The Real List of Worst Presidents

 

Some illiterate mug sent me this at my FB page this morning. I know it’s a fake, because there’s no way the ghost of Time magazine could survive a defamation suit like the one ABC just had to settle for many millions with Donald Trump. Still, it reminded me that the Missing-in-Action opinion editors of the biggest mass media outlets are addicted to soliciting Worst President rankings from deranged left-wing college professors who have written books about the left-wing despoiler of the Oval Office they most admire. (One of them had Biden ranked at 17th best two years into his catastrophic single term.) The only reason why such lists are popular with the media propagandists is the inevitable punchline that Trump and Nixon are first and second worst in some order.

Which is nonsense. Generally, people with any education ignore the lists because they’re predictable, biased, sloppily argued and cited, and transparently a provocative political statement rather than a product of scholarship.

Here’s a list you can fact-check for yourselves. I won’t be as detailed as I could be about any of them in this post because mostly I’ve covered them elsewhere. I’ll give you more than enough to get started on your own digging. You’ll note I haven’t gone out of my way to make any of them look horrible. They just were. All of them. A Baker’s Dozen of Worst Presidents:

No. 1 and 2 (tie)

Barack Obama and Joe Biden

One can’t be separated from the other. The Biden Presidency was really Obama’s third term, a continuation and elaboration of destructive executive branch behaviors that politicized agencies, tolerated massive corruption by members of the permanent federal bureaucracy. Neither man was qualified by life experience to become President at all, devoid of any job of work that was not expressly political and partisan. The ruling ethic was to enable policies that undermined the middle class in favor of the elite and the aggrieved. It was in many ways coldly anti-American. Hillary was supposed to be Obama’s third term, but Trump put the kibosh on that, thus forcing the psychotic break with the rule of law and common sense that has characterized the last ten years. Biden was never President. He was a cipher through whose empty body the work of clandestine vandals could be furthered, including the destruction of U.S. borders, the splintering of the populace into niche victim constituencies who could not be punished for the violence of their protests. All international deals favored foreign nations and disadvantaged the U.S. The enormity of the coverup of Biden’s corruption and dementia may yet prove fatal.

No. 3

Lyndon Johnson

Two gigantic crimes cement LBJ in the 3 spot. His destruction of urban black neighborhoods in a fraudulent reform called the Great Society was the most damaging racial subjugation since slavery. Black neighborhoods were leveled to make room for crime ridden highrise “projects” that killed the black nuclear family structure, immersed single parent households in gang violence, and led to the current sorry statistic that two thirds of black children are born out of wedlock and urban percentages of aborted black babies approach 50 percent in our largest cities. Crime, drugs, illiteracy, prostitution, incompetent schools, and ill health have all been made substantially more epidemic because of the Johnson spending spree on his utopian scheme. The other crime? Vietnam. Just as costly as the Great Society, with monstrous side effects in all of society that came out of that misbegotten war. We won’t get into the personal frailties involving sex and financial corruption. They’re not pleasant to visualize. Most interesting is how infrequently LBJ is mentioned at all in the mass media. They do not want to look at or try to account for his legacy, and so they hope to make everyone forget about him. We shouldn’t. Ever.

No. 4 and 5 (tie)

Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Only remoteness in time keeps these two out of the No. 1 and 2 positions on the list. They are both fathers of the Progressive Movement in the United States. Woodrow Wilson was the more cerebral of the two. He believed that an elite class could use government to pursue the perfectibility of mankind. Their ideal role was to use government to correct the sins and poor behaviors of the working classes. As President of Princeton he stopped accepting Jews to the university and actually recalled all degrees that had been granted to black students, who were retroactively expelled. As U.S. president he also levied the first income taxes on the nation in 1913. He wanted America to lead the world in his perfectibility campaign, thus resulting in the disastrous terms of the Versailles Treaty ending WWI, the epic disaster of the League of Nations, and the subsequent outbreak of WWII. FDR applied Wilsonian principles in his New Deal, building a coalition of the underprivileged to install a heavily graduated tax system that enabled the federal government to control all major investment in the nation. When the Great Depression inevitably descended, he upped the ante, growing government giveaways to create a new generation of dependents on government largesse that would empower Democrats for most of a century. All his spending did not end the Depression but perpetuated it on the back of overtaxed business until WWII revived the munitions industry and then the rest of the manufacturing economy. Along the way, he showed the same ethnic biases as Wilson, doing nothing to publicize or counter the Jewish Holocaust, interning Japanese-American citizens in WWII, and tolerating black citizens in the Army provided their fighting units were segregated. Interestingly, both Wilson and Roosevelt became mentally incompetent in office, which fact was as devotedly hidden by the press as was FDR’s wheelchair. Do these lame exits ring any bells?

