I'm pretty sure ordering your henchmen to break into the opposition's headquarters, bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people is pretty damn evil. I'm not interested in getting bogged down in a semantic argument over whether those actions were moral because Nixon might have been diagnosable. The man was a scumbag and did more bad than good as a President.
You realize Obama has done the last two of those as well?
Ohh this will be fun, but please support your claim.
I'm not looking to bag on Obama, as I consider him a perfectly fine president, and I seriously doubt the veracity of any smoking gun for his ties to the IRS and NSA actions taken that could mirror those of what Nixon did with the FBI. It also gets murkier since a lot of it can be judged warranted due to the "terrorist" label the president now has at his disposal.
The Presidency's power has exponentially increased every year from its inception to the current day, and each President has had a very different set of privileges, responsibilities and expectations. Nixon wasn't the first President to record the goings on in the Oval Office, he was just the most paranoid and fascist-leaning. He also wasn't the first, or last, to use the executive privilege for self-serving reasons, just the one that lost his political base while so doing.
I'm pretty sure ordering your henchmen to break into the opposition's headquarters, bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people is pretty damn evil. I'm not interested in getting bogged down in a semantic argument over whether those actions were moral because Nixon might have been diagnosable. The man was a scumbag and did more bad than good as a President.
You realize Obama has done the last two of those as well?
Ohh this will be fun, but please support your claim.
I'm not looking to bag on Obama, as I consider him a perfectly fine president, and I seriously doubt the veracity of any smoking gun for his ties to the IRS and NSA actions taken that could mirror those of what Nixon did with the FBI. It also gets murkier since a lot of it can be judged warranted due to the "terrorist" label the president now has at his disposal.
The Presidency's power has exponentially increased every year from its inception to the current day, and each President has had a very different set of privileges, responsibilities and expectation. Nixon wasn't the first President to record the goings on in the Oval Office, he was just the most paranoid and fascist-leaning. He also wasn't the first, or last, to use he executive privilege for self-serving reasons, just the one that lost his political base while so doing.
Operation Menu was the codename of a covert United States Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombing campaign conducted in eastern Cambodia from 18 March 1969 until 26 May 1970, during the Vietnam War. The targets of these attacks were sanctuaries and Base Areas of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and forces of the Viet Cong, which utilized them for resupply, training, and resting between campaigns across the border in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). The impact of the bombing campaign on the Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the PAVN, and Cambodian civilians in the bombed areas is disputed by historians.
An official United States Air Force record of U.S. bombing activity over Indochina from 1964 to 1973 was declassified by U.S. President Bill Clinton in 2000. The report gives details of the extent of the bombing of Cambodia, as well as of Laos and Vietnam. According to the data, the Air Force began bombing the rural regions of Cambodia along its South Vietnam border in 1965 under the Johnson administration; this was four years earlier than previously believed. The Menu bombings were an escalation of what had previously been tactical air attacks. Newly inaugurated President Richard Nixon authorized for the first time use of long range B-52 heavy bombers to carpet bomb Cambodia.
The bombing of Cambodia is a murky subject, and while Nixon did ramp it up to carpet bombings, the Khmer Rouge were facilitating the Viet-Kong, and weren't exactly good guys themselves, not that that justifies the action.
I'm pretty sure ordering your henchmen to break into the opposition's headquarters, bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people is pretty damn evil. I'm not interested in getting bogged down in a semantic argument over whether those actions were moral because Nixon might have been diagnosable. The man was a scumbag and did more bad than good as a President.
You realize Obama has done the last two of those as well?
Ohh this will be fun, but please support your claim.
I'm not looking to bag on Obama, as I consider him a perfectly fine president, and I seriously doubt the veracity of any smoking gun for his ties to the IRS and NSA actions taken that could mirror those of what Nixon did with the FBI. It also gets murkier since a lot of it can be judged warranted due to the "terrorist" label the president now has at his disposal.
The Presidency's power has exponentially increased every year from its inception to the current day, and each President has had a very different set of privileges, responsibilities and expectation. Nixon wasn't the first President to record the goings on in the Oval Office, he was just the most paranoid and fascist-leaning. He also wasn't the first, or last, to use he executive privilege for self-serving reasons, just the one that lost his political base while so doing.
So you have nothing, in other words.
Give me twenty years of freedom of information act requests or declassifying of information, and we'll see what surveillance assets Obama chose to access. There's no doubts that Obama has the largest surveillance network of any US President, ever.
And I can easily cite what the NSA did to Angela Merkel, et al. If we allow for non-US citizens to matter. There's also the killing of US Citizens as enemy combatants, something even Nixon didn't do.
I'm just saying a lot more presidents are shades of gray than most seem to believe. This thread seems leaning towards dog whistle blue/red things than I had in mind and I'll gladly step back.
And I can easily cite what the NSA did to Angela Merkel, et al. If we allow for non-US citizens to matter. There's also the killing of US Citizens as enemy combatants, something even Nixon didn't do.
I'm just saying a lot more presidents are shades of gray than most seem to believe. This thread seems leaning towards dog whistle blue/red things than I had in mind and I'll gladly step back.
The NSA spying on Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, is called "doing their fucking job". And various Presidents have seen US citizens who have taken arms against the US killed by US forces in all sorts of conflicts.
Seriously though. Truman is probably the reason the US won the Cold War, with his containment policy, his support for the Marshall Plan and his decision to rebuild Japan and West Germany into stable democratic industrialized nations. All of this laid the ground work for the US to have a collection of prosperous allies to counter the puppet regimes of the soviet block.
His entry into Korea was definitely the right decision in hindsight, without witch all of Korea would be best Korea today. His firing MacArthur when he started talking about using Nukes.
Domestically he suffered defeats, especially the Taft-Hartley act against his veto. However he managed to defend the majority of the New Deal against a congress that saw him as a lightweight. He was for civil rights before it was cool and lost to the Solid South as a result. His Fair Deal would have been a major boost to the US if it had been passed in full. His health care plan was better then ACA is right now.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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GatorAn alligator in ScotlandRegistered Userregular
Abraham Lincoln
I find the Ike-loving ITT somewhat disturbing. He toppled the Shah, overthrew Arbenz and was not able to reach a satisfactory status quo with Cuba.
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GatorAn alligator in ScotlandRegistered Userregular
Abraham Lincoln
I would also say Buchanan was a better president that Dubya.
On any other day I might've said FDR instead of Lincoln, but I flipped a coin, heads=Lincoln and so Lincoln it is
MadCaddy, somebody has sold you story of Nixon that only faintly resembles history. In that there was a president named Richard Milhouse Nixon but any resemblance to your version is coincidental.
