Quote:
Originally Posted by Tango589
(Post 2459583)
The last speech of the Inauguration should be an announcement that:
"Mr President, you have a maximum of 8 years to see how badly you can balls this country up. Your time starts.....now!"
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And make no mistake about that, we have great examples from history beginning with Andrew Jackson:
Jackson somehow got the idea that national banks and mints were evil. Not thinking too much about why economies work and how, he closed the National Bank and shut down the mint, leaving private banks to print all money. Well, what could POSSIBLY go wrong with that plan?
A merchant in Florida had no way of knowing whether that dollar bill issued from the First Bank of Atlanta was any good or not. That's a propblem.. NO, that's a GREAT OPPORTUNITY. Suddenly more than half the money in circulation was conterfeit. And because that was most of the money that was, the populace supported counterfeiters. All money was just about worthless and even with the counterfeiters, there wasn't enough to buy anything. For 20 years middle class people actually starved to death in our largest cities. In addition, Jackson's parrot swore so colorfully he had to be ejected from Jackson's funeral. Trump's chances of living down to that standard are about zero.
Woodrow Wilson
This guy walked into a pretty well designed government. One if its better features was that the individual states had actual representation in the Legislature. There was no such thing as an "unfunded mandate" where the legislators, unable to figure out a way to fund what they wanted, just hands it over to the states, "you are required to do and pay for this!" That was because each state appointed two representatives from state legislatures to sit on the, you guessed it, United States Senate.
Totally removing all direct state influence on the Federal Government, Wilson remade the Senate into nothing more than a duplication of the functions of the House of Representatives, permanently destroying the carefully contrived balance of power and establishing the Imperial Federal Government, which rules unchecked over the affairs of states.
Trump could run on the premise of the "forgotten Americans" because Woodrow Wilson remade our Republican form of goverment in his own image, making us into two countries, each fighting for our lives: inside the beltway and outside the beltway. The haves and the flyovers.
Thank you Woodrow Wilson. Second worst president in history.
But number three is the only one who could reasonably be accused of treason and genocide: Andrew Johnson, president right after Lincoln was shot. Thanks to Lincoln's policies of reconciliation plus rigid enforecement of emancipation, meaning that former slaves had rights to equal respect, responsibility, consequence and reward as any southern plantation owner, governments from local to state to national had great representation from black mayors, black assemblymen, black representatives and senators on the state and national levels from the entire south.
However, Andrew Johnson was an unreconstructed Rebel. And his constitutional duty was to administrate and enforce the laws of the United States of America. He did no such thing. He declared a national holiday on civil rights, giving reactionary southern bigots the green light to murder, lynch, disenfranchise, and worse. Overnight, black representation in all levels of government fell to zero. Again, a black man had no rights a white man was bound to respect. What ten years ago was the defeat of a morally bankrupt southern plantation system turned into a Confederate rout. This wasn't victory, it was eradication. Southerners everywhere rejoiced. Principled Yankee senators (real senators in those days) and Representatives impeached Johnson for his heinous acts. The conviction failed by one vote, which John F Kennedy celebrated in his famous book Profiles in Courage. Kennedy cast it as "one courageous principled vote kept an innocent man from being railroaded." I'll choose to think that Kennedy was merely ignorant of the facts.
If you want to dub Johnson as worst president in history I won't stand in your way. He sucked worse than Trump even has any opportunity to screw the pooch.
I'd mention Obama and cite the 90 million people not part of the workforce, the greatest proportion in all history, plus the fact that unemployment statistics are so muddied that they will never again mean anything. While the economy burned, Obama fiddled with healthcare, a horribly expensive thing that the country had to get healthy again even to think about fooling with. I'd mention that the people who suffered most under his reign were the very ones who supported him the strongest, that Yes We Can became No We Didn't Even Try. He is the only president in history who did not have a single quarter of more than 3% annual growth rate in his entire eight years, that's thirty-two quarters! But nobody starved over 20 years. Half the population of certain states were not marked for murder by the other half. Obama didn't remake a carefully constructed governmental system to disenfranchise every state in the Union.
Whatever Obama did or didn't accomplish he's not in shouting distance of the famous Bottom Three Presidents. And Trump can't get there either. They were just too bad.