No. 6.

Harry S. Truman

The ‘S’ didn’t stand for anything. Neither did Harry for the most part. You don’t like vulgar. He called the critic who panned his daughters singing a “sonofabitch” back when nobody said those words in public discourse. Yeah, he dropped the A-Bomb. Two of them. Boasted that he never lost a moment’s sleep over it. What else? He signed up for the U.N., which has become a plague no one can cure. He invented the American concept of fighting and taking heavy combat losses in a war you did not dare to win. He fired the general who called him on that hypocrisy. Is all that why he’s here in the No. 6 spot? No. He’d be on the list but lower if he hadn’t given America the biggest parting gift any President ever handed the voters on his way out the door. He added the thousands of workers in federal ranks that had been hired as temps during the New Deal civil service status in the U.S. Government. So they could no longer be fired by the small-government Republicans he hated. Why we have the permanent, unfireable federal bureaucracy we have today. FDR built it. Truman made it unstoppable and uncontrollable.

No. 7

George H. W. Bush

This is where the New World Order talk and behind-closed-doors maneuverings began in earnest. Prior to serving as a convention-brokered VP candidate for Reagan, he had served as de-facto ambassador to Red China, Director of the CIA, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, and then as a failed candidate for President. His political career began early, aided by his father’s Senate seat (CT), and other family and Yale connections. His business career was in oil, mostly offshore drilling leases. His time in elected office before becoming VP was two terms as congressman in a Texas district. He ran for president on Reagan’s record, famously vowed never to raise taxes, had a moment in the sun invading Iraq and ending the war abruptly with Saddam Hussein still in office and the oil fields intact, thus paving the way for Iraq War II. Subsequently, he was voted out for a combination of missteps. He negotiated NAFTA, thus dooming the auto industry assembly plants in the Midwest, raised taxes when the Democrat Congress insisted, and presided over a mild recession which hurt him more severely because he didn’t know what a supermarket code scanner was. Why is he here? As a nepotism/dynasty candidate, he smothered the momentum of the outsider Reagan years, served as a spokesman for ill-defined aspirations of unified World Government, and somehow contrived (his one PR triumph) to take credit for the defeat of the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Which was Reagan’s doing, period. After Bush 41, the Republicans were an openly RINO party, a mere tightass wing of the metastasizing UniParty.

No. 8

Jimmy Carter

Republicans, RINOs in particular, are fond of claiming that Carter was the worst President of all time. He wasn’t. He’s on this list for two policy reasons, and one other thing. The policy reasons? His domestic economic policy sucked, turning a so-so economy at the end of Ford’s term into a crushing stagflation economy with little growth and runaway 13 percent inflation on the day he left office. As a Democrat, he couldn’t say no to spending, so budget deficits aggravated by rising gas and oil prices made the kitchen table a sorry place to sort through the monthly bills. His foreign policy also sucked. He preached a lot about human rights, which were always wanting in places Carter disapproved of because he was a humble churchgoing peanut farmer from Georgia. Yeah, that’s the other thing I mentioned. Carter’s biggest weakness was that he was a small man. Small as in not big enough for the job. He personally administered the signups for the WH tennis court. That kind of thing. He did succeed in getting a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, but some good things can be achieved by not getting in the way. Like he didn’t get in the way when the Shah of Iran had a religious uprising by the crazy wing of Islam. Carter didn’t approve of the shah, who was rich and like that, so he didn’t lift a hand to save the Pahlavi regime. Which is how he got himself the hostage crisis that drove him from office. From first to last to the day he died, Carter could never see the big picture. Why he had a petty vendetta against Israel. Why he thought it was okay to negotiate with foreign leaders on his own, with no authority of any kind after he left office. It was okay because he was the one doing it and he was just a humble peanut farmer possessed of an immense portion of virtue. Best way to analyze the Carter presidency is to take a whirl through all the political cartoons of the day. Through the years, they kept drawing him smaller and smaller. Why he’ll eventually be forgotten and left off this list altogether. Provided somebody can finally fix the nearly 50 year old mess he made in the Middle East.

