Re: Help design the ideal Presidential candidate

Sean O'Hara <seanohara@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> In the Year of the Earth Rat, the Great and Powerful Lee Ratner 
> declared:
> > On Apr 18, 5:12 pm, archm...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 (Nate Edel) wrote:
> > 
> >> Some of those have done the most damage have been at far ends of the
> >> "brains" scale - Bush Jr and Woodrow Wilson, for example.
> >>
> >     Care to explain how Woodrow Wilson did damage? He was not the best
> > President and he was a racist but he was much better than Bush Jr. 
>
> Compared to Wilson, Bush is a staunch civil libertarian.
<...>
> And that's not even considering the idiocy of getting the US into 
> the bloody, stupid war in the first place.

It's not just getting us into the war, although the fact that World War I
probably beats Vietnam in the deaths-to-stupidity ratio definitely counts
very heavily against him.  100k Americans dead, for absolutely nothing,
and
entirely on his watch... at least for Vietnam, you can blame it on four
presidents who each had their share in escalating it stupidly.

Instead, Wilson picked one of the worst possible approaches to World War
I:
he failed to adequately protect our neutrality before entering the war
while
at the same time letting our industry and financial sector basically
bankroll the Entente.  Little surprise that we got us sucked into the war
basically because of it... and then we failed to get anything much in the
way of concessions from our allies after the war.

At the same time, he set a lot of stupid precedents for future "wartime"
behavior by the US.

Wilson is also in part responsible for the US intervention in the Russian
civil war.

-- 
Nate Edel                               http://www.cubiclehermit.com/
 preferred email  | 
 is "nate" at the | "I do have a cause, though. It is obscenity.
 posting domain   |  I'm for it." - prologue to "Smut" by Tom Lehrer