In a list of historical failures, GWB will go down in the top 5 along

[ncteechur]

with who else?
____________________________(Fill in the blank)

[henslee]

1. I remember Gore Vidal saying this wy back when. Hmmm, havent

heard much from him lately. Hope he is doing well.

[GetTheRightVote]

2. I believe he will be number one in our own country, the worst Pres ever

:kick:

[eleonora]

3. along with the rest of his cabinet n/t

[ncteechur]

4. I honestly have tried to sit down and think of ONE thing

this guy has genuinely done right. Just ONE thing and I cannot come up with anything. I can't think of ONE way he has improved the United States of America. He is the opposite of King Midas. But of course, I guess improvement is relative. If you are big oil, big corporation, big defense contractor, then things have improved. If you are an average American, then he has done Nothing good. I have asked family and friends who are right-leaning and while some still support him (I honestly don't understand their warped sense of right and wrong) they canno list a friggin thing. He is so bad, you can't even give him the benefit of the doubt. Alcohol, Drugs, Stupidity--a huge fucking trifecta.

[Yupster]

10. Here's a couple

1. The do not call list.
2. The 10 % income tax bracket.

There's a line in the movie "Dodgeball" where one guy says he wouldn't do something for all of King Midas' silver. A classic movie moment.

[ncteechur]

18. Thanks-how could I have forgotten those?

[enid602]

5. Menim

Menim

[speedoo]

6. 1. Hitler. 2. Stalin. 3. ________. 4. ______. 5. GWBush.

Candidates for 3&4: Franco, Musolini, Pinochet and other Central/South American Dictators, various SEAsia bad guys.

No other American remotely approaces this list, and depending on what happens over the next 10-20 years, the Coward might even go to #4 or 3.

[Yupster]

8. I would add

a few more nominations to the list.

Atahualpa was just finishing his long and bloody inter-family Civil War which seriously weakened his empire just as the Conquistadors hit it. Then he was captured, paid a king's ransom to be freed, and was murdered anyway leaving his huge empire leaderless and defenseless to the Spanish conquest.

I'd also like to nominate Fransisco Solano Lopez, president of Paraguay who led his country into war against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay at the same time. In the five year war, Paraguay had over half of its entire population killed, and lost 55,000 square miles of territory. The economy was at a complete standstill, and with maybe 2/3'rds of the adult men in the nation dead, only the large-scale immigration of men kept the population from collapsing entirely. The nation was occupied by Brazil until 1876 and lost much of its Paraguayan culture.

[enid602]

11. good choice

Isn't it Anahualpa? Good choice, though.

[leveymg]

12. Regional studies major?

Didn't know that about Paraguay. Guess Stroesser was right in the national mould.

[Yupster]

15. Too old for any major

I'm an old history teacher and textbook author.

[leveymg]

23. That would be a student emeritus, then?

;-) :hi:

[Ignacio Upton]

16. Mao and Pol Pot would be good candidates too

[DivinBreuvage]

31. Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Stalin (mentioned upthread)

Mao, and Pol Pot basically forge strong dictatorships and get away with everything? (the circumstances of Stalin's death are suspicious and suggest that he may have been murdered by Beria, but he'd managed to make it to his mid-seventies and outlasted just about everyone who might have ousted him, including the nasty head of state over in Germany).

There seems to be some confusion in this thread between failure, which means doing incompetent things, and evil, which means doing bad things.

It sort of reminds me of how some people call men (and women too, now) "cowards" for blowing themselves up in a crowd to make a political point. That's certainly evil, it may be counterproductive, but it's hard to see how it's cowardice. But people are sloppy with language and slap on whatever label makes them feel good.

[Yupster]

7. Hitler has to be the world's biggest failure

all time.

His goals were to
1. Defeat communism.
2. Get rid of the Jews.
3. Enlarge Germany.
4. Make Germany racially pure and super conservative.