No. 9

William Jefferson Clinton

He’s not here for reasons of policy for the most part. Politically, he did try to steer the Democrat Party away from the extreme positions of the Sixties left. He was generally a centrist, neither innovative nor aggrieved. What lands him here is all the other stuff. He was personally corrupt, an inveterate liar and an actual rapist, not just a politically accused philanderer. He was good at seeming to have clean hands because his wife did the dirty work and the worst deeds that had a profound effect on the Government itself. Her coverups of his sins escalated into actual crimes that eventually diseased the entire legal profession and its institutions. His first term was not especially notable but for his continuing pursuit of unseemly interactions with women, but his second term was the bridge too far. Coasting on his re-election he got bored and amused himself with an overeager intern in the White House. By then there was a playbook to handle such things. Hillary had perfected the process of destroying the reputations of any woman who accused the President of sexual impropriety. 

The now notorious two-tier system of justice that characterized the administrations of both his Democrat successors (including Dem candidate Al Gore) acquired its tools and crisis response procedures under Clinton. Never admit wrongdoing. Smear the accusers by means both quasi-legal and criminal. String out the process by destroying even the meanings of the words of accusation and with it the meaning of whole bodies of law. Months of the cable television news melodrama called the Lewinsky Scandal resulted in damage to basic and obvious legal concepts, including perjury (“Everyone lies about sex…”) and the definition of truth itself (“It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is”…). Increasingly, it was a game that could be played openly in public, and lawyers in politics were empowered to use the same tools and methods in every aspect of their careers. What used to be kept secret became an accepted political skill called ‘spin,’ to be graded like an Olympic dive or ski jump. The new virtue was mere survival with acceptable approval ratings in the polls. Clinton survived his own brush with ignominy, but the death knell of his place in history is the stark reality that his real and lasting legacy was, and is, his wife, who made his scheming escape from personal embarrassment into a deadly weapon of immense political, financial, and moral corruption. Her response to losing the 2016 election was to conspire at the utter destruction of her victorious opponents, gathering all of the connections and dirt collected during years of DC skulduggery into what has become known as lawfare. Flagrantly criminal prosecutions conducted pridefully in the open, with full support of the mass media and all the power players of the party apparatus. The font of subversion on this monumental scale is Hillary. Which did not save her career but kept her out of the prison cell in which she undoubtedly belongs. Bill Clinton was Hillary’s accomplice in these destructive activities, and his reputation cannot escape the consequences that will ultimately be laid at the feet of Obama, Biden, and their equally criminal minions.

No. 10

George W. Bush

He should have been a kind of interlude, an accidental president propelled into office by arguably the most successful dynasty building clan in a century full of them. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there had been two Adams and two Harrisons, one father-son combo and one grandfather-grandson happenstance. It was an anomaly of American history, not a pattern. That changed with the family aspirations of the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, and the Bushes, interleaved by the press-supported ambitions of the Clintons, the Gores, and the Obamas. It’s called nepotism, which now pervades Congress and the state governments, and represents a kind of atavistic yearning toward a noble class disdained by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. The Roosevelts scored two presidents (one via assassination of his predecessor), the Kennedys just one (despite three quarters of a century of real and recruited candidates), and the Bushes two presidents brought forward by a Senate patriarch almost as iconic and controversial as Joseph Kennedy. The Bush presidencies were separated only by the two terms of Clinton, and a third Bush was teed up to be a candidate by acclamation in 2016 when Trump stopped both the Republican Jeb and the Democrat dynastic wannabe Hillary in the same campaign year. This earned him the lifelong enmity of both the Bushes and the Clintons, who worked actively to prevent his re-election and destroy him personally before, during, and after his time in office. One not unimportant reason why George W. is on this list. Dynastic grudges are real, but they should not be regarded as legitimate.

But what of ‘W’ as President? Does he belong here on that basis as well? Yes. He had one day of accidental greatness on the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center when he used a bullhorn to win the presidency Al Gore had come so close to stealing from him. After that he fought a War on Terror in the only ways that seemed feasible at the time. War was in the air, and W’s finger was in the air. Subsequently, he did four things which landed him on this list. First and least commented on, he never vetoed a single spending bill he received from Congress, thus cementing the RINOs as a me-too party paddling in the wake of the tax-and-spend deficit builders who had ruled the roost since FDR. Second, he transformed a clear military victory in Iraq into a protracted bloodbath of ill-defined ‘nation-building’ in both Iraq and Afghanistan that resulted in the same kind of humiliating stalemates that characterized American military adventures since Korea. Third, he passed the Patriot Act, which might have served as a temporary bandaid on intelligence weaknesses in the 9/11 aftermath but should have been retired or severely constrained rather than unthinkingly renewed when the terror threat had subsided. As it did. Fourth, he stopped fighting back against the Bush Derangement Syndrome that crippled his second term and emboldened the mass media to be openly scornful and oppositional rather than objective about the administration of a sitting President. Instead he just hid. His ignominy was so great that Obama won the presidency the same way Jimmy Carter did, by being a completely unvetted, unknown outsider who was not a Republican. His vindictive behavior toward Trump since leaving office is all the proof we need of his RINO mindset. He’s closer to Bill Clinton than to Ronald Reagan in his post-presidency persona. He also seems small now. Small like Carter.

