Utter fools, would a bad leader have had a temple built?
I dont think so.
Granted, he is a bit of a lightweight when it comes to the bodycount, but I think one has to consider what he had to work with.
The fact alone that he recognised Shermans talents and put them to good use speaks volumes to the character of his leadership, unfortunately he did not let him implement his final solution for the Indian question, much to Shermans chagrin.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
Al Shades, is this you?[/quote]
lol
[quote]Bambi wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]Bambi wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
The Nazis, Italy and Imperial Japan were defeated.
[/quote]
Defeating Italy could’ve been achieved with a platoon or two. They were a laughing stock. Not disparaging their national character, just their military performance/lack thereof in WWII. The Italian people didn’t really want to get into a war with Britain/US. The fascist soldiers were happier chasing Ethiopians around with tanks. When they attempted to invade a country that had conventional forces(Greece) they failed abysmally. Note also the allied entry into Libya where Graziani’s 200,000+ men were defeated by 36,000 Brits who took 130,000+ Italian POWs.[/quote]
My grandfather (italian army) told me stories of how they weren’t even supplied with boots for the winter (he was with the Germans in Russia) or coats. They had to steal these from the dead Ukranian/Belarussian peasants and their rifles were from the first war with ethiopia int he late 19th century[/quote]
True. Like I said, I’m not disparaging the Italians. My point was there was very little support for the war effort(against the allies) from 95% of Italians and their military was poorly equipped and led. In addition their political leaders were completely divorced from reality.[/quote]
Yes. But if Mussolini had been run over by a bus in 1939 he would be remembered as one of Italy’s greatest leaders. He provided a huge amount of infrastructure - my grandfather remembered Mussolini as an idiot but also the person who drained the marsh round his village, connected a paved road to it (before that there was a dirt track which had been there since Roman times) and helped provide irrigation systems to the farms. To be fair my family’s village in Italy is a nondescript farming place on the banks of the Po utterly removed from anywhere entertaining or fun to go and is pretty backward but having seen pictures of what it was like before Mussolini I have to admit even though he was an utter bastard at least here he helped.
Anyway… What’s with all the people saying Lincoln is one of the worst leaders ever?
[/quote]
Yes, Mussolini was VERY different from Hitler too. Mussolini hated Hitler and even ignored Hitler’s fawning letters to him in the early 30’s. Mussonlini was also not an anti-Semite and Italians actually protected Jews in the South of France from the Nazis.
He was however, actually a Socialist who believed in wealth redistribution. In his early days he was a member of the Socialist party and described himself as a Socialist throughout his life. He also had some ‘character flaws’ which he didn’t seem to recognise as flaws, i.e. he described his experiences of raping women in his autobiography in a matter-of-fact sort of way.
Good books on Mussolini and the Italian fascist movement that I have read:
Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought by A. James Gregor
Mussonlini: A New Life by Nicholas Farrell(a little too forgiving of his flaws but the author makes some good points)
EDIT: Lincoln? It’s either a Dixie vs Yankee thing or a ‘I think blacks should be slaves’ thing. Lincoln and Washington were the greatest Presidents in US history.
And here’s one for orion and his fantasies of Kaiser Wilhelm II as a 20th Century old Fritz:
[quote]Bambi wrote:
Anyway… What’s with all the people saying Lincoln is one of the worst leaders ever?
[/quote]
[quote]Dustin wrote:
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
[quote]belligerent wrote:
If I had to pick who did the most damage out of Hitler, Stalin and FDR, I would have a hard time choosing.[/quote]
Is there some contest to see who can say the absolute dumbest thing at PWI?
It appears we’ve got more than our share gunning for the title. And how.
[/quote]
In a rare occurrence, and I hate to say it, I agree with you.
I think I get what belligerent is trying to say, but perhaps he should reword this post. Not a fair comparison.[/quote]
DUSTIN - your avatar cracked me up - thanks.
Fuck FDR and all the socialists and statists. And fuck Hitler and that piece of shit Stalin.