What you keep calling Bretton Woods was actually the Nixon Shock and ended the Bretton Woods system. A system that started in 1944 when Nixon was still serving in the Navy in the Pacific. He had nothing to do with the development of the Bretton Woods system or its subsequent post war success. He was a nobody at the time. Even as Vice President in the 50s, he was out of the loop on any important decision. The VP was somebody you sent for photo ops, not policy meetings. Gore, Cheney, Biden have changed that a lot in the last 25 years, but Quayle is more the standard.
He did however end it so abruptly that it cause a global recession to become worse. Many Third world Countries saw their economy go into the shitter as a result. Leaving them debt ridden and unstable for decades to come.
As for the US? Know the part of the US called the Rustbelt? Before Nixon came along that was a fairly big industrial heartland. It was ailing and it probably would have undergone de-industrialization anyways, but thanks to Nixon it collapsed so fast it was almost impossible to save anything. An entire region of the US crippled because of his, in your words, "Masterstroke".
Then there was Vietnam. As has been said he sabotaged the 1968 Peace Talks so he could run on his "secret plan" to win "peace with honor" in Vietnam. Which turned out to be bullshit. So for 5 years more the US was stuck in Vietnam. With thousands of US lives lost and maimed. The peace in 1973? SAME PEACE AS IN 1968! Only 10 000 US lives extra! What a guy!
The tragic-comic part of it all was that it ended up completely losing the war in the end. When 1975 came around, the US people was so tired of Vietnam and its war that support for the southern government was next to nil. When the North invaded outright, the South was so weak from the extra years of war that it fell in record time. I don't know what would have happened in an alternate universe, but that the Vietnam war could have ended in a draw ala Korea... is not a Alien Space Bat theory.
Lastly "Only Nixon could go to China". You want to know why it was only Nixon that could go there? Because only Nixon didn't have to worry about having Nixon bad-mouth himself to the press about "betraying america", "appeasing the red chinese" and "being a comiesymp". "Who Lost China" was a big buggaboo in American politics for over a decade after the 1948 revolution and nobody banged that drum harder then Nixon. Nixon spent his entire career attacking anybody that even hinted at talking to China. Never mind that it was the biggest country in the world and nuclear power. Anybody that hinted at a real-politic approach was lambasted by Nixon and his cronies as weak sob sisters. He destroyed careers for talking about doing what he ended up doing.
Nixon just when you think he was merely bad... he turns out to be worse.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
I find the Ike-loving ITT somewhat disturbing. He toppled the Shah, overthrew Arbenz and was not able to reach a satisfactory status quo with Cuba.
yeah, and you'll note nobody tries to defend that stuff
I like Ike
I recognize that he made some bad calls, but there is literally no president who hasn't made mistakes, especially since our foreign policy has been a tire fire for like two hundred years
MadCaddy, somebody has sold you story of Nixon that only faintly resembles history. In that there was a president named Richard Milhouse Nixon but any resemblance to your version is coincidental.
What you keep calling Bretton Woods was actually the Nixon Shock and ended the Bretton Woods system. A system that started in 1944 when Nixon was still serving in the Navy in the Pacific. He had nothing to do with the development of the Bretton Woods system or its subsequent post war success. He was a nobody at the time. Even as Vice President in the 50s, he was out of the loop on any important decision. The VP was somebody you sent for photo ops, not policy meetings. Gore, Cheney, Biden have changed that a lot in the last 25 years, but Quayle is more the standard.
He did however end it so abruptly that it cause a global recession to become worse. Many Third world Countries saw their economy go into the shitter as a result. Leaving them debt ridden and unstable for decades to come.
As for the US? Know the part of the US called the Rustbelt? Before Nixon came along that was a fairly big industrial heartland. It was ailing and it probably would have undergone de-industrialization anyways, but thanks to Nixon it collapsed so fast it was almost impossible to save anything. An entire region of the US crippled because of his, in your words, "Masterstroke".
Then there was Vietnam. As has been said he sabotaged the 1968 Peace Talks so he could run on his "secret plan" to win "peace with honor" in Vietnam. Which turned out to be bullshit. So for 5 years more the US was stuck in Vietnam. With thousands of US lives lost and maimed. The peace in 1973? SAME PEACE AS IN 1968! Only 10 000 US lives extra! What a guy!
The tragic-comic part of it all was that it ended up completely losing the war in the end. When 1975 came around, the US people was so tired of Vietnam and its war that support for the southern government was next to nil. When the North invaded outright, the South was so weak from the extra years of war that it fell in record time. I don't know what would have happened in an alternate universe, but that the Vietnam war could have ended in a draw ala Korea... is not a Alien Space Bat theory.
Lastly "Only Nixon could go to China". You want to know why it was only Nixon that could go there? Because only Nixon didn't have to worry about having Nixon bad-mouth himself to the press about "betraying america", "appeasing the red chinese" and "being a comiesymp". "Who Lost China" was a big buggaboo in American politics for over a decade after the 1948 revolution and nobody banged that drum harder then Nixon. Nixon spent his entire career attacking anybody that even hinted at talking to China. Never mind that it was the biggest country in the world and nuclear power. Anybody that hinted at a real-politic approach was lambasted by Nixon and his cronies as weak sob sisters. He destroyed careers for talking about doing what he ended up doing.
Nixon just when you think he was merely bad... he turns out to be worse.
I never called it his master stroke, you're confusing me with another in this thread paraphrasing me incorrectly, but I did say he appointed possibly our best Secretary of State for handling the Bretton Woods exit and that Nixon was better informed and understood the realities than any other elected official at the time, which I stand by.
There's a lot of hyperbole and loose correlations to things that occurred under Ford or Carter in what you're saying, so laying the stagflation of the late seventies and ruining the economies of third world countries by ending Bretton Woods (which was impossible to maintain anyway, from the point of view of the US, and the exit would bear a thread of its own to discuss the merits, and strategy of the course Nixon took in ending it), but my point has been made and while I will gladly examine the evidence to the contrary, my finding isn't based on me being sold a story by any one individual, but an objective viewing of the historical record. My statement that Nixon was a flawed man, but incredible politcian has only been made by all the evidence submitted thus far in the thread.
Even Abe said some really awful things (he got better).
Yea, I believe Abe was a big advocate for sending the freed slaves back to Aftica whether they wanted or not, but that mightve originated from his cabinet.. I know he deeply believed in the superiority of the white man over the black and went on at length on the subject in a few different sources.
