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@coal
Why do you rate bush43 higher than Clinton?
Rate the last 8 Presidents
Posts
Total:
85
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@RationalMadman
Let's rewind a little. Firstly, how much do you know about the nations that have successfully cut extremely down on guns to the point that they are like severe anomaly in the crime world?
That is inherently an apples to oranges comparison and holds no weight. The United States was founded on the basis of the 2nd Amendment (literally). You cannot compare it to nations where the same is not the case. The culture is inherently different.
Do you truly believe guns can't be controlled through effective sting operations, anti-gun campaigns and incentives for snitching as well as temporary amnesty perhaps if one hands in all their firearms and even the government buying the firearms from them as a potential burst solution, which helped in Australia's original crackdown?
They can’t. Well, not without sparking a Civil War, which I’m sure you don’t support.
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@ILikePie5
And in this civil war, whose side is fuelled by pride and anger and which side is the rational one seeking the best solution?
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@ILikePie5
If America were founded on the 2nd amendment, literally, they'd have given the Native Americans guns and the black slaves not only guns but money to battle their oppression with.
Nice try though.
Biden:
Alright, so. Going into his election, Biden's candidacy had two things going for it. First, he wasn't nearly as polarizing a figure as Trump. Second, his decades of political experience, which Democrats hoped would bring a major asset to the White House. The man was milquetoast as all get-out and had a track record on racial issues that actually was not better than Trump's, but whatever. Perhaps an uninspiring moderate was what the country needed.
Or so was reasoned. In practice, Biden's lack of personal scandals is pretty much the only thing he's managed better than Trump.
Inflation was skyrocketing even before Russia's invasion. As were gas prices, and Biden's fossil fuel policies certainly didn't help. He promised that he had a plan to decisively beat Covid in a short time but after all was said and done, the transition from President #45 to President #46 didn't noticeably affect the course of the pandemic.
Most damningly was Russia. In the weeks leading up to the invasion, the Biden Administration didn't exactly look like it had a plan. The administration issued at least one false prediction of the invasion being "on a Wednesday", which didn't pan out.
Then, on February 24, 2022, Biden's decades of experience proved completely useless. Not only did he fail to deter this attack but in fact his actions likely contributed to it.
Which takes us back to Afghanistan. While Presidents Trump and Biden jointly made the final withdrawal happen, and share joint responsibility for that, the Biden administration had no plan in terms of its execution. Billions of US-supplied army equipment fell into Taliban hands, and more than 100K people were stuffed onto planes in a chaotic evacuation at a besieged airport. Anyone old enough to remember Saigon would've been having traumatic flashbacks as they watched scenes from Kabul unfold on cable television. After this, Biden chose to plunder several billion dollars that comprised Afghanistan's foreign reserves and that could've gone to help the country get back on its feet economically.
The administration projected foreign policy weakness to an extent that Trump did not. If not for that, it's at least possible that Europe might not be on the cusp of another continental-scale war and that the globe wouldn't be on the verge of massive shortages of basic commodities like oil and grain.
While Ukraine is defending itself admirably, there's little reason (with publicly available information, anyways) to assume that Biden can take credit for this. Yes, the US supplied them with weapons, but any administration would.
While his administration's barely a year old, thus far I have to give him a D or at best a C.
Trump:
The man was dysfunctional in his personal and public life to a degree that no likely no other politician in human history could hope to match. However, what people miss is that Trump wasn't governing by merely his own expertise and judgment. Rather, the Republican Party had infrastructure in place to provide advisors who could give sound prescriptions wherever Trump was clueless.
What Trump himself brought to the table was the ability to reinvigorate the party's internal machinery and discourse, giving a sense of enfranchisement to the party's softcore paleocon wing that felt previously unrepresented, while raising debate about which ideas were "conservative" and which weren't, putting items and agendas back on the table that the party had rejected by the late 90s. To some, Trump was a Mussolini figure in modern garb. But to others, he was a new Reagan, if not better than Reagan. To say his style of rhetoric made him a failure is to appeal to subjective taste.
In terms of how it governed, the Trump administration did alright. Trump inherited a fairly good economy from Obama and it stayed good, up until covid. He tried to capitalize on this period of strength to renegotiate trade arrangements that were tilted against the US's favor. He succeeded in some part, hammering out new deals with several countries, but fell short of the big prize: China. Though, in Trump's defense, he was close before Covid hit.
This was another thing Trump himself had to offer: a boldness to take short-term risks in the hope of long-term economic betterment that other politicians didn't. This somewhat weakened growth in the years 2017, 2018, and 2019, but the deals that were renegotiated might (very modestly) boost growth for decades to come.
In terms of Covid, much is said of Trump wildly downplaying the virus early on. In practice, however, the United States fared similarly to other Western countries as late as January 2021, suggesting that, whatever its appearances, Trump's unwise talk early on didn't seriously impact the overall course of the pandemic. What Trump did manage to do right, or at least didn't bungle, was the federal handling of the economic recovery, easily the fastest in American history.
