Worst U.S. president of all time

Conrad , who is the third? Just curious.

Andrew Johnson had some interesting theories on labor relations. He was a friend of the 'mechanic', a loose term in the mid 1800's that designated any role above laborer but below large plantation owner. I guess you could say that the closest comparison today would be small business owner.

The small business owners of the time were carriage repair shops, innkeepers, general store managers etc.

Many politicians at the time were for wealthy interests such as large scale farmers, rail roads or mining interests, but very few were talking about the mechanic class of laborer. There simply wasn't a lot of money in it, I guess that's why today we have certain industries such as pharma or banking so improportionately represented in Congress, but we don't hear a lot about the guy that just owns a repair shop.

An interesting note here: He was drunk on whiskey (supposedly because of his typhoid fever) during his vice-presidential innaugural speech. LOL

Bush/Cheney should be tried for war crimes.

FWIW; I heard that the 3 most corrupt president administrations were: 

1. Ronald Reagan -138 admin.  members prosecuted! 

2.Grant

3Harding

In my opinion, the worst was Reagan.

George W. Bush was second worst,

and Herbert Hoover was the third worst.

You guys are missing the real failure:  James Buchanan, who left Lincoln his mess because his gay lover was an Alabama Senator.  Not all gay history is about heroes either. 

What is worth considering is how miserable a lot of these guys were.  It is a very good reason to return to a republic and get our legislature out of the endorsing the decisions of power and back into governing.

BTW, Bush/Cheney's sins harmed more people than the other failed prexy's, so it is not out of line to name him Numero Uno on the disaster list.

There are some interesting choices:

Reagan. The President who institutionalized racism and lying. (all administrations lie - Reagan lied universally, even when the truth would have served him better.)

Nixon. The southern strategy and the "secret plan to end the war".

Coolidge. Caused the great depression.

Woodrow Wilson. In reality (as opposed to in history) a corrupt racist.

Buchanan. Everyone's assumption.

As I said, it is not a history of great men who deserve a Hall of Fame.  The same applies to the sordid legal record of the Supremes.  I am not saying that Congress has not had its own shit list, just that we cannot depend upon elite correctives to the basic responsibility of electing those who govern in our name and, supposedly, in our interest.  Government of, by and for the people is still a great idea, but not something we have had a lot of.

Here is some nice reading for you......

http://www.ourfuture.org/features/reagan-ruins

http://liberalslikechrist.org/about/Reagan.html

Sprinklerfitter, the race to the bottom in historical judgement is multilayered.  The corrpution derby with Grant and Harding as prime examples is in competition with the failed historical moment gang where I put Buchanan up front for the Civil War with Bush/Cheney at the end of the cycle for madness with power and total destruction.  Then we have the pivotal moment, where Reagan stands tall.  By offering America the salesman grin and assurance of the cowboy movie star, he managed to get us to avoid the critical lessons of history that had come to a head in Vietnam.  This is where Nixon's craven "Southern Strategy" went on steroids as more than an electoral strategy and became the decisive shift in the national narrative. 

The case was made by Beck that Coolidge was the bad guy, and he does deserve his own chapter, or rather his stroke incapacitated body does.  It is just so hard to find a really good one.  Washington gets the Cinncinatus Award for not taking the regal crown.  Lincoln, of course, is deserving of our honor for his transcendence of triumphalism and wisdom.  Teddy R. has to live down his Rough Riding, but did take on the bankster goons of his day, and paid for it.  FDR managed to let the forces of progress make him do the good things while he set the stage for empire.  But, he may not deserve the blame for how the MIC took the wars and ran with them.

Jimmy Carter was a very decent guy, but he had no idea how to deal with the imperial powers and got saddled with Zbigniew and then done in by Iran/Contra.  That puts Reagan back into the evil competition, but when you compare him with the Cheney, nobody deserves the Evil One award like "Dick" does from behind the curtain.

At some point, we have to come to terms with our cultural and structural sins and stop trying to pin the label on those who take the stage for their "brief moment."  The greatest evils are always done by those convinced they are doing the greatest good, and America is a religious delusion about how the heirs of Anglo-Saxon Whiteness have the Holy Grail despite being the last civilized people in the course of human history.  We dismiss India and China as Third World despite their ancient civilizations, and we embrace our 'modernism' as though we were the pure vessel of Christianity and the apostles.  Check out the Mormons on this one too.  That lost tribe of Israel is the American Indian.  OMG!

