quote:
Originally posted by beternU:
...I believe, namely the fond hope that the lingering little knot of unapologetic Nixon defenders might see yet more compelling evidence of what an unprincipled scumbag their boy was and maybe get their heads on straight at long last and stop rationalizing away the criminal and sordid actions of the sorry varmint!
Yes...if we could get our head on straight about some other presidents as well...
While no doubt Nixon was a “scumbag”…pretty much every modern president is a scumbag. If certain secrets were to come to light of any administration, crimes much worse than Nixon would sure to be revealed. But even when the “crimes” and bad judgments are right out in the open, they are ignored for partisan reasons. Was Clinton morally worse than Nixon? Probably. Was (either) Bush worse than Clinton? Probably.
Here are a couple of presidents that are light years beyond Nixon in the scumbag department.
Truman…we could debate about his role in beginning the “unconstitutional” un-declared wars…Korea. Or his Soviet style take over of the steel industry. But of course the thing that puts him right at the top of “scumbag” presidents is the dropping…not once but twice…of the “big one”…the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later.
Over the years, he gave different grounds for his decision. Sometimes he implied that he had acted simply out of revenge for Pearl Harbor. The rationale for the atomic bombings has come over time to be “that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives.” These are the lives that would have been “supposedly” lost in the planned invasion of Japan. Even though that’s what is taught in school…at the time the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost.
The bombings were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur…and Truman’s own chief of staff Admiral William D. Leahy: “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children”.
Truman was a war criminal…what is the difference between Truman massacring civilians from the air at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Nazis wiping out the inhabitants of Czech or Polish villages?
But hey…killing civilians is OK, right. Every president from Wilson to Bush and now Obama has rationalized this because…Well Lincoln did it…so it must be OK.
Dishonest Abe, America’s first dictator ruled the country by presidential decree, exercised dictatorial powers over a free people, and proceeded to wage war without a declaration from Congress. Lincoln blocked Southern shipping ports, justifying his actions by saying "he would enforce all laws and collect all revenues due the North." The blockades were an act of war.
In the march through Georgia during Lincoln’s War of Northern Aggression, he and Sherman carved out a murderous campaign, maiming innocent civilians and setting a precedent for the next century’s bloody genocides that followed.
Lincoln had no fondness for the black man, and in fact, often spoke with the candor of that which would make him a modern-day racist. Lincoln believed there was an inherent inequality between the black and white race, and held a conviction that a "superior position" should be assigned to the white man over the black man due to this political and social inequality.
In 1862, Lincoln published a letter stating, "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union."
Lincoln unconstitutionally suspended the writ of habeas corpus and had the military arrest tens of thousands of Northern political opponents, including dozens of newspaper editors and owners. Some 300 newspapers were shut down and all telegraph communication was censored.
I could go on and on…I’ll close with Lincoln micromanaged the waging of war on civilians, including the burning of entire towns populated only by civilians, massive looting and plundering, rape, and the execution of civilians.