Other Pros: Moved the US embassy to Jerusalem. His appointment of 3 Supreme Court Justices, raising hopes that Roe v. Wade might be overturned in the next 2 years. Should this happen, it'll be the greatest moral triumph in contemporary Western history since the liberation of the last Nazi concentration camp, and Trump will have played a huge role in making it happen.
Despite claims of him being a Russian puppet, no Russian invasion of Ukraine under his watch. Constructed 450 miles of border wall despite a reticent Congress that wouldn't give him any funding for the endeavor. Passed deals with certain Central American countries that would make it harder for "asylum seekers" (99% opportunist immigrants using asylum as a loophole) to cross the US-Mexico border without permission.
Other Cons: The national debt rose more in one term than in any one of Obama's terms, though the percentage of debt increase was lower.
Emboldened Netanyahu to keep building illegal settlements in the Palestinian Territories. His joint responsibility with Biden for the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. His outrageous speech, which degraded the high dignity of the White House. Dozens of miscellaneous scandals, which surely demoralized public trust in the government. Weakened the US's diplomatic standing with many countries. His rhetoric helped make the anti-masker and anti-vaxxer positions seem more legitimate during a global pandemic. Failed to stop Turkey's 2019 offensive in Northern Syria against Kurdish-held areas.
And finally, his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. While those who refer to it as a coup attempt are repeating lies, what Trump unambiguously did do was disgraceful and will raise the specter of violence in American elections for years, if not decades, to come.
Grade: N/A. The man is impossible to grade.
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@Greyparrot
George H. W. Bush:
1. Did not make foreign policy mistakes, particularly with respect to (a) Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bin Laden in and around 1994-1995 (unlike Bill Clinton); and (b) did not allow multiple genocides to unfold under his watch, throughout the developing world in general and Central/Eastern Europe in particular. I will never forgive Bill Clinton for what happened in Kosovo, Bosnia and throughout Yugoslavia, much less Rwanda. The cries of those children should haunt him every night he goes to sleep, and torment him for eternity.
2. Did not make domestic policy mistakes, like defunding the CIA, selling out the American working class, expanding the Community Reinvestment Act in 1995 (which was the direct and proximate cause of the 2007 real estate bubble) and repealing Glass-Steagall. And let's not forget his "reforms" to student loans.
I could go on and on with Bill Clinton's failures. He got a select few very important things right, which is the only reason he doesn't have an F. But 9/11 is more on Clinton than any other president.
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@coal
But 9/11 is more on Clinton than any other president.
I think destabilizing Iraq and disrupting the power balance there while also making America look bad was a worse long term failure but...ok.
did not allow multiple genocides to unfold under his watch
Whatevs. Global Genocides happen under every president. Surely you know about Ethiopia's genocide this year...or maybe not. You can't stop them all.
expanding the Community Reinvestment Act in 1995 (which was the direct and proximate cause of the 2007 real estate bubble)
I blame Barney Frank for that. A president has no direct control over rogue congress members. His authority doesn't extend to Congressional duties. That would have been a suicidal veto.
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@Greyparrot
To understand Iraq, we need to start to consider vice presidents. Dick Cheney was probably the worst, ever.
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@coal
Dick Cheney was probably the worst, ever.
Knee deep in graft. MIC. Etc.
Obama:
Offered a hopeful vision to the American public during hard times. When there was a wide consensus that capitalism "had failed", he made people believe a better future was possible without actually gutting the economy in practice. Bailed out certain large companies for which, had they fallen, the infrastructure and collective expertise they had in place would've been lost to the country.
Obama was the first black president. While a politician shouldn't be qualified or disqualified for public office on the basis of their race, having at least one black guy fill the position symbolically shattered a glass ceiling for ethnic minorities in this country and confirmed, once and for all, that a black man can aim for the same peaks of high achievement as his white counterpart.
On a global stage, having a black president gave a non-white face to the country, which likely did a lot to break ground in our relations with the Third World and in particular Africa. Lingering fears that the US harbored a eurocentric foreign policy agenda were dispelled. When Obama showed up to negotiate with the head of, say, Nigeria or South Africa, this wasn't a white overlord coming to dictate terms to them. Rather, here was somebody they could relate to and sympathize with, and by extension with the country that Obama represented.
By the time Obama left office, the economy had recovered from its worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Granted, he had 8 years to do this and it took a while to show results, but he eventually got it done. This, of course, came at a then-unprecedented price tag in terms of the national debt. He successfully negotiated the Iran Deal, and possibly thanks to that Iran still doesn't have a nuclear bomb in the year 2022.
