Re: Help design the ideal Presidential candidate

In article <fujdu2$jhb$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Keith F. Lynch <kfl@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Tim McDaniel <tmcd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>> Nate Edel <archmage@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>>> 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, ...
>>
>> ...  Had Germany cracked France in the spring, I think they might
>> have been able to enforce a peace on the Entente.  Knowing Imperial
>> Germany, it would have been vindictive and greedy: farewell Belgium
>> and large chunks of northern France, and central and Eastern Europe
>> out into the Ukraine.
>
>I'm not convinced that would have been any worse than what did
>happen.

Europe as a whole was a lot freer immediately after World War I than
it would have been with Germany triumphant, though the gains were
largely lost by 1939.  But World War I managed to deal the fatal blow
to royalism (though it lingered in the south) and boosted democracy
(even if nominally).

>Belgium and France weren't innocent victims.  The Belgian Congo, for
>instance, was one of the worst regimes in the world.

- Victims none the less: Belgium had no part in it until invaded.
- No, the Belgian Congo was one of the better colonial regimes in the
  world.  The previous government, the Congo Free State, run by
  Leopold II as a private preserve without any input from the
  government of Belgium, was a horror.
- Who shall 'scape whipping?  For example, you were not completely
  innocent of sin at the time, I suspect, but that didn't make you
  deserve going to prison.
- Or, on the other hand, who deserves whipping?  Did the women and
  children of Tamines deserve being massacred in 1914, or the women
  and children of the Central Powers deserve starving to death in the
  blockade?

-- 
Tim McDaniel, tmcd@[EMAIL PROTECTED]