Don't forget Franklin Pierce! He is directly related to W, too, through his mother Barbara Pierce. That familiy is like a veneral disease that won't go way.

I'd vote for Jefferson Davis as the worst myself.  ;)

Each one the selected spokesperson for Empire, or Empire-to-be. Each one served the system's purpose. Focusing on the individual actors is probably not going to get us off the path toward self-destruction.  

  I'd have to nominate G H W Bush for the role of evil one behind the curtain. I believe he was pulling the levers during Reagans dramatic portrayal of an American president who won the cold war by squandering trillions on tactical nuclear. After that he managed to score 4 more years as the legitimate prez. During this time his buds in MIC continued to score big with the whole military invasion racket. He then had an 8 year break from the limelight, during which time he and his apprentice Richard the "Dick" Cheney put together a plan to get his dipshit son into the whitehouse. And we all know how that turned out.

  "Thats my theory and I'm sticking to it"

It is a grand parade, isn't it?  This is why historians write about it.  Figuring out who is "worst" depends upon the metrics and where the narrative begins and ends.  It is a part of the humanities, not "social science."

Reagan started the mess we are in, but he didn't really live up to it.

For example, he started the forefunners of NAFTA ("NAT"), he he raised tarriffs and talked a bit tough to Japan. He fired the PATCO workers, but relied on coporate power to attack unions directly. He cut taxes, but went to raise them 11 times. He reduced welfare, but it was Clinton who signed so-called 'welfare reform'. He ran on enhancing social security and doubled the tax. He deregulated airlines, oil, S&L's, and the media, and stopped enforcing Sherman Act, but it was Cliniton who did the real deregulation of commodites, media, NAFTA, and so on.

And Reagan's little wars were cute by Bush's standards. His amnesty for illegals was also a nice touch.

No, I don't think any president is worse than Bush Jr. Bush took all the worse from Reagan - deregulation, trading arms for hostrages, free trade, anti-environment and really got a lot done with it.  Ending Posse Comatus? Spying?  I mean who could have guessed he would institute a policy of torture? But when he kidnapped Sheik Mohamod's children and made them walk barefoot in the freezing whether around the prison - in effect torturing children - who could do worse than that (well, there is Jackson and the Indians but...)?

I know Dr. Econ, just when we have our nominee, we remember someone else who could be worse.  For the pure abuse of the most power, Dubya/Cheney wins.  But for getting us into this mess, or for doing serious evil with the power they had before the empire, there are so many players who were so lacking in any redeeming qualities.  Polk and the Mexican War is pretty tawdry.  It is a lot easier finding the few who could be called "good."

GHW Bush's name appears in the Cuban Missle Crisis, the JFK assasination, Iran Contra Drugs for Guns, October Surprise, Reagan assasination attempt--GHW was meeting with Hinkley and Hinkley was an oil partner-- empowered Cheney and set him on his maniacal path, GHW was sitting with the Bin Ladens in the Ritz Carleton Hotel on Sept. 11, 2001 as members of the Carlyle war profiteering group, spawned G W Bush, Jeb, Marvin, Neil, each devious douchebags in their own right. Read George Bush the Unathorized Biography by Webster Tarpley.

Tough to pick from such a sorry lot but I'm going with GHW Bush, his damage to this country has been astronomical, indemic and persistant.

I still think it is easier to find the few good ones.  The Bush Crime Family head honcho is right up there, but he did resist the invasion to take down Saddam.  Like I said, the metrics and the context make it a tough call.

You learn something new every day...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hinckley,_Jr.#Bush.E2.80.93Hinckley_fa...

"Coincidentally, Hinckley's father was a financial supporter of George H.W. Bush's 1980 presidential primary campaign, where Bush was Reagan's closest rival for the Republican nomination prior to becoming his Vice President. Hinckley's older brother, Scott, had a dinner date scheduled at the home of Neil Bush the day after the Reagan assassination attempt.[19][20] Neil's wife Sharon indicated in a newspaper interview the day after the shooting that Scott was coming to their house as a date of a girlfriend of hers, and that she didn't "know the brother [John]" but understood "that he was the renegade brother in the family." Sharon described the Hinckleys as "a very nice family" and that they had "given a lot of money to the Bush campaign."[21] In another coincidence, Neil Bush had lived in Lubbock, Texas, in 1978, where Hinckley lived from 1974 to 1980."

