Who was the best American president of recent decades?

[joseph5620]

You have no idea.
Ford didn't do badly during the time he was president. There were no wars when he was finished, and the economy was not too bad.

Nixon brought home the troops from Viet Nam. I've always thought he was not guilty of what he was accused of (Watergate), I think he was set up.

You're an idiot if you believe that. He was guilty

[ßringer]

Lyndon was crap... You forgot to mention dragging us into the Vietnam war, the greatest blunder in american foreign policy. Also all those social programs have done nothing, if they worked, poverty would have shrunken, not ballooned over the past few decades..
But I do agree he was a very shrewd politician

Not the worst, but def not the best

Horse****.

First of all, I mentioned vietnam. I acknowledged that it's an albatross around his neck that prevents him from scoring higher than he actually should in the same way that watergate prevents Nixon from receiving full credit for his accomplishments.

The war on poverty absolutely worked from 1967 through 1999. Actually, a compilation of data just came out last month showing precisely that.

http://www.datavisualisations.net/vi...ome-since-1967

The 1990s is when NAFTA was signed and major provisions in Glass-Steagall were repealed. You'd be absolutely ******ed to deny the impact that those two things along have had on increasing poverty in this country since then. You'd be more insane to try and hang the fallout from those bills around Lyndon Johnson's neck when the data suggests otherwise.

Secondly, if you want to actually discuss the moral merits of the vietnam war then I'd be more than happy to have an in-depth discussion about that, but not if you're not going to acknowledge the failings of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy for planting the seeds for that war to begin with.

http://thevietnamwar.info/us-preside...e-vietnam-war/

Johnson blundered Vietnam. There's no arguing that he didn't, but there's a lot of really interesting nuance there and it personally affected him to a nearly crippling extent.

Here's an infamous photo of him crying while listening to an audio recording made by his son-in-law who was serving in Vietnam describing to him what was taking place on the ground there.



I also think that Vietnam has long since been replaced by the Iraq invasion under Bush as our biggest foreign policy blunder ever, what with the rise of ISIS now affecting dozens of nations across the world, the entire destabilization of the middle east, and the threat seeming to grow larger every week. And that's not even mentioning the cost of Bush's war vs. the cost of Vietnam.

[TheUnbiased]

Obama will make the top 10 in the future.

[ßringer]

Letter grades:


John F Kennedy A

Lyndon Johnson C

Richard Nixon C

Gerald Ford B

Jimmy Carter B

Ronald Reagan B

Bill Clinton F

Barack Obama F

George Bush Jr. D

George Bush Sr. B

How the **** are you gonna give Kennedy an A but Johnson a C?

Kennedy couldn't even get the voting rights act or the civil rights act passed without Johnson's help. Kennedy introduced the legislation but had nearly no support from any of the opposition in regards to supporting it. It took Johnson literally bullying members of congress and playing the liberal Northwest senators and conservative Southern senators to an absolutely brilliant degree to even pull off. Neither of them would've ever passed were it not for Johnson's persuasive grit and intellect.

Kennedy had been dead for 2 years before the voting rights act was even passed, FFS.

You can make the argument that you're docking points from Johnson for Vietnam (you'd have to dock him incredibly hard to give him a C, IMO), but if that's the case then what grounds are you giving Kennedy an A on? Being handsome, his oratory prowess, or the fact that he banged Marilyn Monroe?

Also, @ rating Bush Jr higher than Obama - They guy who successfully cleaned up all of his messes and turned our economy around.

[Sugar Adam Ali]

Horse****.

First of all, I mentioned vietnam. I acknowledged that it's an albatross around his neck that prevents him from scoring higher than he actually should in the same way that watergate prevents Nixon from receiving full credit for his accomplishments.

The war on poverty absolutely worked from 1967 through 1999. Actually, a compilation of data just came out last month showing precisely that.

http://www.datavisualisations.net/vi...ome-since-1967

The 1990s is when NAFTA was signed and major provisions in Glass-Steagall were repealed. You'd be absolutely ******ed to deny the impact that those two things along have had on increasing poverty in this country since then. You'd be more insane to try and hang the fallout from those bills around Lyndon Johnson's neck when the data suggests otherwise.

