Most harmful political figures in America

[Pablo Sanchez]

John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon for Vietnam and Watergate, respectively.

The tendency of the American establishment, both in government and military, was towards more and more involvement in Vietnam, and both parties strongly supported it. Johnson certainly did put 500,000 men into the conflict, but in the '64 campaign his challenger, Barry Goldwater, went even further and advocated the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons to Vietnam. No single actor can be blamed for the war in Vietnam, at least not in the sense that Nixon could be blamed for Watergate or Bush can be blamed for Iraq. Just look up the Pentagon Papers to see how "logical" it was for us to become deeply involved in Vietnam.

I would bring up Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol as being especially damaging to the United States and the world at large, because they were so key to the development of the neoconservative movement.

Elfdart-
Although it's a little early to tell, the Bush-Cheney presidency is something like the apotheosis of Reagan-style governance and neoconservative foreign policy, which is why I bring up the propagandists of neoconservatism.

[Elfdart]

John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon for Vietnam and Watergate, respectively. It is my understanding that JFK got us into Vietnam in the first place, and Nixon was involved in Watergate and then lied about it. Those two events were the watersheds that led to the election of Reagan because they fostered a deep and underlying (self-perceived) distrust of the government by Americans.

Time to give Nixon his due. He's quite simply the most vile motherfucker to ever hold public office in the US. Let's start with the 1968 election. Because Johnson had passed various civil rights laws, white racists (not just in the South, by the way) were enraged. Nixon pandered to the bigots and made the GOP the home of white supremacists once and for all. Nixon also sent his stooges, including Anna Chennault and Henry Kissinger to gum up the works on the Paris Peace Talks, telling the South Vietnamese delegation that Nixon would give Thieu everything he wanted if they pulled out. So Nixon prolonged the war for another five years and settled for the same terms that were on the table in 1968. He also expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia. Millions of people died during those five years to get Nixon elected and re-elected in 1972.

Reagan and the two Bushes are just variations on Nixon: Tell well-to-do white people that they are being oppressed. Tell poor whites that those people (commie-weirdo-negro-joo-fags) are the reason their standard of living is declining. Use the power of the state to enrich your supporters and if anyone gets in your way, harass them, bully them and spy on them -illegally if necessary. Oh, and kill foreign dark-skinned people who get too uppity. Most importantly: "Burn the damn tapes!"

The difference is, Nixon had real opposition, while Reagan and the two Bushes did not.

[Coyote]

But Nixon's malfeasance didn't wash with the American people. They turned on him, and he got out because he knew the game was up.

Reagan, OTOH, made malfeasance and crazy schemes patriotic.

[Spyder]

Nixon was one of the worst, however he was also the architecht of his own misfortune due to his insistence on taping everything. If all the arseholes that have taken office had the same policy this would be a very different world.

For most potentially harmful I'm going to throw Barack H Obama out there. The entire world loves this guy. Yes, yes, he's been telling us all how he's going to change everything for the better and, rightly so, people voted for him. However people forget that he's still a politician and an American president. Losing objectivity towards someone with that much power is dangerous.

[RedImperator]

Seeing as we're still mopping up some of Woodrow Wilson's messes, I'll nominate that prissy old racist dickbiter.

[The Romulan Republic]

Nixon earns special contempt from me since the Space Program suffered under his watch. Of course, that's true for most politicians to some extent.

This is not be on the same level of evil as a lot of the other stuff mentioned in here, but in terms of long-term harm its probably hard to do worse than helping to keep your species stuck on one world. At least that's my opinion.

Most of the obvious ones have already been mentioned. Though perhaps Andrew Jackson deserves a mention.

[Phantasee]

Seeing as we're still mopping up some of Woodrow Wilson's messes, I'll nominate that prissy old racist dickbiter.

Could you expand on that a little (well, a lot)?

[Samuel]

Seeing as we're still mopping up some of Woodrow Wilson's messes, I'll nominate that prissy old racist dickbiter.

Could you expand on that a little (well, a lot)?

Oh boy. He was a racist asshole who purged the civil service of blacks, the only president who presided over what was essentially a police state and he helped draw the borders of interwar Europe and the treaty of Versailles.

[The Romulan Republic]

Seeing as we're still mopping up some of Woodrow Wilson's messes, I'll nominate that prissy old racist dickbiter.

Could you expand on that a little (well, a lot)?

Oh boy. He was a racist asshole who purged the civil service of blacks, the only president who presided over what was essentially a police state and he helped draw the borders of interwar Europe and the treaty of Versailles.

I believe he also sent support to the anti-communists in the Russian civil war, which could be seen as the start of hostilities between the USSR and America. Though I don't they'd have ever been good friends regardless.

[Uraniun235]

I suppose it stands to reason that McCarthy should be included. Even though "McCarthyism" today bears a tremendous negative connotation, he did seed society with a great deal of anti-communist hysteria that permeates today. That in and of itself wouldn't be such a huge deal if it also didn't apply to the standard American dread of socialized institutions like medicine. It's inconceivable to think of something like Social Security being instituted today for that reason.