I never called it his master stroke, you're confusing me with another in this thread paraphrasing me incorrectly, but I did say he appointed possibly our best Secretary of State for handling the Bretton Woods exit and that Nixon was better informed and understood the realities than any other elected official at the time, which I stand by.
There's a lot of hyperbole and loose correlations to things that occurred under Ford or Carter in what you're saying, so laying the stagflation of the late seventies and ruining the economies of third world countries by ending Bretton Woods (which was impossible to maintain anyway, from the point of view of the US, and the exit would bear a thread of its own to discuss the merits, and strategy of the course Nixon took in ending it), but my point has been made and while I will gladly examine the evidence to the contrary, my finding isn't based on me being sold a story by any one individual, but an objective viewing of the historical record. My statement that Nixon was a flawed man, but incredible politcian has only been made by all the evidence submitted thus far in the thread.
Dude, Stagflanation was a thing created under Nixon. Ford was a non-entity stuck with a hostile congress and Carter laid the groundwork for ending it, but Nixon is the guy responsible for making it a thing. The exit from Bretton Woods aka the Nixon Shock put every major US manufacturer in a defensive position. By fueling speculation against the dollar it created a world market where exports became harder, precisely at a time where the US needed it be easier to offset its cost. The defence of the dollar chewed up spending that could have gone to other more useful things like infrastructure. Not only that but by defending the dollar they lost the value of a fiat currency in the first place, US goods didn't become cheaper on the world market, the negative balance of Payments didn't improve and the debt from the Vietnam war(which Nixon prolonged) became worse. The money supply increased, while domestic manufacturing decreased. Stagflanation.
I mean, you do know that time is linear and that event earlier in the time line can effect things later right?
The fact that you call it Bretton Woods instead of its more accepted name of the Nixon Shock, that you talk about the Secretary of State instead of the Secretary of the Treasury(you know the guy in charge of the money and the guy that handled the actual exit) and your general lack of knowledge of what Nixon did at all... Where did you learn this?
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
I never called it his master stroke, you're confusing me with another in this thread paraphrasing me incorrectly, but I did say he appointed possibly our best Secretary of State for handling the Bretton Woods exit and that Nixon was better informed and understood the realities than any other elected official at the time, which I stand by.
There's a lot of hyperbole and loose correlations to things that occurred under Ford or Carter in what you're saying, so laying the stagflation of the late seventies and ruining the economies of third world countries by ending Bretton Woods (which was impossible to maintain anyway, from the point of view of the US, and the exit would bear a thread of its own to discuss the merits, and strategy of the course Nixon took in ending it), but my point has been made and while I will gladly examine the evidence to the contrary, my finding isn't based on me being sold a story by any one individual, but an objective viewing of the historical record. My statement that Nixon was a flawed man, but incredible politcian has only been made by all the evidence submitted thus far in the thread.
Dude, Stagflanation was a thing created under Nixon. Ford was a non-entity stuck with a hostile congress and Carter laid the groundwork for ending it, but Nixon is the guy responsible for making it a thing. The exit from Bretton Woods aka the Nixon Shock put every major US manufacturer in a defensive position. By fueling speculation against the dollar it created a world market where exports became harder, precisely at a time where the US needed it be easier to offset its cost. The defence of the dollar chewed up spending that could have gone to other more useful things like infrastructure. Not only that but by defending the dollar they lost the value of a fiat currency in the first place, US goods didn't become cheaper on the world market, the negative balance of Payments didn't improve and the debt from the Vietnam war(which Nixon prolonged) became worse. The money supply increased, while domestic manufacturing decreased. Stagflanation.
I mean, you do know that time is linear and that event earlier in the time line can effect things later right?
The fact that you call it Bretton Woods instead of its more accepted name of the Nixon Shock, that you talk about the Secretary of State instead of the Secretary of the Treasury(you know the guy in charge of the money and the guy that handled the actual exit) and your general lack of knowledge of what Nixon did at all... Where did you learn this?
Don't know why you're making this personal.
And you're wrong about the effect of "Nixon Shock" (does that make you happy?)
I never called it his master stroke, you're confusing me with another in this thread paraphrasing me incorrectly, but I did say he appointed possibly our best Secretary of State for handling the Bretton Woods exit and that Nixon was better informed and understood the realities than any other elected official at the time, which I stand by.
There's a lot of hyperbole and loose correlations to things that occurred under Ford or Carter in what you're saying, so laying the stagflation of the late seventies and ruining the economies of third world countries by ending Bretton Woods (which was impossible to maintain anyway, from the point of view of the US, and the exit would bear a thread of its own to discuss the merits, and strategy of the course Nixon took in ending it), but my point has been made and while I will gladly examine the evidence to the contrary, my finding isn't based on me being sold a story by any one individual, but an objective viewing of the historical record. My statement that Nixon was a flawed man, but incredible politcian has only been made by all the evidence submitted thus far in the thread.
Dude, Stagflanation was a thing created under Nixon. Ford was a non-entity stuck with a hostile congress and Carter laid the groundwork for ending it, but Nixon is the guy responsible for making it a thing. The exit from Bretton Woods aka the Nixon Shock put every major US manufacturer in a defensive position. By fueling speculation against the dollar it created a world market where exports became harder, precisely at a time where the US needed it be easier to offset its cost. The defence of the dollar chewed up spending that could have gone to other more useful things like infrastructure. Not only that but by defending the dollar they lost the value of a fiat currency in the first place, US goods didn't become cheaper on the world market, the negative balance of Payments didn't improve and the debt from the Vietnam war(which Nixon prolonged) became worse. The money supply increased, while domestic manufacturing decreased. Stagflanation.
I mean, you do know that time is linear and that event earlier in the time line can effect things later right?
The fact that you call it Bretton Woods instead of its more accepted name of the Nixon Shock, that you talk about the Secretary of State instead of the Secretary of the Treasury(you know the guy in charge of the money and the guy that handled the actual exit) and your general lack of knowledge of what Nixon did at all... Where did you learn this?
Don't know why you're making this personal.
And you're wrong about the effect of "Nixon Shock" (does that make you happy?)
Oh yeah, the IMF. There is a unbiased source. The Third world economic problems I talked about? The IMF caused that by refusing to lend and be repaid in anything but dollars. All that talk about forgiving the third world debt a few years back was a result. The World bank has a similar issue. They are both heavily influenced by economist that are opposed to the Keynsian school that formed Bretton Woods. That link you gave me? Charitably hillarious.
Edit: I don't care anymore. Needless to say the only reason Nixon isn't at the bottom of any US president Ranking is because Buchanan will always be last. You just can't beat the guy that sat on the sidelines as the US tore itself apart and did nothing to stop it.