Under Obama's tenure, Congress passed the PPACA. Even to this day, I'm still not well informed about this subject, but I can testify that I personally would not be covered by health insurance today if not for certain provisions contained therein. So I'd chalk that up to a positive.
And now the bad.
Obama's withdrawal from Iraq was premature, though he shared joint responsibility with George Bush. This enabled ISIL's takeover of northern Iraq, the subsequent Yazidi Genocide, and other grave war crimes by the group. From there, it'd take a 3-to-4 year old air campaign to uproot them from their new stronghold.
He was the man in the White House when the Arab Spring happened. In principle, I cannot blame Obama for trying to bring democracy to the Middle East and therefore supporting the rebels in these various states. However, he did this without a plan for what came next. Nobody stabilized Libya and it fell into a second civil war as soon as the first ended. He didn't give enough support to the rebels in Syria for them to win, instead merely prolonging an unwinnable rebellion with not-so-covert CIA training and arms. Yemen, of course, also became a colossal mess.
All of this sparked the largest refugee crisis Europe had seen in decades.
2014 was a hell year for American interests. ISIL aside, it was the year when Russia and China brought an end to the peaceful post-Cold War era and boldly asserted themselves as aggressive rival powers, seizing territory in Crimea and the South China Sea.
Under Obama, FISA Courts came to operate with increasing impunity and with minimal public scrutiny. This court was later weaponized against presidential candidate Donald Trump. Some of Obama's public comments helped egg on the "Black Lives Matter" movement, which largely failed to decrease police brutality while simultaneously raising homicide rates to such an extent that BLM's activism probably led to more black deaths on net balance.
If not for Obama's two successful appointments to the Supreme Court, the decision Obergefell v. Hodges likely wouldn't have been passed. On one hand, this greatly expanded the opportunities of gay and lesbian Americans to choose a desirable partner. On the other, it accelerated the timetable for mass LGBT activism of the kind that re-shaped America as a place utterly inhospitable for millions of religious Americans. I won't comment on whether this was good or bad, but it's worth mentioning.
Grade: Let's give him a B-.
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@RationalMadman
And in this civil war, whose side is fuelled by pride and anger and which side is the rational one seeking the best solution?
You mean the side fighting for their god-given rights*
If America were founded on the 2nd amendment, literally, they'd have given the Native Americans guns
They did…but nice attempt at a strawman.
and the black slaves not only guns but money to battle their oppression with.Nice try though.
Nice strawman.
Bush:
Suffice to say, the man's presidency was virtually defined by the War on Terror.
This is especially hard to assess. Everyone knows about the endless drone strikes, Guantanamo Bay, the forever battlefields of Afghanistan, annoying TSA lines at airports, etc. What's harder to see is the hypothetical alternative, i.e. how many additional terror attacks would've been planned and executed successfully without the War on Terror or what other countries might've fallen to Jihadists aside from Afghanistan by now. Nobody can know the answer and for all that we know, it could be anything between "Nothing was prevented" and "An apocalyptic wave of attacks against the West that would've sunk the United States forever to its knees was prevented". Hypotheticals are funny that way.
It's similarly impossible to assess the Iraq War. As it stands today, the Western-led order is threatened by axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Nobody knows what it'd look like if we added Baathist Iraq to the picture, nor what Iraq would look like today were the vast slew of international sanctions from the '90s all still in place. At the same time, we do know the immense bad that the invasion resulted in and that the casus belli was legally questionable at best under international law.
Abroad also, the Bush administration failed to rein in those elements of the army and three-letter agencies that ignored due process and detained and tortured anyone at will so long as they were foreigners from less-than-prestigious countries. Ironically, this drove jihadist recruitment around the world and undermined the very aim of the War on Terror that put said agencies in a position to commit these illegal acts in the first place.
At home, Bush simultaneously cut taxes and sent federal spending through the roof, trying his hand at reconciling two contradictory schools of Republican thought (fiscal libertarianism and a security apparatus that needs maximal funding because otherwise the nebulous enemy will win).
Bush's presidency ended in a long-overdue collapse of the housing bubble, which was mostly due to factors predating his presidency but which he failed to notice in time and take meaningful steps against. He was reportedly booed as he was leaving the White House. He also botched the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, which morphed into a horror without modern precedent for a Western country.
Grade: So much of this is contingent on speculation that I'm tempted to give him an N/A score like with Trump. However, I'm assigning Bush a D or C.
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@RationalMadman
Get back to me when you come up with a reason as to why you should ban something that saves at the minimum 10x lives overall and probably more than 50x after doing a deep dive into gun deaths.
Clinton:
This guy was lucky enough to be at the helm during the golden years. The Cold War had ended, Eastern Europe was opening up to Western trade, and America could reap the so-called peace dividend. This was a unipolar era where the United States, driven by its conviction that it had a hegemon's noblesse oblige to make other countries into liberal democracies, gleefully put boots on the ground wherever it wished and Americans still enjoyed the luxury of being absolutely convinced their actions were just.
