Hoodathunk #87, could you be a bit more specific? I think the 58,000 American deaths in Vietnam were about evenly split between LBJ and Nixon.
US should have stayed out of WWI (116,708).
Most deaths by far came in Civil War (623,026).
Korea (36,914).
Of course, furriners don’t count.
January 14th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
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Hoodathunk Says:

Keith, forget the hero worship and check the stats. What war killed more Americans?

January 14th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
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Sorry, but could you be specific so I’ll know what you are talking about?
I don’t know what you meant the first time and I don’t know what president you think I am worshiping.
I gave you nothing but stats before. I said:
“Most deaths by far came in Civil War (623,026).”.
Is that wrong???????? I meant to include World War 2 (407,316)—but you said you were not talking about World WarII. My source is:
http://www.militaryfactory.com/american_war_deaths.asp
Are they wrong????????????????????/

I was not letting LBJ off the hook. Half the Vietnam deaths came under him. The other half came under Nixon. I was just saying JFK was not as bad as Nixon. Can anyone comprehend what I am saying????????????

I am also part Native American and think all the rest of you should go back to where you came from. Are you talking about the killing of the Native Americans? There are no stats for that and then you would be forgetting the Civil War because you said war and not wars.

ONLINE ANTI-BUSH SCHOLASTIC RESEARCH: LISTING OF MAJOR ISSUES

http://andrewyu-jenwang.blogspot.com/2008/10/bush-is-worst-president-in-american.html

drew3rd Says:

Only Carter did more damage to this country.

Seriously, what did he do? There was a brief gas shortage, some stagflation, and the Iranians went nuts. That’s a small fraction of the crap what went down during Bush’s term.

Typically, wingnut derision of Carter is of the 5th-grade schoolyard method:

WINGNUT: Carter is the worst President ever!

REASONABLE PERSON: He wasn’t great, but he wasn’t that bad.

WINGNUT: Ha ha, you can’t even defend him! He’s the worst President ever!

REASONABLE PERSON: Um, no, he’s not that -

WINGNUT: Loser! Loser!

That’s pretty much the essence of any anti-Carter argument I’ve ever heard.

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drew3rd Says:

Hoover was framed. No one could have done anything to stave off the depression.

I’ll grant that up until then nobody knew from economic institutions and regulation. After all, we’d just gone through the Industrial Revoltion, so nobody really knew how the new economy worked.

But Hoover spent the entire duration of his Presidency flailing around with “voluntary” fixes, basically trying to whine the economy back into shape, rather than exercising any actual power to fix it.

And I think RHF is a meanie.

The one between the Sioux and the Shawnee.

And the facts come out. Thank you for the reminder.

Hoodathunk Says:
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and (a nail in my coffin) what war had ALL casualties as American?

The one between the Sioux and the Shawnee.

Historians are pretty well educated persons, it just doesn’t make sense that 2% could be that wrong.

(George Mason’s) “History News Network’s poll of 109 historians found that 61 percent of them rank Bush as “worst ever” among U.S. presidents…..96 percent of the respondents place the Bush presidency in the bottom tier…..98 percent label it a “failure.”

I was around then, and I don’t know how you can argue that JFK was worse than Nixon.

I know Carter is the man conservatives love to hate, but if you look at the deficits and unemployment he inherited from Ford and what he left Reagan, Carter improved them. Really, just get a decent almanac and look at the Ford-Carter-Reagan years.

Bush is the worst American president in history.

And he did it because he quit talking to the other side.

1) Bush
2) Nixon
3) McKinley (big imperialist)
4) Andrew Johnson (way overmatched for the job — BTW, Lincoln was NOT a Republican in 1864!)
5) Harding
6) Grant
7) Buchanan
(most of the worst were just incompetent or in over their heads) Nixon and Bush were malignant.

Perhaps (but not necessarily) in that order.

I don’t know about the rest of you folks but I am sick and tired of these ‘polls’…

Polling is OK for some things, but “worst 5 presidents” is such an open-ended question that it really isn’t statistically scalable. There are just too many answers, too many ways to look at it, and it’s really tough to answer without doing at least a few minutes of research.

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shoeless Says:

I would put John Adams as among the worst…

Yeah, that Alien and Sedition Acts thing was pretty messed up. Probably even more so than the PATRIOT Act.

I’d add Andrew “Mofo” Jackson. Started the trail of tears. After the Cherokees successfully sued the U.S. in the Supreme Court which handed down a cease-and-desist order, Jackson went ahead with relocating them anyways, and said “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it!”

Openly defying the SCOTUS. Not even Chimpy has gone that far in forcing a Constitutional crisis. But then again, he’s got a few days left.

Then there’s Andrew Johnson, who got impeached for real. He really doesn’t seem to be the bad guy in that situation, but when your Sec of War can get you kicked out for trying to kick him out, you just suck.

There was Warren G. Harding and the Teapot Dome Scandal, but reading about that, it sounds like stuff that Chimpy does every day: handing over federal land to private interests in return for cash.

Then John Quincy Adams assumed the Presidency under electoral circumstances that make Florida 2000 look like a perfect model of Democracy. Nobody got a majority in a 4-way race (Jackson with the lead, both electoral and popular) so the House got to pick. At the time, that pretty much meant the Speaker of the House got to pick. He picked JQA.

Hoover, for the whole Great Depression thing…

Also, Nixon. ‘Nuff said about him.

So I’d go… Chimpy, Jackson, Adams, Nixon, Hoover.