Kipling217 on
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
I'm pretty sure ordering your henchmen to break into the opposition's headquarters, bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people is pretty damn evil. I'm not interested in getting bogged down in a semantic argument over whether those actions were moral because Nixon might have been diagnosable. The man was a scumbag and did more bad than good as a President.
You realize Obama has done the last two of those as well?
Ohh this will be fun, but please support your claim.
I'm not looking to bag on Obama, as I consider him a perfectly fine president, and I seriously doubt the veracity of any smoking gun for his ties to the IRS and NSA actions taken that could mirror those of what Nixon did with the FBI. It also gets murkier since a lot of it can be judged warranted due to the "terrorist" label the president now has at his disposal.
The Presidency's power has exponentially increased every year from its inception to the current day, and each President has had a very different set of privileges, responsibilities and expectation. Nixon wasn't the first President to record the goings on in the Oval Office, he was just the most paranoid and fascist-leaning. He also wasn't the first, or last, to use he executive privilege for self-serving reasons, just the one that lost his political base while so doing.
So you have nothing, in other words.
Give me twenty years of freedom of information act requests or declassifying of information, and we'll see what surveillance assets Obama chose to access. There's no doubts that Obama has the largest surveillance network of any US President, ever.
And I can easily cite what the NSA did to Angela Merkel, et al. If we allow for non-US citizens to matter. There's also the killing of US Citizens as enemy combatants, something even Nixon didn't do.
I'm just saying a lot more presidents are shades of gray than most seem to believe. This thread seems leaning towards dog whistle blue/red things than I had in mind and I'll gladly step back.
You claimed Obama was guilty of ' bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people', and have thus far offered fuck-all evidence to prove either assertion. Claiming that there's totally secret records that show him doing it that will prove you right when it's released in twenty years is a weak-ass excuse.
Wilson was certainly a white supremacist, but being racist doesn't make someone a facist.
He doesn't seem to really ideologically fit with any of the rest of 20th century facism
"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it." - Oscar Wilde
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
I'm pretty sure ordering your henchmen to break into the opposition's headquarters, bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people is pretty damn evil. I'm not interested in getting bogged down in a semantic argument over whether those actions were moral because Nixon might have been diagnosable. The man was a scumbag and did more bad than good as a President.
You realize Obama has done the last two of those as well?
Ohh this will be fun, but please support your claim.
I'm not looking to bag on Obama, as I consider him a perfectly fine president, and I seriously doubt the veracity of any smoking gun for his ties to the IRS and NSA actions taken that could mirror those of what Nixon did with the FBI. It also gets murkier since a lot of it can be judged warranted due to the "terrorist" label the president now has at his disposal.
The Presidency's power has exponentially increased every year from its inception to the current day, and each President has had a very different set of privileges, responsibilities and expectation. Nixon wasn't the first President to record the goings on in the Oval Office, he was just the most paranoid and fascist-leaning. He also wasn't the first, or last, to use he executive privilege for self-serving reasons, just the one that lost his political base while so doing.
So you have nothing, in other words.
Give me twenty years of freedom of information act requests or declassifying of information, and we'll see what surveillance assets Obama chose to access. There's no doubts that Obama has the largest surveillance network of any US President, ever.
And I can easily cite what the NSA did to Angela Merkel, et al. If we allow for non-US citizens to matter. There's also the killing of US Citizens as enemy combatants, something even Nixon didn't do.
I'm just saying a lot more presidents are shades of gray than most seem to believe. This thread seems leaning towards dog whistle blue/red things than I had in mind and I'll gladly step back.
You claimed Obama was guilty of ' bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people', and have thus far offered fuck-all evidence to prove either assertion. Claiming that there's totally secret records that show him doing it that will prove you right when it's released in twenty years is a weak-ass excuse.
I proved exactly that claim, but it was discounted due to the NSA "doing its job", which I don't care to argue over. i have no stake in discrediting Obama as I voted for him both times, and have made peace with his shortcomings and think he's been a fine president. I'm still not burying my head in the sand to the claims made against him, and the possibilities that lie in the current national security apparatus.
I want to put in a good word for JFK's handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. With the knowledge that was possessed at the time among his advisers, the vote was essentially unanimous to take direct military action. Even RFK, who often gets credited with being the dove in the room, was only and repeatedly advocating against a sneak attack because of his personal feelings about Pearl Harbor. He was still advising bombing the missile sites, just doing it after making some kind of public declaration. I think we were immensely lucky to have a president like JFK at that moment in time, who was willing to act against advice and take a path away from war.
I don't think the situation was perfectly handled. Interdicting shipping was clearly a mistake, especially given that several missiles were already constructed. (This was contrary to what the intelligence reports said.) But both the outcome and the process was exceptionally good for the United States in a situation that could have turned ugly fast.
And I can easily cite what the NSA did to Angela Merkel, et al. If we allow for non-US citizens to matter. There's also the killing of US Citizens as enemy combatants, something even Nixon didn't do.
I'm just saying a lot more presidents are shades of gray than most seem to believe. This thread seems leaning towards dog whistle blue/red things than I had in mind and I'll gladly step back.
Abraham Lincoln had no qualms about killing Americans as enemy combatants. Context matters.
And I can easily cite what the NSA did to Angela Merkel, et al. If we allow for non-US citizens to matter. There's also the killing of US Citizens as enemy combatants, something even Nixon didn't do.
I'm just saying a lot more presidents are shades of gray than most seem to believe. This thread seems leaning towards dog whistle blue/red things than I had in mind and I'll gladly step back.
Abraham Lincoln had no qualms about killing Americans as enemy combatants. Context matters.
They actually were citizens of the Confederacy... But I did slip up, and not mention executive ordered the assassination. Abraham Lincoln had a significantly less robust executive privilege, and didn't (to the best of my knowledge) personally sign any death warrants for treason.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
Nixon put people on a list but Jackson put a man in the ground because he called him a coward.
Even people in the south thought it was cold.
I guess actually killing people for slurring you is SLIGHTLY worse than keeping detailed lists of every person who has wronged you.
Now that I think of it, He clearly misused executive power and privilege, and suffered from paranoia, but I can't really think of vindictive actions that Nixon took that're on the same level as Jackson. He was much more "my way or the highway, come hell or high water" than Nixon. This kind of ties into my earlier defense of Nixon; there have been some real shitheels who've used the office solely for vainglorious or self-serving reasons. There have also been complete puppets on numerous occasions, and men drastically under qualified to fulfill the rigors expected of the position, physically and mentally. Nixon was a psychopath, possibly a sociopath, no ifs and or buts, but I still see the legacy he leaves in his wake and have a hard time saying he was a bad president. A bad, troubled man, yes, but President...