1. Because of his deal with the Soviets, and then invasion, communism took over Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Estonia, Albania, Latvia, Lithuania, and half of Germany.

2. The state of Israel was created after the war.

3. Germany was reduced to half its pre-war size, as areas which had been German for 1,000 years were taken over by Russia and Poland.

4. Germany today is more ethnically diverse than ever, and has completely split from its nationalistic and conservative traditions.

You don't see a failure like that eery day.

On the other hand, Bush's main goals were to take out Saddam, and cut taxes, and he has accomplished them regardless of what it's done to the country and the world.

[leveymg]

9. Boy, it really didn't take a lot to take down the Last Rogue Superstate,

didn't it? An Idiot-in-Chief, a few improvised munitions, and a hurricane.

Bam. It's cracking up, like the former Soviet Union.

Kinda makes one wonder whether we were ever as great and powerful as we were cracked up to be. Or were we always just Oz with nukes?

[melody]

14. Every country is like every other

To paraphrase George Carlin, a few cool people and a whole lot of losers. (I actually think the split is more 50/50 - well, 60/40 it seems right now in the States) We just display it in different ways. It's all basic primate politics.

[leveymg]

24. Oh great. We're a monkey troupe with nukes, then!

Betya that makes the rest of the world feel more secure.
:nuke: :nuke: :nuke::nuke::nuke: :nuke: :nuke: :nuke::nuke::nuke:

:nuke:

[melody]

26. Yeah, pretty much - the only thing that saves us is their fear

...of death, and maybe a touch of divine intervention...maybe.

[ncteechur]

17. Well I for one am brushing up on my Chinese!

[renie408]

20. LOL!! n/t

[melody]

27. I'm keeping my Latin up to par for moving to Latin America :)

[DivinBreuvage]

30. A few minor quibbles with your otherwise shrewd post

first of all, the establishment of the state of Israel scarcely negates the truly thorough job Hitler and his "willing executioners" did in exterminating European Jewry; if you could put in a phone call to hell to ask him about it I suspect he'd consider a beleaguered and surrounded Jewish state in the Middle East an acceptable tradeoff for virtually effacing the Jewish populations of Germany and Eastern Europe.

Secondly, the point on Communism is not quite so clear cut as it may at first appear; while it is certainly true that Hitler's war ended with the Red Army triumphant in Berlin and half of Germany yielded to the Communists for 45+ years, it is also true that even before the end of the war the West, and especially the Americans, were sidling up to Germany and even to Nazis (rocket scientists and intelligence operatives, for instance) to secure help for their own coming showdown with Bolshevism, exactly as Hitler had foreseen. West Germany emerged once more as a dominant power in postwar Europe largely as a result of this continuing struggle against Communism which, in the long run, Germany most certainly did not lose.

Thirdly, you neglect to mention a number of the other goals Hitler set himself, the pursuit of some of which earned him the praise of no less a personage than Winston Churchill, and plenty of love and admiration from a goodly number of American businessmen and big shots:

becoming Chancellor: accomplished
turning Germany into a one-party Nazi state: accomplished
alleviating German unemployment: accomplished
overturning the Treaty of Versailles: accomplished
reclamation of the occupied Rhineland: accomplished
annexation of Austria: accomplished
absorption of the Sudetenland: accomplished
reclamation of the Memel Land: accomplished
humiliation of Czechoslovakia and Poland: accomplished
avenging WWI defeat at the hands of the French and English: accomplished
eastablishing Germany as mistress of continetal Europe: accomplished
securing living space for Germans in the East: accomplished

All of these goals were highly unrealistic in the 1920s when Hitler was a crackpot on the extremist fringe of German politics. Many of them remained highly unrealistic when he became Chancellor. Yet all of them were met. Granted, most of them turned out to be of temporary duration, but in the Duke of Wellington's words it was "a near-run thing". For a time Hitler managed to accomplish a number of seemingly impossible goals, and came close to pulling off the rest of them. Thus the statement that he was the world's biggest failure is without foundation, although of course one is always given a certain amount of "street cred" for saying such things about Hitler.

