Submitted by theotherbogart t3_yr2pva in todayilearned
Damn it Zeus, you're getting slow.
How different would things be.
One can dream.
Very real chance you'd have gotten 9 years of Bush 1 instead of 4. Even as a democrat I'd take Reagan
Idk, Bush called Reagan's infamously bad fiscal policy "voodoo economics". I think I'd take Bush over Reagan. Bush was bad, but I still believe Reagan had the most damaging presidency in US history. I think without Reagan, you never get Trump.
Nixon.
Yeah Reagan was just Nixon in a more appealing package. Nixon went too hard and too fast, and people weren’t ready to just accept it yet. Reagan put a nicer face on it so it was accepted, the W made it more flagrant without pushback, and then Trump came along and just ripped the mask off completely and out-Nixoned Nixon, but this time, the asshole brigade had such a committed fanbase that none of it mattered.
Nixon expanded welfare, proposed Obamacare in 1971, and made incredible progress in protecting the environment. Reagan burnt it down.
For real people say Nixon was so bad but like by modern American government standards he was practically a liberal. If it wasn’t for the war on drugs and the watergate scandal he’d be one of the better presidents throughout history like the dude had his faults but everyone just hangs on to how the media paints him without knowing anything about his actual policies.
Let’s not forget that Nixon was a crook.
If Henry Kissinger wasn’t around and he didn’t launch the War On Drugs, I could tolerate Nixon crookedness.
I mean the Kissinger thing is huge. He escaped the Nazis….only to commit genocide himself. I mean the QAnon folks should be looking at him if anyone. I don’t see how that man isn’t a lich or something surviving on the blood of virgins he killed in war crimes.
Let me guess, you’re a Republican?
Look at my username.
I like baseball and communism. The 1970’s Cincinnati Reds were the “Big Red Machine”. Communists are also know as Reds. Hence BigCommieMachine.
Then why would you tolerate what Nixon did?
They are all crooks. Nixon just got caught.
>they are all crooks
What a validly stupid thing to say.
Pretty hard to argue against Jackson, who did his damnedest to undo Reconstruction
I guess that's fair. I would argue for Reagan, but that could be recency bias. It's hard for me to objectively judge a presidency from so long ago.
I don't think you can make the case for anyone worse than Reagan from WWII on though.
that was the start of killing us softly
Idk. I was young, but I still remember zombie Reygun more. It may have to do with seeing my city deviated by poverty and property loss.
Bush was just sort of there to murder people for oil.
They're talking about Daddy Bush, who didn't do that. He was President when the UN stopped Saddam from doing that.
Hell, he specifically decided not to push into Iraq to take advantage because it'd be an endless quagmire of guerilla warfare.
His faults were financial and economic, in regards to deregulation and NAFTA, not naked imperialism.
NAFTA was Clinton, tho. Otherwise, yes
Negotiations did begin under Bush, fwiw
Yes, it took five years of negotiating. Doubtless wasn't helped by the change of administration, but it was, at the end of day, basically trading one neoliberal for another.
Oh for fucks sake.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bush-orders-operation-desert-shield
I may have been young, but I’m not fucking stupid.
Yes, that's the point they made. That operation was to stop Saddam from killing people for money, it was actually a justified war on America's end.
Except, that is entirely subjective and I think I just stepped on someone nostalgia.
Motivating for even getting involved was motivation by “resource protection” not people protecting as he bombed civilians and civilian infrastructure intentionally. Especially when we are talking about: food processing, electrical facilities, water treatment plants.
Which obviously led to a break down of being able to care for the population properly; which in turn led to disease, instability and even more death. 158,000 dead. 13,000 immediate civilian deaths with 70,000 following due to disease, hunger and squalor.
That’s not “helping people”; it’s also not “stopping the bad guy” especially because said bad guy was in power until Baby Bush decided to use 9/11 to finish what Daddy Bush started.
A war in which we are still in.
And then! There is also his involvement in the Iran Contra affair which facilitated selling arms to Iran. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure that was intentional destabilization of the area in an attempt to justify starting a war seeing as Bush Sr covered it up, pardoned collaborators, and refused to cooperate with investigations.
There is also his deep ties to big oil.
Both wars were started with the aim of seizing control of oil fields; justification for starting either was never “naked imperialism”; the outcome, however, was.
Operation Iraqi Liberation
Just how many years of influence did that one Bush have? Most of Reagan's time in office, his own time in office, and his son's 2 terms?
If it's true that Bush was involved in JFK's assassination, can we add LBJ's time to the tally?
There is very little evidence that H.W. Bush had any major influence over the Reagan administration. Reagan had his own circle of insiders and military men that he leaned on.
Bush and Reagan didn't necessarily dislike each other, but their wives hated each other. Bush was likely selected by Reagan as a running mate due to his popularity with those who previously endorsed Ford in the 76 election and because Bush was so popular in the Republican primaries.
Bush actually openly disagreed with Reagonmics, but shut up about it and played "party politics" when he joined Reagan's ticket in 1980.
He was really the last WASP President. His son maybe started out that way, but 9/11 took everything in a very different direction and then after two failed bids for the White House, Trump came out of nowhere and remade the Republicans as a working-class populist party.
I would argue that Trump didn't come out of nowhere, but was more so a symptom of a perfect storm.
An angry white industrial working-class that was knocked down by Reagonmics, and finally killed off NAFTA, the tech industry, and globalization. The final bit was killed of by the 2008 Recession.
The other side of the equation were white supremacists that were aside themselves that black people lived in the Whitehouse for eight years. Add in the 9-11-era fear mongering (South Asians and non-christians are out to get us), spliced with the growing fear over population projections for the next fifty years (latins and asians are growing to challenge the WASP in population numbers).
I think these two things left the door wide open for someone like Trump who simply promised "it all" to scared and angry white voters.
I think it's a lot more complicated than that though. Trump massively gained with Hispanic voters and probably blacks and Asians too in the 2020 election, groups. So even though he may have heavily relied on non-Hispanic white voters in the Midwest, in his four years, he really started to rebuild the Republican Party as a working-class populist party.
The number of "white supremacists" in the US is vanishingly tiny, and the "progressive" left's attempt to associate Trump voters with this small group probably ended up doing more harm than good, tarring the entire Democratic Party, which previously had represented working class-whites as late as Obama's reelection in 2012, as being a party that despised the working class whites as "white supremacist". It also apparently didn't impress black, Asian, and Latino voters, who didn't appear to become more Democratic-leaning after Trump's election. Rather, it appears to have only been well-received among the Democrats growing "progressive", white collar base that's concentrated in a few, mostly coastal metropolitan areas. And that's likely why, if trends continue, Republicans are headed toward a supermajority in the Senate. That's probably one reason why McConnel has no interest in getting rid of the filibuster. Within the next decade, there's a good chance that Republicans will have enough Senators to pass legislation no matter what the opposition party thinks.
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