To untold millions of foreigners, however, this looked like a new age of Western imperialism driven by missionary zeal, only this time bringing McDonald's instead of crucifixes. The conflicts of this era, even if since forgotten by Americans, would shape anti-American rhetoric by Russian apologists and wumaos online to this day.
From approximately 1994 until the Dotcom Burst, the economy was doing great. Clinton worked together with a Republican-majority Congress and many bipartisan bills of great substance were passed during this time. What most people also don't know is that Clinton reformed and improved the civil service.
But, ultimately, Clinton's presidency would end in disgrace. The revelation that the (married) President of the United States was receiving bl0wj0bs in the Oval Office, and then perjured himself concerning this matter on live television, lowered the bar of expected presidential conduct nearly to the floor and surely contributed to why Americans cared so little about Trump's scandals 20 years later.
Clinton had so much going for him, and so much of that beyond his right to take credit, that it's perhaps unfair to give him a higher score than Bush or Obama, who were handed more difficult circumstances from the start. But I'm gonna give him a B.
Bush Sr:
Like Trump, George Herbert Walker Bush only served one term. And two events overshadow all of the rest:
The Persian Gulf War and the fall of communism. 1991 was our annus mirabilis if there ever was one. Bush probably can't take credit for the fall of communism, but the Persian Gulf War was his doing.
And to be clear, this wasn't such an easy call despite how it might seem in retrospect. Saddam's army was, on paper at least, possibly as strong as the PLA (albeit without nukes). It had Scud missiles with chemical WMDs and the United States had been humiliated in Vietnam less than 20 years ago.
At the time, it was a respectable opinion that the United States might be defeated in a war by Iraq. Bush was running a risk that could ruin his presidency but he proceeded anyway, understanding that letting Saddam consolidate his gains in Kuwait, and then threatening Saudi Arabia in the future, was even more unthinkable.
This single decision (to commence an air campaign against occupying forces in Kuwait) shaped the next 30 years of human history. Any country that considered invading another now understood that overwhelming retaliation from the US was the most likely outcome. As a result, the global map has held mostly stable up until February 24, 2022.
I'd give Bush Sr. an A.
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@Incel-chud
First article on Google. Some excellent research skills you have there genius. It doesn't even talk about his presidential term just references the 80s in general LOL
That... that was his presidential term though...
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@Swagnarok
What Trump himself brought to the table was the ability to reinvigorate the party's internal machinery and discourse
Does "criticize Trump as a Republican and your political career is over" really count as reinvigorating discourse and not, like, the complete opposite?
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@cristo71
True but for the last part— money in investment accounts IS being put to work. If I had to think of ways of making money dormant (other than under the mattress), I would say buying precious metals and crypto.
This is true nothing is ever as clean and simple as activists say. Prying wealth from people is extremely difficult. “wealth” is also a hard concept to grasp because now that it’s not all land, precious metals, and other physical goods a lot of the value depends upon a state that respects property rights. If the government just straight up liquidated Jeff Bezos assets many of them would be worth way less. The desire for a wealth tax is just childish and immature imo
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@ILikePie5
And in this civil war, whose side is fuelled by pride and anger and which side is the rational one seeking the best solution?You mean the side fighting for their god-given rights*If America were founded on the 2nd amendment, literally, they'd have given the Native Americans gunsThey did…but nice attempt at a strawman.and the black slaves not only guns but money to battle their oppression with.Nice try though.Nice strawman.
I didn't strawman at all. A strawman would be saying that if you are against gun rights in the US, you are against the US.
And in this civil war, whose side is fuelled by pride and anger and which side is the rational one seeking the best solution?You mean the side fighting for their god-given rights*
Very rational and unemotional, I see.
Biden: F-
Trump: F+
Obama: F-
Bush: F-
Clinton: F-
Bush: F-
Reagan: F-
Carter: F-
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@RationalMadman
I didn't strawman at all. A strawman would be saying that if you are against gun rights in the US, you are against the US.
You haven’t answered any of my contentions at all. Slavery has nothing to do with gun rights in the 21st century.
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@RationalMadman
Very rational and unemotional, I see.
Do you deny the concept of god-given rights? I don’t see how that’s an emotional argument lol.
Does God not exist and therefore cannot give us rights? I’m genuinely curious what your position is
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@ILikePie5
Let's put aside the irrationality of assuming we know what this god gave us as rights or that god exists.
The very fact that we assume the rights are real when the blacks and native americans of the very same land were thwarted by denying them the rights (meaning if there is a god, god favoured the unfairly armed invaders and oppressors) means that rationally, god does not give the slightest shit about gun rights in the US.
The way you work around that is by emotional appeal and doublespeak.
This tends to apply to many right-wing 'god given rights'.