I know this probably makes me sound like a Hitler apologist, which I am not at all. It is simply that if one wishes to be true to history one is forced to concede that Hitler, for some time, was one of the most freakishly effective personnages the world has ever produced. This is not to praise him, and mere effectiveness has no correlation whatsoever to virtue, morality, decency, righteousness or any other positive and commendable quality. Furthermore, I am not aware that the question of Hitler's efficacy has ever been sufficiently answered, and this is a vital question because the problem of apocalyptic demagogues seizing control of rich and powerful states did not die with him.

Bush, of course, has failed to make American safe from terror, get the economy back on track, make sure no child is left behind, and plenty of other promises he made but never managed to live up to. But, you're right, he really has met two of his major goals big time.

Surely history's greatest failures lie more along the lines of the Henry VIs, the Louis XVIs, the James Buchanans, the Nicholas IIs, and so forth, men who accomplished little or nothing on their own account and on whose watches occurred the most colossal of catastrophes -- which indeed occurred in part precisely because of the weakness and insufficiency of these men.

[saltpoint]

13. John Travolta should be on the list.

And possibly Anna Nicole Smith, although the jury's still out on that one.

Richard Nixon and Warren Harding, as U.S. presidents go, were both gigantic and monstrous failures. Bush should be lumped in with this group.

Jesus' ministry evidently lasted around three years or so and he wound up being arrested amid a gang of drunken apostles and then nailed to a board. On the political plain, that ministry was not a success. His reputation got spun into Messiah-hood some years later and he currently enjoys significant adoration from the flock, etc., hot diggety-dog.

The Japanese effort in the Second World War and the decision to fire on Fort Sumpter sparking the War Between the States -- were less than triumphant undertakings.

And whoever the U.S. field commander was for the Red Cloud War -- I'd include him on that list, too.

[renie408]

19. That sounds cool and all, but is completely wrong

Jesus got a whole religion named after him and has millions of worshipping followers. By time he was 33, he had people believing he was he son of god and he completely reinvented the Jewish religion into a kinder, gentler version that has been very popular. He died nobly for something he passionately believed in, then when his body went missing, nobody thought, "Gee, grave robbers." They thought, "HE ROSE FROM THE DEAD!!" I am an atheist and I think it is asinine to say that Jesus was a failure.

[saltpoint]

28. We disagree on what Jesus' intent was.

His intent was not, in my view, to establish a new religion whatsoever.

He was a Jew, a follower of the old law, albeit with a bent toward compassion and inclusion, but in no way did he advocate his own divinity.

"Who do men say I am?" he asks his apostles. He does not say, 'See -- they think I'm the divine son of God Almighty." His divinity, such as it is, was not decided for generations after his death.

I consider his ministry a failure. The PR job Paul and the bishops did afterward was none of Jesus' doing.

[renie408]

21. Napoleon?

I don't know as much history as I could, but it seems to me that Napoleon made some big mistakes. That whole trying to conquer Russia in winter thing is about as bad as thinking you could 'bring Democracy to the Middle East'. And he over-extended his army and was a pretty sucky leader. Good at starting fights, bad at managing the country.

[Yupster]

22. I thought of Napolean

but didn't include him because of his influence on current government and the law.

[Kablooie]

25. How bout Caligula?

[leveymg]

32. Now, he would seem hard to top.

At least as far as depravity is concerned. But, as far as disaster during his reign is concerned, Nero may have been even worse.

[ProudDad]

29. Harding

for sure.

Teapot Dome was a tempest in a teapot compared to shrub's corruption...

And Warren was an idiot too.

[Pharlo]

33. Idi Amin, Duvaliers - Papa Doc and Baby Doc

Custer
Guy Fawkes
Mslle. Marie Anntoinette and spouse et Louis XVI
Emperor Hirohito
King Leonidas
etc...