A lot of the "good" that Nixon did was actually done to blunt further pushes on those topics (again, the EPA is a good example of this), and he horribly abused the power of the office. The problem with just looking at the legacy of a President is that puts their work in a vacuum. Context is important for weighting their actions.
I agree context can be important as it seems disingenuous to rate Presidents based on our current mores and current understanding of the role of the executive. I just don't see the counter to my statement of Nixon being an extremely skillful politician in the evidence you're citing. In fact, I only see more examples of how canny and skilled the man was at playing the game, and use of rhetoric. I would never call Nixon a green president, and the fact that people could be tricked into thinking so further demonstrates his skill. His establishment of the EPA was a power grab for the executive more than a heartfelt attempt at environmentalism, no doubt, but it also further proves the skill for the office he exemplified.
Skilled and impactful are not synonyms for good.
You might wanna look up skilled in the thesaurus again...
Hedgie's point is that being skilled at accomplishing things that make the country worse doesn't make him a good President, I think
Nixon did more good for the country and weathered more crises than either Ford or Carter, and I've already given examples of things he accomplished during his administration that will be remembered far beyond our own generation, and have had a tremendous impact globally. While I don't agree with the mans politics, and see him for the ego maniac and psychopath he was, I have a hard time saying he was a bad president in comparison to some of the do nothing's and true shitheels thatve held the office.
Nixon was Eisenhower's Vice President, another executive being lobbied around for the best, and he was heavily involved in that administration and his checkers speech shows a view on campaign finance that we wish our candidates today would have.. I also stand by the statement that Nixon was the most qualified and best choice in every presidential race in which he ran. While Nixon wasn't a good man, I have a hard time saying he was a bad president.
Ford and Carter were shitty Presidents, near the bottom of anyone's lists.
Carter legalized home-brewing. There was also SALT II, bailing out Chrysler, and handing back the Panama Canal. I'd rate him as above-average. There was a lot more to his presidency than the Iranian hostage crisis and the OPEC embargo.
daveNYC on
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
I'm pretty sure ordering your henchmen to break into the opposition's headquarters, bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people is pretty damn evil. I'm not interested in getting bogged down in a semantic argument over whether those actions were moral because Nixon might have been diagnosable. The man was a scumbag and did more bad than good as a President.
You realize Obama has done the last two of those as well?
Ohh this will be fun, but please support your claim.
I'm not looking to bag on Obama, as I consider him a perfectly fine president, and I seriously doubt the veracity of any smoking gun for his ties to the IRS and NSA actions taken that could mirror those of what Nixon did with the FBI. It also gets murkier since a lot of it can be judged warranted due to the "terrorist" label the president now has at his disposal.
The Presidency's power has exponentially increased every year from its inception to the current day, and each President has had a very different set of privileges, responsibilities and expectation. Nixon wasn't the first President to record the goings on in the Oval Office, he was just the most paranoid and fascist-leaning. He also wasn't the first, or last, to use he executive privilege for self-serving reasons, just the one that lost his political base while so doing.
So you have nothing, in other words.
Give me twenty years of freedom of information act requests or declassifying of information, and we'll see what surveillance assets Obama chose to access. There's no doubts that Obama has the largest surveillance network of any US President, ever.
And I can easily cite what the NSA did to Angela Merkel, et al. If we allow for non-US citizens to matter. There's also the killing of US Citizens as enemy combatants, something even Nixon didn't do.
I'm just saying a lot more presidents are shades of gray than most seem to believe. This thread seems leaning towards dog whistle blue/red things than I had in mind and I'll gladly step back.
You claimed Obama was guilty of ' bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people', and have thus far offered fuck-all evidence to prove either assertion. Claiming that there's totally secret records that show him doing it that will prove you right when it's released in twenty years is a weak-ass excuse.
I proved exactly that claim, but it was discounted due to the NSA "doing its job", which I don't care to argue over. i have no stake in discrediting Obama as I voted for him both times, and have made peace with his shortcomings and think he's been a fine president. I'm still not burying my head in the sand to the claims made against him, and the possibilities that lie in the current national security apparatus.
Angela Merkel was not "harassed" or "politically damaged" in the way Nixon's domestic enemies were.
The NSA's whole job is to collect signals intelligence on foreign countries, including our allies. The scandal was that they were also storing data on US citizens to search later (among other things). Which is almost certainly illegal but can't be challenged in court because no one can prove they have standing because it's all classified, etc.
Accusing Obama of using this information for political gain is a huuuuuuuuuuuge step from all the evidence that is available at the moment.
I'm pretty sure ordering your henchmen to break into the opposition's headquarters, bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people is pretty damn evil. I'm not interested in getting bogged down in a semantic argument over whether those actions were moral because Nixon might have been diagnosable. The man was a scumbag and did more bad than good as a President.
You realize Obama has done the last two of those as well?
Ohh this will be fun, but please support your claim.
I'm not looking to bag on Obama, as I consider him a perfectly fine president, and I seriously doubt the veracity of any smoking gun for his ties to the IRS and NSA actions taken that could mirror those of what Nixon did with the FBI. It also gets murkier since a lot of it can be judged warranted due to the "terrorist" label the president now has at his disposal.
The Presidency's power has exponentially increased every year from its inception to the current day, and each President has had a very different set of privileges, responsibilities and expectation. Nixon wasn't the first President to record the goings on in the Oval Office, he was just the most paranoid and fascist-leaning. He also wasn't the first, or last, to use he executive privilege for self-serving reasons, just the one that lost his political base while so doing.
So you have nothing, in other words.
Give me twenty years of freedom of information act requests or declassifying of information, and we'll see what surveillance assets Obama chose to access. There's no doubts that Obama has the largest surveillance network of any US President, ever.
And I can easily cite what the NSA did to Angela Merkel, et al. If we allow for non-US citizens to matter. There's also the killing of US Citizens as enemy combatants, something even Nixon didn't do.
I'm just saying a lot more presidents are shades of gray than most seem to believe. This thread seems leaning towards dog whistle blue/red things than I had in mind and I'll gladly step back.
You claimed Obama was guilty of ' bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people', and have thus far offered fuck-all evidence to prove either assertion. Claiming that there's totally secret records that show him doing it that will prove you right when it's released in twenty years is a weak-ass excuse.
I proved exactly that claim, but it was discounted due to the NSA "doing its job", which I don't care to argue over. i have no stake in discrediting Obama as I voted for him both times, and have made peace with his shortcomings and think he's been a fine president. I'm still not burying my head in the sand to the claims made against him, and the possibilities that lie in the current national security apparatus.
