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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[LordSlowpoke]

And people think that something that happens during a presidency, even if it's a delayed reaction/leak of something started/caused during the previous administration, is the fault of the sitting president.

yeah, people are too short sighted for long-term planning to work. or the terms are too short, one or the other

meaning you've got politicians who focus too much on the long term kicked out and replaced by the ones who change a lot of shit that affects people directly (and are praised for the effects of the former ones long term planning)

therefore, the presidential seat needs to be abolished. no president -> nobody to blame -> system improves exponentially, logic is flawless

in an alternative scenario a party will go all out during the end of a term that they know will be their last and radically fuck up everything for the next one, letting them take the flak and regaining the seat later

[Owlbread]

Only on the Republican side. We leftists have outgrown these silly superstitions.

I think popular support for Clinton that continues to this day among Liberals is proof that they are just as prone to the tribalism, or whatever it is, as their Republican foes.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Bill Clinton prevented a slide into complete Reaganocracy, and at least for that I respect him. As for Hillary, she hardly lacks detractors. Obama defeated her in 08, and she'll have to swing left on a lot of things if she expects to win in 2016. I'd still prefer Warren, but alas, she's not running.

[Owlbread]

I was referring to Bill Clinton primarily who I consider to be in some ways more despicable than Bush. Take a look at this interview with Christopher Hitchens. I found it very interesting.

[GlyphGryph]

Here's the thing - look at all the presidents we've had in recent memory.

Clinton has a single redeeming factor - he wasn't anywhere near as bad as everyone else. He was a politician through and through, but he wasn't nearly as bad as the people who came before and after him, he didn't do anything particularly egregious, esp. comparitively, and he was president during a great economic situation.

Basically - terrible human being, but at least he didn't seem dedicated to destroying our entire country and everything it was founded on at every turn! His evil was all... personal, really. It was selfish, but it was all... petty.

He didn't do evil on the grandscale of our other presidents, really.

[Owlbread]

Christopher Hitchens gives the example of Clinton calling in air strikes on Sudanese medical institutions to distract the media following the Lewinsky scandal. That's unusually terrible.

[GlyphGryph]

No, it accused him of hurrying and not doing due diligence because of the pressure of the scandal. Not quite the same thing.

Even if he DID do it intentionally, it's still a pretty damn petty evil on the scale of the evils presidents usually get up to.

[Owlbread]

But what evils do presidents "usually get up to"? Are you referring to Watergate? Vietnam? Iraq? You seem to have a benchmark for Presidents, a sort of "average" of evil, but how do you define it?

Clinton may have been the man that allegedly ended the "Reaganocracy" but he's also the man that, in order to keep corporate America happy, quite single handedly destroyed the old link between the Democrats and FDR's New Deal. At one point ended up proposing and passing a bill to cut welfare that was harsher than anything the Republicans had proposed.

It's funny that one of the very arguments Hitchens has the most beef with is that of the Left at the time who were saying tripe like "What, do you want Dan Quayle to be President?" whenever they were challenged on Clinton's character. The way we're talking now seems reminiscent of that.

[alway]

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/sen-paul-says-hes-suing-over-nsa-policies

Discuss.

Terrible publicity stunt. The judicial system can't do jack shit about it; that's already been made abundantly clear. The legislative branch gave the executive branch a mandate to fuck up everything with vague wording and a terrible series of bills, essentially telling the executive branch they had free range to form secret cabals to search for and destroy any perceived and nebulously defined enemies of the state. The legislature is the only body capable of reversing the crapshow they created, and taking it to the judges won't change anything.

If he wants to end what his own body created, he needs to raise a shitstorm there; he needs to go on a media blitz against those supporting these tactics; he needs to hold the feet of the legislature to the fire. All this secret spying is immensely unpopular with pretty much the entire electorate, and could be a topic with which much traction can be gained.

"Throw out these cabal-forming enemies of our modern, digital society, who are working to undermine the very pillars of our digital economy and sacred freedoms of the press, association, and privacy," should be the rallying cry against those in his own branch in support of these programs. Pass actual legislation to end it, going on a media witch hunt against those who support these programs until sufficient votes exist to pass legislation ending it, regardless of party affiliation.

But instead, he brings it to the courts, who are simply going to uphold the very laws his branch of government created.

[GlyphGryph]

Look, I'm not saying Clinton wasn't a terrible president. But he bombing a medical factory is... nothing, really, on the scale of "evil shit" presidents get up to, and with the exception of Carter all the presidents in modern history have been psychopaths of various types. And when I'm talking evil, I'm not talking about petty shit like fucking watergate - I'm talking about actual serious stuff with serious consequences.

