country into a de facto slave of the US government. All the abuses of the twentieth and twenty first centuries can be traced directly to Lincoln's tyranny.
Just in case anyone wants to look at some facts (although we have had campaign people tell us they don't let the facts get in the way) concerning Presidents (who get far more credit for good and bad than they should), Congresses ( who don't get near the credit for both the bad and good they do) and the debt of the United States. Here is a table I compiled from openly available information. If you look at just the Presidents, it looks like the Dems win the good side more often. Seems like no one wants to look at the facts anymore, just the emotion created by the giant blogoshpere on TV and email. Can't wait to see the discussion this causes.
Anyone can cherry pick data and with a bit of deft handling can make the numbers mean anything he wants. So . . . what can you trust? Ideology, instinct, and a life time of experience living with the results of both GOP and DEM party control of either the presidency or the Legislative Branch or both. Grudgingly I give the win to the GOP which at least does not try and remove freedom from the table and yet does figure that the average citizen should be able to keep some of what he and she earns through hard work and figures that an able bodied citizen SHOULD work for a living if possible. The Dem's leadership in those regards? Fail!
Where the hell are Johnson, Tyler, Taylor, Buchanan, etc - you know, the people who just epicly failed at their jobs? You people are so ignorant of your own history you can't name any Presidents after Madison and before Lincoln, or after Lincoln and before Roosevelt.
When you inherit a $236 billion surplus, a $161 billion surplus is nothing to brag about. Then why do you attribute to him the effects of the recession? Then prove it by quoting my statement. Your repeated failure to back up your statements proves their falseness and your intellectual dishonesty. gain, why do you continue to make false claims about my statements? I asked you to quote where I said this last time and you dodged. Several times now.
Compared to taking a $161B rapidly falling deficit to $1,400B it is. The effects of the lack of a full recovery. Why do you blame the effects of the recession on Bush? I note them regularly. OK you're just going to dodge the question as to why you only attribute deficits to Presidents nor can you show where you have done so other wise.
Except that we still had a relatively limited federal government until 1912, 50 years after Lincoln had passed from the scene. As late as 1900 federal spending was 2.7% of GDP. Today that number is about 24%. There was no FBI, DEA, or IRS. The FBI and IRS were both spawn of the Wilson admin, and the DEA can be traced back to the Harrison Act of 1914, signed by Wilson, which outlawed opium, coca, and marijuana, all of which had been readily available at the corner pharmacy more than 50 years after Lincoln's time. The godfather of the modern leviathan state is Woodrow Wilson(D, NJ), not Abraham Lincoln(R, IL).
I would disagree that Lincoln can be singled out in this way. Granted that he did engage in executive over-reach, but then so did other presidents. Remember the famous quote from Andrew Jackson where he sneered that the SCOTUS had made a ruling, now let them enforce it. Jackson probably engaged in more over-reach than Lincoln, so why not trace the planting of the seed back to him. Or for that matter Jefferson, who said he 'stretched the Constitution until it cracked' in executing the Louisiana Purchase. The truth is that we survived all of those 19th cent. presidents with limited, Constitutional government intact. It was not until the 20th century that the transformation truly began, and Wilson was its godfather. If you wish to single out Lincoln for having 'planted the seed' you have to explain why it took 50 years for that seed to germinate.
You may be correct http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/02/abraham-lincoln-was-not-the-father-of-big-government History repeats itself Looks like Obama is much like Wilson in invoking Lincoln and finding a crisis everywhere But I still don't think he should have fought the civil war. That would have prevented much of the growth caused by that war
The data is not cherry picked. It comes from the Bureau of Economic analysis, Bureau of labor Statistics, and the OMB. All of the data is publicly available. As I stated in the post with the spreadsheet. No one wants to do the hard work of actually looking up the information.
So why are you bragging about that? Trickle down and austerity. What else would you expect. Where did I say anything about Bush? See my prior posts. Another fail. What a surprise. Strawman.
Mostly due to revisionist hype built around the Lincoln Myth before the war even ended. When the Todd family finally relinquished editorial control and censorship over Lincoln's papers did the real Lincoln begin to emerge, in the early 1950's.
Woodrow Wilson's administration was the most corrupt in my book; notably the Teapot Dome scandal. I think it makes recent administrations pale in comparison. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal
Uhm, NO. The "Teapot Dome" scandal happened ENTIRELY during the administration of Warren Gamaliel Harding (R-OH). Do you even READ the links you post? Thanks. - - - Updated - - - James Polk is also no heavy hitter out of the bunch...
There's been allot of bad presidents. Wilson, being one of the worst. Nixon, should have been in jail. LBJ, Vietnam was his mess. FDR, was power hungry, threw US citizens in concentration camps, the New Deal was a flop. But, he did have redeeming qualities. Grant, ran a corrupt admin. Bush made a mess of the Middle East. Clinton, was caught lying under oath, and seems to be a all around scumbag. Obama is a complete ideologue, narcissist, and tone deaf. In no certain order, I think these were good presidents, but also had dings on their records. Teddy Roosevelt, populist, monopoly buster, but war monger. Polk, set out to accomplish everything he wanted, and all in one term. Was a war monger though. JFK, inspiring, stood at the bring of nuclear war with the soviets, kept calm and made the soviets back down. Bay of Pigs, and Vietnam were black marks on his presidency. Truman, had to fill some big shoes and make some hard decisions. Integration of the military. I could go on and on.
Neither is U.S. Grant, whose administration was easily a match for the G.W. admin, if not worse; the Republican Party was founded on the ideal of crony capitalism and corporate welfare. The Civil War created a wave of new millionaires; Cornelius Vanderbilt, then the richest man in America, quadrupled his fortune during the war, for one, and J.P. Morgan even more so, speculating in the gold rooms on the outcomes of various battles and bribing Union officers running the telegraph system to feed him advance info, for another, of many all through the military contracting pipeline selling shoddy crap for the troops.