You said that Obama bugged people he disagreed with to damage their reputations, and ordered the government to harass people.
This is not an equal statement to, "Our intelligence community monitors other major world powers."
In a duel with Charles Dickinson, another expert marksman, he decided that his best bet for winning would be to let the man take the first shot. You are reading that correctly: he let his opponent shoot first. His reasoning was that Dickinson's quickness would result in a less accurate shot. According to the rules, both duelists had to stand perfectly still and would get only one shot each. Dickinson took his quick shot, as predicted, and hit Jackson in the chest. Jackson, apparently unperturbed, took careful aim while bleeding from a gunshot wound, and misfired; his pistol stopped at half cock. So he sighed, drew it back again, and shot Dickinson in the chest, killing him.
Jackson was also the first President to survive an assassination attempt. On his way out of the Capitol building for a funeral, Richard Lawrence approached him and shot at him. The gun misfired, and Jackson proceeded to club the everloving dogshit out of him with his walking cane. While he was getting clubbed repeatedly, Lawrence pulled a second gun and attempted to shoot Jackson again -- and his second gun also misfired.
Funnily enough, Lawrence's derringers were studied by the Smithsonian Institute and both properly fired on the first attempt. They calculated the odds of both pistols misfiring at 1:125,000.
In a duel with Charles Dickinson, another expert marksman, he decided that his best bet for winning would be to let the man take the first shot. You are reading that correctly: he let his opponent shoot first. His reasoning was that Dickinson's quickness would result in a less accurate shot. According to the rules, both duelists had to stand perfectly still and would get only one shot each. Dickinson took his quick shot, as predicted, and hit Jackson in the chest. Jackson, apparently unperturbed, took careful aim while bleeding from a gunshot wound, and misfired; his pistol stopped at half cock. So he sighed, drew it back again, and shot Dickinson in the chest, killing him.
Jackson was also the first President to survive an assassination attempt. On his way out of the Capitol building for a funeral, Richard Lawrence approached him and shot at him. The gun misfired, and Jackson proceeded to club the everloving dogshit out of him with his walking cane. While he was getting clubbed repeatedly, Lawrence pulled a second gun and attempted to shoot Jackson again -- and his second gun also misfired.
Funnily enough, Lawrence's derringers were studied by the Smithsonian Institute and both properly fired on the first attempt. They calculated the odds of both pistols misfiring at 1:125,000.
There are dozens of stories about what a badass Andrew Jackson was, but the Indian Removal Act kinda kills any pleasure I could take in recounting or reading them.
Basically any President prior to the 20th century is going to have some really awful racial views. And most in the 20th century, too.
Even for his time Jackson was considered violent, rageful and racist. His acts against the native tribes were not common consensus in his time, and were largely considered horrific by a significant number of his political contemporaries. He was a really violent, angry person in general. He happened to also be tough as nails! True! But a great man only in terms of causing great events happening, and not really of the positive kind at any point in his career.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
I never called it his master stroke, you're confusing me with another in this thread paraphrasing me incorrectly, but I did say he appointed possibly our best Secretary of State for handling the Bretton Woods exit and that Nixon was better informed and understood the realities than any other elected official at the time, which I stand by.
There's a lot of hyperbole and loose correlations to things that occurred under Ford or Carter in what you're saying, so laying the stagflation of the late seventies and ruining the economies of third world countries by ending Bretton Woods (which was impossible to maintain anyway, from the point of view of the US, and the exit would bear a thread of its own to discuss the merits, and strategy of the course Nixon took in ending it), but my point has been made and while I will gladly examine the evidence to the contrary, my finding isn't based on me being sold a story by any one individual, but an objective viewing of the historical record. My statement that Nixon was a flawed man, but incredible politcian has only been made by all the evidence submitted thus far in the thread.
Dude, Stagflanation was a thing created under Nixon. Ford was a non-entity stuck with a hostile congress and Carter laid the groundwork for ending it, but Nixon is the guy responsible for making it a thing. The exit from Bretton Woods aka the Nixon Shock put every major US manufacturer in a defensive position. By fueling speculation against the dollar it created a world market where exports became harder, precisely at a time where the US needed it be easier to offset its cost. The defence of the dollar chewed up spending that could have gone to other more useful things like infrastructure. Not only that but by defending the dollar they lost the value of a fiat currency in the first place, US goods didn't become cheaper on the world market, the negative balance of Payments didn't improve and the debt from the Vietnam war(which Nixon prolonged) became worse. The money supply increased, while domestic manufacturing decreased. Stagflanation.
I mean, you do know that time is linear and that event earlier in the time line can effect things later right?
The fact that you call it Bretton Woods instead of its more accepted name of the Nixon Shock, that you talk about the Secretary of State instead of the Secretary of the Treasury(you know the guy in charge of the money and the guy that handled the actual exit) and your general lack of knowledge of what Nixon did at all... Where did you learn this?
Don't know why you're making this personal.
And you're wrong about the effect of "Nixon Shock" (does that make you happy?)
Oh yeah, the IMF. There is a unbiased source. The Third world economic problems I talked about? The IMF caused that by refusing to lend and be repaid in anything but dollars. All that talk about forgiving the third world debt a few years back was a result. The World bank has a similar issue. They are both heavily influenced by economist that are opposed to the Keynsian school that formed Bretton Woods. That link you gave me? Charitably hillarious.
Edit: I don't care anymore. Needless to say the only reason Nixon isn't at the bottom of any US president Ranking is because Buchanan will always be last. You just can't beat the guy that sat on the sidelines as the US tore itself apart and did nothing to stop it.
that and also refusing to give loans without forcing countries to adopt conservative economic policies, effectively becoming an insane retrograde world government
I admit I am embarrassingly ignorant of my own countries political leaders. But even if I were more informed I would give it to Lincoln. I do not think any other president has been put in such a dire situation and came out on top. Washington would be my second choice for the obvious reasons.
Basically any President prior to the 20th century is going to have some really awful racial views. And most in the 20th century, too.
Even for his time Jackson was considered violent, rageful and racist. His acts against the native tribes were not common consensus in his time, and were largely considered horrific by a significant number of his political contemporaries. He was a really violent, angry person in general. He happened to also be tough as nails! True! But a great man only in terms of causing great events happening, and not really of the positive kind at any point in his career.
The Indian Removal Act also wasn't some of that old fashioned "genocide that at least benefits the new nation." Jackson was deliberately positioning to buy land and exterminate natives to make real estate deals that improperly enriched himself. He kept pretending to be serving the common good while surreptitiously making land grabs to line his pockets.