There was anti-communist hysteria in the United States since Joe McCarthy was still shitting his diapers. It wasn't really new at all - it just found new opportunity to blossom as American-Soviet relations broke down after WW2 ended.

If anything, he may have done a service to us in over-reaching as he did, as there's still a lot of people who would agree that Joe McCarthy was a total asshole. The scary thing is ultra-authoritarians like Ann Coulter (as well as some shithead over at Spacebattles, I think it was Es Arkajae) who are trying to re-cast McCarthy as some misunderstood champion of goodness over those dastardly commies.

[Patrick Degan]

For most potentially harmful I'm going to throw Barack H Obama out there. The entire world loves this guy. Yes, yes, he's been telling us all how he's going to change everything for the better and, rightly so, people voted for him. However people forget that he's still a politician and an American president. Losing objectivity towards someone with that much power is dangerous.

To put it kindly, that simply reeks of bullshit. Until you can point out objective evidence of long-lasting harm done by Obama, who has just barely started into his term, you have no argument. Indeed, it can be pointed out that he's already brought a net positive to the balance sheet simply by preventing the election of the truly poisonous duo of McCain and Palin.

[Patrick Degan]

Seeing as we're still mopping up some of Woodrow Wilson's messes, I'll nominate that prissy old racist dickbiter.

Could you expand on that a little (well, a lot)?

Oh boy. He was a racist asshole who purged the civil service of blacks, the only president who presided over what was essentially a police state and he helped draw the borders of interwar Europe and the treaty of Versailles.

Oh, even more than that. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, in pursuit of some messianic vision of himself as world peacemaker, essentially did everything in his power —including the aggrandisement of police-state powers Chimpus Caesar could only dream of having so as to quash popular opposition— to ram this country into a war it really had no stake in, which resulted in the fucked up peace of Versailles and laid the groundwork for the next and far more horrific war to follow, and for which 117,762 Americans died for nothing. His anti-German (later transformed into anti-Boshevik) zeal in exercising those police-state powers through every executive department also effectively destroyed progressive politics in the United States and removed every threat to the business power and their designs, which gave us the Roaring 20s and, very soon after, the Great Depression. The downfall of progressivism was so complete that it took comparatively little effort decades later by politicians like Reagan and Gingrich to start the dismantling of the New Deal and the Great Society because there was no effective Left in the American political spectrum to oppose it. The McCarthy witchunts of the 50s? A pale imitation of the Red Scare which was vigorously stoked and pursued by Wilson's attorney-general, A. Mitchell Palmer, his Justice Dept. bully-boy, J. Edgar Hoover, and even his postmaster general, Albert S. Burleson, who simply took it upon himself to repeal the First Amendment and suppressed wholesale the circulation of socialist, progressive, and even any dissenting, literature and publications —and of course dutifully turning over the lists of all the mailing addresses to Palmer.

And on the other hand... Wilson's zeal against blacks really helped to solidify Jim Crow racism for a good five decades and helped create the conditions which a reptile like Nixon was able to use to bring to the GOP it's Southern Strategy —the race-card they used in every election from 1968 up to 2008.

Wilson damaged the politics of this country for a solid century and the scope of that damage is still going to be felt in America for a few decades yet.

[K. A. Pital]

Didn't Wilson also preside over the Palmer Raids and the detention and forcible deportation of tens of thousands of people? Is that correct?

[Patrick Degan]

Didn't Wilson also preside over the Palmer Raids and the detention and forcible deportation of tens of thousands of people? Is that correct?

That's what the aforementioned Red Scare was all about.

[Big Orange]

The whole "ownership society" concept which Chimpus Caesar was pimping was one of Maggie's most cherished ideas.

Margaret Thatcher was more unpopular than Ronald Reagan because her Lolbetarian policies were more immediately felt in very a compressed island such as Britain where we're more suited to socialism than free marketeering, from the unnecessary privatization of utilties, smashing public transport for pure profit almost beyond repair, selling council housing, to the sudden dismantling of certain moribund industries which made permanent sink estates. The busted flush City of London was one of Maggie's biggest doings as well (which was a economic basket case from the start, enabling Britain to have numerous recessions long before the Depression of 08). Labour under Brown and Blair have become so much like the Conservatives it is not funny, rendering the democratic process arguably more meaningless than Democrats/Republicans, since who ever you vote for is going to be a Kleptocrat.

Ronald Reagan's name was not immediately mud since America is a much, much bigger nation than the UK and most of its composite States are really small to medium to large sized countries in their own right, so the damaging Lolbetarian notions of a weak central Federal government would seem appealing amongst the different States, the cutting down on welfare would have its appeal as well since Rednecks and gang bangers are not hard to demonize (hurting the majority who really needed it), and Ronald Reagan could cover up these damaging policies by bolstering the US Military (a monsterous Federal juggernaut with many high tech industries and civilian services dependent on it nationwide and overseas). But that led to equally monstrous debts that got seriously exacebated by Bush the Dumber's policies, although the rot was already begining to set in as far back as the early 90s and was even satarized in Falling Down (with Michael Douglas as a redundant aerospace engineer).

