Originally posted by: ProfJohn
Craig, you can pick ANY President and find stuff to bitch about...
Kennedy started us down the path to Vietnam and launched a failed invasion of another country.
Clinton did nothing while India and Pakistan both went nuclear and AQ built its power base.
etc etc etc.
The only real way to grade Presidents is on whether did more good than harm.
Reagan certainly did far more good than harm.
Clinton would turn out on the plus side as well.
Bush 41 would be about even, the economy was in the rebound as he left.
As for Bush 43 it looks bad, but he still has a year to go and then another 4 or 5 before we can really look back at his term and grade it. I doubt he will end up doing more good than harm though, but you can never tell.
John, you're just wrong - do you get anything right on Kennedy? - again. You need to read.
Kennedy *did not* start us down the path to Vietnam, that's simply a lie. We supported the colonization of Vietnam by the French for decades before Kennedy, and it was Eisenhower who set our direction there especially. Big decisions were made about the Vietnamese people, who wanted to be free of colonization; the US negotiated aninternational agreement temporarily splitting the country in two, with an agreement to hold elections soon
Because an actually independent, nationalist leader, Ho Chi Minh, was likely to win the elections, the US - the guys who fight for democracy, remember - refused to have the elections and instead kept 'our guy' Diem, with his bad civil rights policies, in power. Eisenhower had the US paying up to 90% of the French war costs as they fought and lost. He sent the first 'military advisers'. Kennedy inherited the mess in Laos and Vietnam, and he increased out military advisers to a max of 16,000, while shifting our policy towards limiting our involvement to advisers and equipment and transferring the war responsibility to Vietnam. He ordered the first 1,000 reduction in advisers in October, 1963, sending a message. That's a far cry from beginning our involvement in Vietnam.
You need to stop just making up facts to fit your ideology's convenience.
There is stuff to bitch about Kennedy on, but I'm not going to bother since you are so irresponsible as to leave me doubting you have any interest in the facts.
I have no comment on your Clinton comments - it'd take reviewing his role, what he should have done versus what he did.
You say Reagan "certainly" did far more good than harm. You are wrong on that, since there's a good case to be made that he did more harm than good.
I summarized many of his disasters, and didn't even mention others such as Grenada (disastrous in principle, not US casualties), didn't mention his invading Lebanon with Israel (was that part of his debt to them for their playing secret middleman in selling the missiles to Iran?), and his contradicting his tough talk by withdrawing the Marines embarrassingly after a bomb was used; he blew a historic chance for banning nuclear weapons with Gorbachev. What good did he do? Perhaps Libya...
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