Kennedy invaded other countries for what amounted to no reason at all, killing thousands, and cementing the rule of some pretty terrible dictators. Which isn't that bad, really, but he had a limited amount of time to do serious damage, so you gotta give him credit for trying.

Lyndon Johnson, yeah - Vietnam. There's nothing about Vietnam that THIS asshole wasn't responsible for.  In addition, following his leadership, he instituted the now cemented tradition of going to war without actually needing to declare war! And he made up the stuff that he used to justify it. The whole thing was based on misinformation Johnson personally ensured was fed to congress and the media, in collusion with the Pentagon who were looking for any excuse to go gung ho in the region, after campaigning against intervention. Notice any traditions set up there? And it wasn't just vietnam - he napalmed civilian villages in Guatamala and funded the death squads that roamed the country, and he orchestrated the coup against the democratically elected president of Brazil, replacing it with a military dictatorship and killing thousands upon thousands.

Nixon... oh hell, Nixon. Watergate was a bit of petty stupidity that got him kicked out of office, but this man destroyed American's faith that government could ever be a tool for good. He lied to them constantly, about everything. He conducted multiple wars, attempting to hide them from the public, and more than a million people died from his actions, half of them solely due to his actions. He essentially destroyed Cambodia out of nothing but arrogance, with no potential gain ever to be realized. He plummeted the US into a terrible war debt, and strengthened the military-industrial complex immensely, he deceived the population constantly and has what may be the largest body county to his name of any modern (post-WWII) president.

(And his outgoing legacy was to bring Pol Pot to power, though I'll let him off here since unlike the rest of it this probably wasn't intentional) So, yeah... if Watergate is what you think of when you think of "evil" and Nixon... you've got a weird definition of evil.

Ford was mostly okay - except he set the precedent that Presidents are and always will be above the law. I actually forgot about Ford, who is now officially getting my vote as "less terrible than Clinton and thus everybody else but Carter". He also did quite a bit to subvert the rule of law, and did all of the "normal" evils of continuing policies that killed a whole bunch of people for no good reason, but most of that was momentum and following congress's lead, so... moving on.

Carter was good. I don't care what anyone else says about how terrible a president he was - he enacted good policies with good consequences and didn't order anybody assassinated, overthrow any democratically elected governments, and he even managed to avoid killing a whole bunch of people because he was bored. His most egregious sins seems to have been letting to many other people get away with too much stuff he arguably had the power to stop - but that's not really "evil" on the mass-murder scale we've been operating on so far. His only real sin was being followed by...

Reagan.
You could fill a goddamn book with all the evil shit this guy did. Compared to the beacon of evil that was Reagan, Clinton's evil star isn't even visible in the night sky of presidential evils. Nothing he did even comes close. Grenada, El Salvador, Angola, and, of course, Nicaragua.
Not only was he utterly evil in terms of foreign policy, basically treating the world as a list of people to be killed (he really brought back politicial assassination as the cool thing) he also did everything in his power to destroy us domestically - Hell, his AIDs policy alone probably caused more harm Ford managed in his entire presidency.
Oh, and he helped genocide the Mayans. Genocide is pretty evil, right?

Bush Sr - he helped finish the Genocide Reagan started, invaded Panama, and a whole bunch of other stuff...

Clinton did a LOT of terrible things. Horrible things. He was worse than Carter and Ford... but was he really any more "evil" than most of his peers? Doubtful.

And we already know what happened since then...

[Max White]

Wow ok...
Suddenly Keating and Fraser look like fucking saints. You guys have had a really bad run, you know that?

I still put a lot of blame on your non compulsory voting system. When you don't have to vote, the only people who do are either crazy or intelligent, and intelligent people are too small a demographic to count.

[Sheb]

Well, that and the fact that they're a fucking huge country that saw itself as either half an hegemon or an hegemon. It's harder to invade country on a whim when you're Belgium.

[kaijyuu]

Can I just pop in to state that Andrew Jackson was an evil, evil president and the fact he's on the 20 dollar bill is fucking appalling?

[10ebbor10]

Well, that and the fact that they're a fucking huge country that saw itself as either half an hegemon or an hegemon. It's harder to invade country on a whim when you're Belgium.

We did invade Germany once...

[Vector]

Can I just pop in to state that Andrew Jackson was an evil, evil president and the fact he's on the 20 dollar bill is fucking appalling?

God.  I'd... forgotten about that.

It is fucking appalling.