[K. A. Pital]

Note that it's interesting how many people from "the very top" were named. But it's really hard to imagine them without a circle of assholes composing their government, right? I mean, there should've been those who supported and nurtured the intellectual atmosphere which gave birth to such leaders. Okay, Rand - she's a worthless fiction writer but her adherents are high in power - but who else?

Just how many of those top figures were really malevolent in their own right, as opposed to just being a product of their ruling cabal, their upper class social circle? That's the question. Was Reagan really different in his view from the people working in his government, spoon-feeding the bullshit to every area of society? Who was the prime "enabler", Reagan or his circle?

[Elfdart]

If you want an idea of what a police state the country was under Wilson, a Hollywood filmmaker was tried and convicted for making a movie about the American Revolution in which George Washington was the good guy and the redcoats were the villains.

[Darkdrium]

If you want an idea of what a police state the country was under Wilson, a Hollywood filmmaker was tried and convicted for making a movie about the American Revolution in which George Washington was the good guy and the redcoats were the villains.

Sorry, maybe you mean the opposite? I have a hard time believing americans ever saw Washington as anything other than a Great Big Damn Hero.

[Kanastrous]

The film was The Spirit of '76, directed by Robert Goldstein, which got him thrown in jail for undermining the war effort against Germany because it portrayed Britain, a U.S. ally in the Great War, in an unfavorable light.

[Darkdrium]

I suppose that makes sense... in a twisted kind of way. Thanks for the clarification.

[Phantasee]

If you want an idea of what a police state the country was under Wilson, a Hollywood filmmaker was tried and convicted for making a movie about the American Revolution in which George Washington was the good guy and the redcoats were the villains.

...What?

[MKSheppard]

Oh, even more than that. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, in pursuit of some messianic vision of himself as world peacemaker, essentially did everything in his power —including the aggrandisement of police-state powers Chimpus Caesar could only dream of having so as to quash popular opposition— to ram this country into a war it really had no stake in, which resulted in the fucked up peace of Versailles and laid the groundwork for the next and far more horrific war to follow, and for which 117,762 Americans died for nothing.

Yeah -- unrestricted submarine warfare; which we had told the Germans not to do; cause that was a very stupid thing to do; had nothing to do with it; and neither did the Zimmerman telegram.

His biggest mistake was accepting Armistice terms, instead of pushing for Plan 1919 to take the war into the Ruhr and beyond.

[MKSheppard]

I have to nominate Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Robert Strange McNamara, for getting 58,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese killed over essentially nothing, in a lunatic war which, even with the passage of 40 years still pisses me the fuck off. I'm reading into the various plans put forth by the JCS (which Johnson and McNamara vetoed) for victory in 1964; and it's just infuriating.

It took us until 1972; eight years, before we actually began to seriously bomb and destroy the targets on the JCS' 94-target list, such as railroad yards, mining Haiphong harbor, etc etc; by which time the North had managed to build up their defenses to a level not seen since in density (other than of course some spots in the Soviet PVO network).

[MKSheppard]

Just look up the Pentagon Papers to see how "logical" it was for us to become deeply involved in Vietnam.

I've been looking at some of the stuff reprinted in them, and it's just fucking infuriating. It's where I first learned of the '94 target list' that was prepared by the JCS under Curtis LeMay. Among other things, they proposed simply erasing a North Vietnamese Air Force Base for MiGs under 450 tons of bombs from 30 B-52s in a single night sortie, with sustained successive F-105 strikes on other smaller MiG bases.

[Patrick Degan]

Oh, even more than that. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, in pursuit of some messianic vision of himself as world peacemaker, essentially did everything in his power —including the aggrandisement of police-state powers Chimpus Caesar could only dream of having so as to quash popular opposition— to ram this country into a war it really had no stake in, which resulted in the fucked up peace of Versailles and laid the groundwork for the next and far more horrific war to follow, and for which 117,762 Americans died for nothing.

Yeah -- unrestricted submarine warfare; which we had told the Germans not to do; cause that was a very stupid thing to do; had nothing to do with it; and neither did the Zimmerman telegram.

The Germans announced ahead of time that the Atlantic was going to be a war zone and that any ship crossing that zone was liable to be attacked. For a time, they did abide by the Sussex Pledge and restricted their mode of submarine warfare until it became far too obvious that American flag vessels were being used to carry war materiel across the sea lanes in flagrant violation of neutrailty. The Zimmerman Note was a stupid, desperate move to try to pin America's attentions homeward to keep them out of Europe. None of this invalidates the charges against Wilson, no matter how much you like to think it does.

His biggest mistake was accepting Armistice terms, instead of pushing for Plan 1919 to take the war into the Ruhr and beyond.

Which would only have made postwar conditions worse, not better.