Secondly, if you want to actually discuss the moral merits of the vietnam war then I'd be more than happy to have an in-depth discussion about that, but not if you're not going to acknowledge the failings of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy for planting the seeds for that war to begin with.

http://thevietnamwar.info/us-preside...e-vietnam-war/

Johnson blundered Vietnam. There's no arguing that he didn't, but there's a lot of really interesting nuance there and it personally affected him to a nearly crippling extent.

Here's an infamous photo of him crying while listening to an audio recording made by his son-in-law who was serving in Vietnam describing to him what was taking place on the ground there.



I also think that Vietnam has long since been replaced by the Iraq invasion under Bush as our biggest foreign policy blunder ever, what with the rise of ISIS now affecting dozens of nations across the world, the entire destabilization of the middle east, and the threat seeming to grow larger every week. And that's not even mentioning the cost of Bush's war vs. the cost of Vietnam.

Nafta and glass/seagal repel did have a lot of affect... But welfare/social programs have shown to not be effective in ending poverty

Iraq could be the biggest blunder, but we didn't have the loss of life as we had in Vietnam.. Regardless, both wars were huge mistakes and the presidents that made them can't possible be considered the best president of the modern era

[ßringer]

Nafta and glass/seagal repel did have a lot of affect... But welfare/social programs have shown to not be effective in ending poverty

Iraq could be the biggest blunder, but we didn't have the loss of life as we had in Vietnam.. Regardless, both wars were huge mistakes and the presidents that made them can't possible be considered the best president of the modern era

I don't think we'll ever equal the loss of life of Vietnam again in the modern era of drones and airstrike combat. At least I ****ing hope we don't. But there are more ways of judging the cost of a war than simply comparing body counts.

If you were looking at it in a history book 100 years from now, on its surface, the Iraq invasion would seem like a microscopic blip on the radar as far as American interventions go.Especially when the body count was compared to the body counts of WWI, WWII, Vietnam, the Civil War, the Korean war, or pretty much any other major conflict that you'll find in the history books.

But like I said : Body count is just one way of assessing the cost of a war, and even that is deceptive as **** regarding the Iraq invasion given the other front in Afghanistan, the rise and spread of ISIS in to dozens of other countries resulting in thousands of other non-American casualties, and the **** that's taking place throughout the region due to destabilization.

Then there's the fact that the vietnam was cost a total of $173 billion.

The Iraq invasion has cost us $1.7 trillion, with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ir...92D0PG20130314

[ßringer]

Some of these are a bit biased (Kennedy's is very pro-Kennedy and Nixon's is a little too anti-Nixon for my liking), but these are all pretty entertaining, albeit cursory introductions to most of the Presidents in the poll here.

JFK



LBJ



Richard Nixon



Gerald Ford



Jimmy Carter



Ronald Reagan



George H.W. Bush



Bill Clinton



George W Bush



Johnson's and Clinton's are the best, IMO. Though that could just be personal bias on my part. They're all definitely worth watching. Makes me miss the days when channels like History and Biography were actually legitimately educational.

[-2 Scrappy-]

If conspiracy theories have any merit. JFK is #1. George W is the worst.

[SterlingStained]

barack obama.

despite the fact that he is a beta secret muslim cuck, he has had a successful presidency. a historic one. i dont agree with a lot of his actions and philosophies, but he has been a good president despite it all. despite ISIS growing under his watch, despite him signing the monsanto protection act. despite the destabalization attack on syria and libya.

jfk is nice, but yo ass got killed.

clinton? meh. got impeached. got caught with affairs. economic success was mostly due to the dotcom boom.

nixon? lmfaooo come on now.

gerald ford i respect. never started a war.

the bushes??? probably the two worst ones. has a lot of blood on their hands.

[The Hammer]