All while doing so by committing unthinkable acts of violence and genocide which even his contempories considered horrific.
"Jackson and several friends made off with a breathtaking 45,000 acres, colonized the area and even founded a new city. They then established multiple cotton plantations run by enslaved laborers just as cotton prices were reaching record highs. All told, Jackson both created and scored in the greatest real estate bubble in the history of the United States up to that time."
Posts
I'm not looking to bag on Obama, as I consider him a perfectly fine president, and I seriously doubt the veracity of any smoking gun for his ties to the IRS and NSA actions taken that could mirror those of what Nixon did with the FBI. It also gets murkier since a lot of it can be judged warranted due to the "terrorist" label the president now has at his disposal.
The Presidency's power has exponentially increased every year from its inception to the current day, and each President has had a very different set of privileges, responsibilities and expectations. Nixon wasn't the first President to record the goings on in the Oval Office, he was just the most paranoid and fascist-leaning. He also wasn't the first, or last, to use the executive privilege for self-serving reasons, just the one that lost his political base while so doing.
So you have nothing, in other words.
The bombing of Cambodia is a murky subject, and while Nixon did ramp it up to carpet bombings, the Khmer Rouge were facilitating the Viet-Kong, and weren't exactly good guys themselves, not that that justifies the action.
Give me twenty years of freedom of information act requests or declassifying of information, and we'll see what surveillance assets Obama chose to access. There's no doubts that Obama has the largest surveillance network of any US President, ever.
I'm just saying a lot more presidents are shades of gray than most seem to believe. This thread seems leaning towards dog whistle blue/red things than I had in mind and I'll gladly step back.
The NSA spying on Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, is called "doing their fucking job". And various Presidents have seen US citizens who have taken arms against the US killed by US forces in all sorts of conflicts.
Well god-day to you all.
Seriously though. Truman is probably the reason the US won the Cold War, with his containment policy, his support for the Marshall Plan and his decision to rebuild Japan and West Germany into stable democratic industrialized nations. All of this laid the ground work for the US to have a collection of prosperous allies to counter the puppet regimes of the soviet block.
His entry into Korea was definitely the right decision in hindsight, without witch all of Korea would be best Korea today. His firing MacArthur when he started talking about using Nukes.
Domestically he suffered defeats, especially the Taft-Hartley act against his veto. However he managed to defend the majority of the New Deal against a congress that saw him as a lightweight. He was for civil rights before it was cool and lost to the Solid South as a result. His Fair Deal would have been a major boost to the US if it had been passed in full. His health care plan was better then ACA is right now.
On any other day I might've said FDR instead of Lincoln, but I flipped a coin, heads=Lincoln and so Lincoln it is
What you keep calling Bretton Woods was actually the Nixon Shock and ended the Bretton Woods system. A system that started in 1944 when Nixon was still serving in the Navy in the Pacific. He had nothing to do with the development of the Bretton Woods system or its subsequent post war success. He was a nobody at the time. Even as Vice President in the 50s, he was out of the loop on any important decision. The VP was somebody you sent for photo ops, not policy meetings. Gore, Cheney, Biden have changed that a lot in the last 25 years, but Quayle is more the standard.
He did however end it so abruptly that it cause a global recession to become worse. Many Third world Countries saw their economy go into the shitter as a result. Leaving them debt ridden and unstable for decades to come.
As for the US? Know the part of the US called the Rustbelt? Before Nixon came along that was a fairly big industrial heartland. It was ailing and it probably would have undergone de-industrialization anyways, but thanks to Nixon it collapsed so fast it was almost impossible to save anything. An entire region of the US crippled because of his, in your words, "Masterstroke".
Then there was Vietnam. As has been said he sabotaged the 1968 Peace Talks so he could run on his "secret plan" to win "peace with honor" in Vietnam. Which turned out to be bullshit. So for 5 years more the US was stuck in Vietnam. With thousands of US lives lost and maimed. The peace in 1973? SAME PEACE AS IN 1968! Only 10 000 US lives extra! What a guy!
The tragic-comic part of it all was that it ended up completely losing the war in the end. When 1975 came around, the US people was so tired of Vietnam and its war that support for the southern government was next to nil. When the North invaded outright, the South was so weak from the extra years of war that it fell in record time. I don't know what would have happened in an alternate universe, but that the Vietnam war could have ended in a draw ala Korea... is not a Alien Space Bat theory.
Lastly "Only Nixon could go to China". You want to know why it was only Nixon that could go there? Because only Nixon didn't have to worry about having Nixon bad-mouth himself to the press about "betraying america", "appeasing the red chinese" and "being a comiesymp". "Who Lost China" was a big buggaboo in American politics for over a decade after the 1948 revolution and nobody banged that drum harder then Nixon. Nixon spent his entire career attacking anybody that even hinted at talking to China. Never mind that it was the biggest country in the world and nuclear power. Anybody that hinted at a real-politic approach was lambasted by Nixon and his cronies as weak sob sisters. He destroyed careers for talking about doing what he ended up doing.
Nixon just when you think he was merely bad... he turns out to be worse.
yeah, and you'll note nobody tries to defend that stuff
I like Ike
I recognize that he made some bad calls, but there is literally no president who hasn't made mistakes, especially since our foreign policy has been a tire fire for like two hundred years
I never called it his master stroke, you're confusing me with another in this thread paraphrasing me incorrectly, but I did say he appointed possibly our best Secretary of State for handling the Bretton Woods exit and that Nixon was better informed and understood the realities than any other elected official at the time, which I stand by.
There's a lot of hyperbole and loose correlations to things that occurred under Ford or Carter in what you're saying, so laying the stagflation of the late seventies and ruining the economies of third world countries by ending Bretton Woods (which was impossible to maintain anyway, from the point of view of the US, and the exit would bear a thread of its own to discuss the merits, and strategy of the course Nixon took in ending it), but my point has been made and while I will gladly examine the evidence to the contrary, my finding isn't based on me being sold a story by any one individual, but an objective viewing of the historical record. My statement that Nixon was a flawed man, but incredible politcian has only been made by all the evidence submitted thus far in the thread.
Yea, I believe Abe was a big advocate for sending the freed slaves back to Aftica whether they wanted or not, but that mightve originated from his cabinet.. I know he deeply believed in the superiority of the white man over the black and went on at length on the subject in a few different sources.
