Thanks for the slam against California; I guess you thought that was necessary and added to the quality of debate.
Humor dude. I forgot you have none.
Historians view Andrew Johnson as a white supremacist that opposed extending basic human rights to freed slaves. He opposed the 14th Amendment which provided for due process and equal protection for Blacks under the law. Moreover, he issued numerous vetoes of equal rights bills. That is what I meant by oppressing the South, since more than 40 percent of the South was Black. When I used the term "South," I was referring to the polulation as a whole. I was not thinking only of former Confederate officials and white land owners, to whom Johnson showed much compassion. The House impeached Johnson and he came within one vote of impeachment in the Senate. Those are historical facts. And for those reasons, Johnson is number one on my worst list.
Thank you for the clarification. Of course it made perfectly good sense to take illiterate slaves and put them immediately into positions of power and give them responsibilities they had no concept of how to handle.
That explains why they were so welcomed in the North.
Lyndon Johnson had success passing civil rights legislation and that is why he did not make it to number one on my worst Presidents list. Otherwise, his Presidency was a stunning failure that had profoundly negative effects for years after he was gone. Johnson’s ill-conceived “Great Society” program helped to create a generation of welfare dependents. Instead of integrating the economically disadvantaged into their cities and communities, the program concentrated poor people, many of them Black, in Federally funded housing ghettoes infested with crime and drug abuse. The “Great Society” program swallowed billions of taxpayer dollars while actually widening the gulf between the poor and the rest of society. Was that Johnson’s intention? Of course not, but it was the effect.
Johnson merely tried to update Roosevelt's obsolete handout programs. I gues it would have been far more acceptable to leave people on the street where they are instead of at least trying to provide them shelter.
It was Johnson’s massive failure in SE Asia that vaulted him into second place on my list. Like Bush 43, he did not trust his generals, and disregarded their advice. Far more damaging than his tactical blunders was the failure of his will to win. By 1968, US soldiers were dying at a rate of 1000 per month while being under the command of a President that did not take the steps advised by his generals that were necessary to win. Johnson’s stated policy was the “containment” of the communists, not their defeat. Johnson did not want to lose the war, but he never took the steps necessary to win; such as a ground assault of North Viet Nam, or intradiction of supplies from China and Russia. A truly deplorable situation. Nixon continued Johnson’s failed policy of containment, and while his bombing of the North got the enemy to pretend to negotiate peace, his end game included the abandonment of the SE Asian battlefield by US ground troops. Instead of a policy designed to win, Nixon substituted the process of Vietnamization, which led directly to outright defeat. That defeat, accelerated by the US Congress when it rejected Ford’s request for continued funding, led to many thousands of deaths in North on South retribution, and cleared the way for sociopaths like Pol Pot to grab power in Cambodia at the point of a gun. He, of course, committed one of the greatest genocides in world history. Had Johnson jettisoned his failed policy of containment and showed the will necessary to defeat the communists in SE Asia, then perhaps many millions of lives would have been spared the fate that resulted from Nixon’s abandonment of the battlefield.
Your knowledge of history as far as the Vietnam War is concerned leaves MUCH to be desired. You seem to have quite a few facts mixed and matched. Instead of doing a page long response right here, I will address Vietnam as a separate issue and we can have us a discussion. I'll even try to not slam that state you're from.
Your defense of Bush 43 is less than convincing. You mentioned that he dealt with an oncoming recession. Here is the reality: Bush has borrowed far more money than any US President in history. He has increased the US National Debt by $3 trillion dollars! That’s trillion with a “t.” Meanwhile he came up with GDP growth rates of 2 to 3 percent. You could go outside right now, pick the first person walking by on the street, give him $3 trillion (of his children’s money) to spend, and he could do better than Bush’s pathetic 2 to 3 percent growth rates. Bush, like Johnson, disregarded the advice of his generals. This time it has cost us $500 billion. If Bush had put in the 400,000 troops that his generals told him were necessary, then much of that expense might have been avoided. Who knows? What we do know is that the path that Bush and Rumsfeld chose has been disastrous economically, and led us to the brink of political defeat. We can only hope that General Petraeus can reverse four years of failed Bush policy in Iraq.