[quote]byukid wrote:
[quote]Bambi wrote:
Anyway… What’s with all the people saying Lincoln is one of the worst leaders ever?
[/quote]
http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln[/quote]
Interesting. The first three links are to the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. The fourth is a wiki created by that institute. Von Mises was a brilliant economist but “as a student of human nature he (was) worse than null and as a debater he (was) of Hyde Park standard.” - The Economist
Lincoln’s listing is entirely critical in tone and is full of complete BS such as his ‘attempted deportation of all blacks to Liberia’ and the ‘murder’ of ‘350,000’ Americans. Revisionist history on steroids.
[quote]Lowe-1 wrote:
Ad hominem attacks. Strawman rebuttals. Unwillingness to rationalize or use logic. Don’t need to be a fortune teller to see where this one is headed.
Good day.[/quote]
I knew it. Of course, there were no ad hominems or strawmen - I gave you substantive rebuttals.
But hey - it’s Al Shades! He’s come back to discredit a third profile/persona (by my count) here at T-Nation!
Awesome - between “.9 of a banana” to vile white supremacy theories, I am not sure you can fall much lower. But big points for trying.
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
Interesting. The first three links are to the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. The fourth is a wiki created by that institute. Von Mises was a brilliant economist but “as a student of human nature he (was) worse than null and as a debater he (was) of Hyde Park standard.” - The Economist
Lincoln’s listing is entirely critical in tone and is full of complete BS such as his ‘attempted deportation of all blacks to Liberia’ and the ‘murder’ of ‘350,000’ Americans. Revisionist history on steroids.[/quote]
Actually it isn’t “complete BS.” Since you naively dismiss out of hand The Mises Institute take a look at these two for starters:
New book sheds new light on Lincoln’s racial views
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_lincoln_colonization
Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement
[quote]Bambi wrote:
Anyway… What’s with all the people saying Lincoln is one of the worst leaders ever?
[/quote]
Certain “libertarians” around here (not all) have a particular fetish about Lincoln being a horrid centralizer and proto-socialist. It’s dumb for a lot of reasons, and every time one of these “libertarians” raise this, myself and maybe five other posters practically wirte a treatise (every time) discrediting these foolish ideas, and we stack piles and piles of arguments and references in support of these arguments.
After offering flaccid and unoriginal arguments in a weak defense of this stupid, stupid theory, these “libertarians” always slink off humiliated, only to resurrect a discussion every so often with complete amnesia as to all the arguments they couldn’t (and cannot) contend with in the previous round.
This, interestingly, has actually been occurring for several years. It’s kind of fun - or it was - now it’s kind of dull.
How “libertarians” ever got around to defending a society that actually looked to expand federal power to further its iron grip on human beings in violation of their Natural Rights continues to baffle me, but these “libertarians” need some bozo anti-authoritarianism to cling to, and this is the historical revisionism du jour.
It’s dumb. And they give libertarianism a bad name.
I agree with the premise that these worst President’s are stupid , we all know it is Reagan that has achieved the HONOR 
that being said I have heard many criticisms of FDR but never the one the original poster made .
[quote]cloakmanor wrote:
[quote]SexMachine wrote:
Interesting. The first three links are to the Ludwig Von Mises Institute. The fourth is a wiki created by that institute. Von Mises was a brilliant economist but “as a student of human nature he (was) worse than null and as a debater he (was) of Hyde Park standard.” - The Economist
Lincoln’s listing is entirely critical in tone and is full of complete BS such as his ‘attempted deportation of all blacks to Liberia’ and the ‘murder’ of ‘350,000’ Americans. Revisionist history on steroids.[/quote]
Actually it isn’t “complete BS.” Since you naively dismiss out of hand The Mises Institute take a look at these two for starters:
New book sheds new light on Lincoln’s racial views
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_lincoln_colonization
Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement
I didn’t ‘dismiss the Mises Institute out of hand’. See their wiki entry on Lincoln and tell me it’s not entirely critical to the extreme. Lincoln ‘murdered 350,000 Americans’? You expect me to take this seriously? See also post by thunderbolt23. He sums it up well.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
FTR, I agree with T-bolt regarding the practicalities of FDR manipulating Stalin, and the US for that matter, to achieve the end goal of defeating fascist Germany.