Dude, Stagflanation was a thing created under Nixon. Ford was a non-entity stuck with a hostile congress and Carter laid the groundwork for ending it, but Nixon is the guy responsible for making it a thing. The exit from Bretton Woods aka the Nixon Shock put every major US manufacturer in a defensive position. By fueling speculation against the dollar it created a world market where exports became harder, precisely at a time where the US needed it be easier to offset its cost. The defence of the dollar chewed up spending that could have gone to other more useful things like infrastructure. Not only that but by defending the dollar they lost the value of a fiat currency in the first place, US goods didn't become cheaper on the world market, the negative balance of Payments didn't improve and the debt from the Vietnam war(which Nixon prolonged) became worse. The money supply increased, while domestic manufacturing decreased. Stagflanation.
I mean, you do know that time is linear and that event earlier in the time line can effect things later right?
The fact that you call it Bretton Woods instead of its more accepted name of the Nixon Shock, that you talk about the Secretary of State instead of the Secretary of the Treasury(you know the guy in charge of the money and the guy that handled the actual exit) and your general lack of knowledge of what Nixon did at all... Where did you learn this?
stagflation
Don't know why you're making this personal.
And you're wrong about the effect of "Nixon Shock" (does that make you happy?)
https://www.imf.org/external/about/histend.htm
Oh yeah, the IMF. There is a unbiased source. The Third world economic problems I talked about? The IMF caused that by refusing to lend and be repaid in anything but dollars. All that talk about forgiving the third world debt a few years back was a result. The World bank has a similar issue. They are both heavily influenced by economist that are opposed to the Keynsian school that formed Bretton Woods. That link you gave me? Charitably hillarious.
Edit: I don't care anymore. Needless to say the only reason Nixon isn't at the bottom of any US president Ranking is because Buchanan will always be last. You just can't beat the guy that sat on the sidelines as the US tore itself apart and did nothing to stop it.
You claimed Obama was guilty of ' bugging people you disagree with politically to damage their reputations, and ordering government agencies to harass people', and have thus far offered fuck-all evidence to prove either assertion. Claiming that there's totally secret records that show him doing it that will prove you right when it's released in twenty years is a weak-ass excuse.
And Clinton ignored genocide and Obama assassinated citizens and FDR put them in camps and
All presidents make bad calls.
Wilson was a fascist.
Wilson was certainly a white supremacist, but being racist doesn't make someone a facist.
He doesn't seem to really ideologically fit with any of the rest of 20th century facism
"We believe in the people and their 'wisdom' as if there was some special secret entrance to knowledge that barred to anyone who had ever learned anything." - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Fourteen Points and internationalism in general are profoundly anti-fascist.
I proved exactly that claim, but it was discounted due to the NSA "doing its job", which I don't care to argue over. i have no stake in discrediting Obama as I voted for him both times, and have made peace with his shortcomings and think he's been a fine president. I'm still not burying my head in the sand to the claims made against him, and the possibilities that lie in the current national security apparatus.
I don't think the situation was perfectly handled. Interdicting shipping was clearly a mistake, especially given that several missiles were already constructed. (This was contrary to what the intelligence reports said.) But both the outcome and the process was exceptionally good for the United States in a situation that could have turned ugly fast.
Abraham Lincoln had no qualms about killing Americans as enemy combatants. Context matters.
http://www.gwpda.org/1918/wilpeace.html
Doesn't sound so fascist.
They actually were citizens of the Confederacy... But I did slip up, and not mention executive ordered the assassination. Abraham Lincoln had a significantly less robust executive privilege, and didn't (to the best of my knowledge) personally sign any death warrants for treason.
Carter legalized home-brewing. There was also SALT II, bailing out Chrysler, and handing back the Panama Canal. I'd rate him as above-average. There was a lot more to his presidency than the Iranian hostage crisis and the OPEC embargo.
Angela Merkel was not "harassed" or "politically damaged" in the way Nixon's domestic enemies were.
The NSA's whole job is to collect signals intelligence on foreign countries, including our allies. The scandal was that they were also storing data on US citizens to search later (among other things). Which is almost certainly illegal but can't be challenged in court because no one can prove they have standing because it's all classified, etc.
Accusing Obama of using this information for political gain is a huuuuuuuuuuuge step from all the evidence that is available at the moment.
You said that Obama bugged people he disagreed with to damage their reputations, and ordered the government to harass people.
This is not an equal statement to, "Our intelligence community monitors other major world powers."
In a duel with Charles Dickinson, another expert marksman, he decided that his best bet for winning would be to let the man take the first shot. You are reading that correctly: he let his opponent shoot first. His reasoning was that Dickinson's quickness would result in a less accurate shot. According to the rules, both duelists had to stand perfectly still and would get only one shot each. Dickinson took his quick shot, as predicted, and hit Jackson in the chest. Jackson, apparently unperturbed, took careful aim while bleeding from a gunshot wound, and misfired; his pistol stopped at half cock. So he sighed, drew it back again, and shot Dickinson in the chest, killing him.
Jackson was also the first President to survive an assassination attempt. On his way out of the Capitol building for a funeral, Richard Lawrence approached him and shot at him. The gun misfired, and Jackson proceeded to club the everloving dogshit out of him with his walking cane. While he was getting clubbed repeatedly, Lawrence pulled a second gun and attempted to shoot Jackson again -- and his second gun also misfired.
Funnily enough, Lawrence's derringers were studied by the Smithsonian Institute and both properly fired on the first attempt. They calculated the odds of both pistols misfiring at 1:125,000.
There are dozens of stories about what a badass Andrew Jackson was, but the Indian Removal Act kinda kills any pleasure I could take in recounting or reading them.
Even for his time Jackson was considered violent, rageful and racist. His acts against the native tribes were not common consensus in his time, and were largely considered horrific by a significant number of his political contemporaries. He was a really violent, angry person in general. He happened to also be tough as nails! True! But a great man only in terms of causing great events happening, and not really of the positive kind at any point in his career.
that and also refusing to give loans without forcing countries to adopt conservative economic policies, effectively becoming an insane retrograde world government
PSN:Furlion
The Indian Removal Act also wasn't some of that old fashioned "genocide that at least benefits the new nation." Jackson was deliberately positioning to buy land and exterminate natives to make real estate deals that improperly enriched himself. He kept pretending to be serving the common good while surreptitiously making land grabs to line his pockets.
All while doing so by committing unthinkable acts of violence and genocide which even his contempories considered horrific.
First write up on it I could grab from my phone.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/andrew-jackson-made-a-killing-in-real-estate-119727
"Jackson and several friends made off with a breathtaking 45,000 acres, colonized the area and even founded a new city. They then established multiple cotton plantations run by enslaved laborers just as cotton prices were reaching record highs. All told, Jackson both created and scored in the greatest real estate bubble in the history of the United States up to that time."