No. 11 and 12 (tie)

James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson

No mystery about why these two are here. Both have long been conceded by historians (back when we still had them) to be the two worst presidents in history. Their single terms in office bracket the Lincoln presidency. Buchanan made the Civil War inevitable by provoking abolitionists beyond the breaking point with his advocacy of the Dred Scott decision in the Supreme Court (look it up) and by accepting Kansas into the Union as a slave state. His argument that divisions over slavery between north and south were more a matter of states rights than pro-slavery sentiment led to States Rights becoming the great excuse of the Confederacy, a figleaf covering the fact that southern aristocrats had built and depended on a slave economy for their wealth and would do anything to defend the institution. By the time Lincoln was elected, the war could no longer be prevented. That’s all we need to know about Buchanan. Andrew Johnson succeeded Lincoln after the assassination. His administration was dedicated to appeasing the defeated Confederate states by rubber-stamping their petitions for re-admission to the Union despite the implementation of ‘black codes’ designed to make the lot of free blacks almost indistinguishable from slavery. Johnson opposed the 14th Amendment designed to prevent the reestablishment of exactly such new forms of southern defiance and racial discrimination. He was impeached, but not for any of this. He was impeached for trying to fire members of his own cabinet for opposing his wishes and defying his orders. His conviction failed in the Senate by one vote, as a matter of constitutional principle described in JFK’s book ‘Profiles in Courage.’ (Presidents do have the Constitutional right to fire people in the executive branch.) Johnson was a disaster nonetheless and deserves his low place in American history. 

No. 13

Richard M. Nixon

I was going to give this last spot to Warren G, Harding, whose only known qualification for the presidency was the fact that he looked more like a President than almost anybody ever (look at the picture, not the PBS twaddle). His administration was corrupt, incompetent, and devoid of saving accomplishments. BUT…. He’s not on the list because he did serve his nation in death by dying in office with Calvin Coolidge as his Vice President. Coolidge saved the nation from a Great Depression before the one we got later on by an unheard of response. He reduced federal spending by 80 percent, thus freeing the economy to recover by reinvestment of freed funds and hard work by people who actually work. This kind of policy doesn’t look good to historians raised in the liberal tradition of using government to fix every problem rather than let the people do it on their own. Anyway, that’s how Harding gets a pass, leaving us with the guy pictured above.

Richard Nixon was run out of office by a cabal of the press and a political establishment that never liked him. His resignation amounted to a successful coup by a minority elite to overturn the results of the most one-sided election in the 20th century. That said, does he belong on this list on the merits? Yes. He gave them the weapons they needed to bring him down. He or his designates did know about the Watergate burglary, which if it had occurred under a Clinton or Obama would have been filed in the memory hole as a failed dirty trick by over-eager campaign operatives. Confronted with an extraordinary offensive against him by the press, Nixon tried to win the wrong way, with coverups and evasions and outright lies, and he got nailed. In other words, he helped set the precedent that a President can be driven from office by the press if enough people hate him enough. As President on the job he has a mixed report card. The costs and benefits of his rapprochement with Red China are still being debated. His use of wage and price controls to deal with inflation caused by government spending was a mistake, which gave future Democrat administrations more weasel room in their own political responses to inflation. Nixon did negotiate a peaceful end to the Vietnam War, but his own downfall and a vengeful runaway Congress refused to fund the terms of the peace and transfer of power to South Vietnam. The result was an incredibly damaging debacle and a lingering neurosis in the public mind about unwinnable wars in foreign climes, which has materially contributed to the likelihood they will be unwinnable, The upshot? Nixon belongs on the list, down here at Unlucky 13.

That’s all we’re doing here today. There will be no response to the fervent desire of so many ignoramuses to put Trump at the top of this list. Very few of them, if any, are qualified even to attempt such an argument without gales of laughter. What I will say is that he is a sitting President of the United States. It is therefore impossible to know how effective or ineffective his policies will be in the long term. Anyone who disputes that last statement is either a liar or a moron. 

Have a nice day, everyone.