I also agree with the others who call him the worst president, mainly for his socialist economic policies and juggernaut approach to centralizing federal power in direct contradiction to the Constitution.
Yes, he defeated Hitler and the Japanese but he was willing, unnecessarily so in my opinion, to sacrifice American freedoms along the way. He almost single-handedly (with Teddy Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s policies serving as a springboard) transformed the USA from a true constitutional republic into the federal leviathan that we know, and suck on like piglets, today.
By the way, Henry Fucking Wallace? C’mon, folks. If he wasn’t an out and out Soviet agent he was as close as you can get without being one. I can easily imagine him cashing his weekly paycheck from the Kremlin at the Moscow Federal Employees Credit Union. Good fuckin grief, FDR, you worthless sonuvabitch, what kind of peyote were you smoking that motivated you to choose that hammer and sickle branded POS as your running mate in 1940?[/quote]
‘FDR manipulating Stalin’? Also, I have already explained that it was Chuchill who formed the Soviet alliance 6 months before the US entered the war when US foreign policy amounted to fingers crossed, a handful of destroyers and a couple of months of lend lease.
Also, whilst he played his part in the defeat of Japan even the A bombs Truman dropped didn’t do the job. The Japanese Supreme War Council did everything they could to keep the war effort going then the diehards ritualistically stabbed themselves to death, as one naturally does in these situations.
I haven’t read much of this thread, but I just wanted to say that I’m still pissed off about the assassination of Yamamoto.
Wilson was the worst US president, by a mile.
Well, I’m not sure where FDR ranks on the best to worst scale for President, but have read his past economic leadership might have not been as successful as some have thought. FDR brought Keynesian economics to the nation, still used today, which probably caused the depression of the 30s to last longer than it should have. And we look to have the same problem in America today.
Thomas Sowell has an article today touching on that idea.
“Just Let The Economy Recover”
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/570779/201105021810/Just-Let-The-Economy-Recover.htm
Excerpt:
"Those who are true believers in the old-time Keynesian economic religion will always say that the only reason creating more money hasn’t worked is because there has not yet been enough money created. To them, if QE2 hasn’t worked, then we need QE3. And if that doesn’t work, then we will need QE4, etc.
Like most of the mistakes being made in Washington today, this dogmatic faith in government spending is something that has been tried before â?? and failed before.
Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, said confidentially to fellow Democrats in 1939:
“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.”
As for the Federal Reserve today, a headline in the Wall Street Journal of April 25 said, “Fed Searches for Next Step.”
That is a big part of the problem. It is not politically possible for either the Federal Reserve or the Obama administration to leave the economy alone and let it recover on its own.
Both are under pressure to “do something.” If one thing doesn’t work, then they have to try something else. And if that doesn’t work, they have to come up with yet another gimmick.
All this constant experimentation by the government makes it more risky for investors to invest or employers to employ, when neither of them knows when the government’s rules of the game are going to change again. Whatever the merits or demerits of particular government policies, the uncertainty that such ever-changing policies generate can paralyze an economy today, just as it did back in the days of FDR.
The idea that the federal government has to step in whenever there is a downturn in the economy is an economic dogma that ignores much of the history of the United States.
During the first 100 years of the United States, there was no Federal Reserve. During the first 150 years, the federal government did not engage in massive intervention when the economy turned down. No economic downturn in all those years ever lasted as long as the Great Depression of the 1930s, when both the Federal Reserve and the administrations of Hoover and of FDR intervened.
The myth that has come down to us says that the government had to intervene when there was mass unemployment in the 1930s. But the hard data show that there was no mass unemployment until after the federal government intervened. Yet, once having intervened, it was politically impossible to stop and let the economy recover on its own. That was the fundamental problem then â?? and now."
Eh, they all kinda suck.