From here: http://www.rense.com/general45/hink.htm

He was tried for the incident but acquitted by reason of insanity after his lawyer, the legendary Edward Bennett Williams, argued that Hinckley shot the president to impress actress Jody Foster.

 Vice president George H.W. Bush, father of the current president, George Bush, Jr., assumed the duties of the presidency briefly after the shooting and nearly became president as Reagan almost died from the shooting. A bullet missed his aorta by less than an inch. The Bush and Hinckley families go back to the oil-wildcatting days of the 1960s in Texas. (Ironically, they go back even farther in a genealogical sense, since the have a common ancestor in Samuel Hinckley, who lived in the late 1600s.) The relationship was much closer between George Bush, Sr., and John Hinckley, Sr., whose families were neighbors for years in Houston. John Hinckley, Sr., contributed to the political campaigns of Bush, Sr., all the way back to Bush's running for Congress, and he supported Bush against Reagan for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination. Bush, Sr., and Hinckley, Sr., were both in the oil business. When the Hinckley oil company, Vanderbilt Oil, started to fail in the 1960s, Bush, Sr.'s, Zapata Oil financially bailed out Hinckley's sompany. Hinckley had been running an operation with six dead wells, but he began making several milliion dollars a year after the Bush bailout. Scott Hinckley, John's brother, was scheduled to have dinner at the Denver home of Neil Bush, Bush, Sr.'s, son (and of course the current president's brother) the day after the shooting. At the time, Neil Bush was a Denver-based purchaser of mineral rights for Amoco, and Scott Hinckley was the vice president of his father's Denver-based oil business. On the day of the shooting, NBC news anchor John Chancellor, eyebrows raised, informed the viewers of the nightly news that the man who tried to kill the president was acquainted with the son of the man who would have become president had the attack succeeded. As a matter of fact, Chancellor reported in a bewildered tone, Scott Hinckley and Neil Bush had been scheduled to have dinner together at the home of the (then) vice-president's son (Neil) the very next night. The story of the Bush-Hinckley connection was reported on the AP and UPI newswires and in some newspapers, including the Houston Post, which apparently originated the story. It was also reported in Newsweek magazine. Then the story about one of the strangest coincidences in presidential assassination history simply disappeared. (The AP story is quoted in its entirety at the end of this article, not for commercial use but solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.) 

It is such a small world, particularly at the top of the pyramid.

While all the strikes against GHWB are true, they are not all things he did as president.

For me, my real answer, if you just want to talk about the guy in charge who did the most damage while in charge, it has to be the unprecedented (pun intended) run of Alan Greenspan. Or as Matt Taibi calls him, The Biggest Asshole in the Universe. This is the man that has actually been in charge since Reagan, through Bush, Clinton and W. His protegé Bernanke holds his seat now. If money is power (and it is), those are the guys in charge.

One of Greenspan's greatest scams is the Social Security Trust Fund, aka, the Lockbox. It is kind of hard to steal ephemeral money, the kind that just shows up on the budget every once in a while. But put it in a 'box', even an imaginary one, and then it can be stolen. And everyone of all political stripes buys into this invention of his. It also allowed Reagan to raise taxes on workers, and then use the 'fund' to finance tax cuts for the über-wealthy, i.e. it was the great mechanism for the redistribution of wealth for the workers to the rich. No one talks about the Cruise Missile Trust Fund running out. There is always money for one more cruise missile. You cannot steal the cruise missile fund because it does not exist. And the banking fiasco/housing bubble? Alan Greenspan's fingerprints all over it. This is the greatest con-man the world has seen.

Yes, the Pope of Wall St. who did not understand that Original Sin applied to Wall St. banksters.  Devotee of the St. Ann of Ryand and prime example of why "brains" are not enough.  His acolyte, Ben the Bernacke, went to the same seminary and learned the same catechism.  Add in the Grahm's and it becomes a grand illusion indeed.

I was working with people at Stanford Business School when this crap was being put in place.  It was amazing to watch this thin gruel go past people who were smart enough, or too smart by half, and should have known better.  A few did, but they were swept away in the float all boats surge that swamped all but the rich and powerful.  Damn, I hated being right because economic alchemy sounded so good.