Ranking U.S. Presidents 1-42....best to worst

People that know anything about WWII history know that Hitler didn't invade England because of his intense fear of water. England would have been starved into submission had we not become involved in WWII. Even in a best case scenario, most of the world would have been under the control of the Nazi's and the Japanese and we would have faced thenm alone. Sorry Madcap but history has shown that FDR was right to get involved in WWII. Try getting your history from sources not tainted by Federalist Society Revisionism.

 

I didn't hear that debate thing.
Pardoning Nixon is why he gets an honorable mention. He possibly sacrificed his political career to keep the country together, though he seemed genuinely angry at Nixon (and would not take prior deal to pardon in return for the presidency), did major civil rights acts without major public pressure to do so (such as education for handicapped children), and from everything I've read about him he seems like a generally great guy.
He gets only an honorable mention because of his short career as president, and my unclear view of if his economic efforts were successful (cause Carter sent that shit right into a nosedive)

 

jackson was a bigot (check out some of his anti-indian propaganda posters). grant and the two presidents before taft were corrupt.

i dunno...i really don't know enough about the presidents to say more.

 

Look up some old SNL episodes from the 70'.s Chevy Chase used to do Ford on that good ol show and ended up making him into a laughing stock. Ford's tie as on crooked plus he made the gaffe about the Soviet Union so Chevy Chase had a field day with it.

Nixon should have been thrown in jail, not pardoned.

 

Just like Bush should be (or better yet, executed) - but it's easy to see how that would tear the country apart right now - and now, just like then, isn't the time. There are much bigger problems such as a war to manage, and horrible economic problems.

 

lolz really?

FDR didn't get us into WW2

The Japanese got us into WW2

And Britain would not have been starved into submission, the Lend-Lease program was in place before the US entered into the war and even after the US joined the war most escort duty was still done by the British and Canadians as most of the US navy was in the pacific. The worst point in the battle of the Atlantic was the "happy time" as it was refered to by U-boat men between June 1940- to early 1941 after the fall of France while the convoy system was lacking and U-boats hunted easy targets in wolfpacks. Britain got out of that itself

Not to mention the fact while material aid from the United States did help them greatly, the Soviet Union played the biggest part of ending WW2, over 80% of the German army along with the Italian 8th army was on the Eastern front.

I think you need to crack a book

 

Britian and her Allies would have been unable to free the Continent from the bootheel of Nazism had the US not gotten involved. Ya know what boys I thought I knew it all when I was your age. Try talking to people that lived during the aforementioned eras. Sorry boys but I've been on this Earth for over a decade longer than then either of you so I can pretty much guarantee I know just bit more about history than either of you two kids.

 

this is really a cool question.great reading these rankings.i've read and seen short bios about the president but i don't know history well enough to judge.but i wanted to contribute this.the old question do people make the history or does history make the people.i might rank the presidents by the entertainment value.in this sense the presidency of jimmy carter and his family would be high....gerald ford and his mishaps would rank up there..............nixon,agnew and watergate in the news every day that was pretty good....the 1988 vice president debate betwwe senators lloyd bentsen and dan quayle.the senator you're no jack kennedy retort by bentsen was classic political entertainment.harry truman was president when i was born."give em hell,harry"....and for sure the clinton years,...on my list george w. would be close to the top of the list.

 

Good ol G duhbya was good for more than few laughs.... Ya ever heard the song The First Part of W is Duh.? I heard Vince Herman and Great American Taxi play on 4/20 at Springjam '08.

 

you're blatantly ignoring the fact that hitler was a nationalist. in other words he had more concern for what was going on with germany's affaiors than with what was happening with other people. you act as if england wasn't the one who declared the world war. it was england who declared it against germany both times. Hitler's biggest concern politically was communism.

would have faced them alone? we didn't get involved until after it had been going on for some time. even if there had been no pearl harbor, it's been shown that roosevelt had premediated plans to get us involved in another foreign war. a war which was unpopular in many americans eyes. this phony moral highground nonsense should have been abandoned long ago. just like back then, moral highground is an excuse to justify militarism. considering that we had the soviets on our side, i'm not even so sure we ever had any sort of moral highground on which to even stand on.

history has shown that FDR was one of the single worst presidents we've had. he was a power hungry fool who used a foreign war as an excuse to extend his presidency to four terms. he was also known to be sympathetic to communism. it's known his economic policies only made the great depression worse. FDR didn't get us involved to defend freedom, he got us involved to keep the military industrial complex and the international bankers pockets fat.

if you want more insite into the history of world war 1 and 2. read up on benjamin feiedman and sir anthony sutton writings.
btw-the history you know is whatever the establishment feeds you. like most people, you only know what you're told. also keep in mind that even run of the mill historians subject history to revisionism.

 

http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/ph25_8.html
thanks to the freedom of information act, it's been reveled that roosevelt had prior knowledge that japan was about to attack pearl harbor. he looked the other way and it was rather conviently used as justification for our war effort. the history channel even has mentioned this. western aggresion had far more to do with world war 1 and 2's origins than any german aggresion ever did. hitler even pleaded to churchill more than once not to go to war against germany. as far as i'm concerned the only winners of world war 2 was communism, the arms industry and international banking.

 

Hitler only cared about Hitler and didn't give a rats *ss about the German people. Your ignorance of history is absolutely dumbfounding.

Nationalism means devotion to the interests of ones own nation.(Webster's Dictionary)Nationalism means you put your country's interests above your own. Nationalism means you don't destroy your country to achieve your own interests. Hitler continued to destroy Germany and sacrifice her people for his own selfish interests long after it was evident that the war was lost. If you had the slightest grasp of history you would know that Hitler was a Nationalist in name only.

Churchill and FDR had both read Mein Kapmf and knew that Hitler had plans to conquer Europe and murder all the Jews.

Real historians recognize the fact that FDR was one of the greatest Presidents.

Hitler's main Concerns:

1.Hitler
2. Murdering all the Jews
3. Conquering Europe

So FDR should have just stood by and let Europe suffer under the bootheel of Nazism and let Asia be enslaved by the Japanese?

You really need to get your history from sources not tainted by Federalist Society Revisionism.

You almost sound like you think Hitler was in the right and we were in the wrong.

 

Whoa, I saw a document talking about how there appears to be no real threat of attack from the Japanese.
Had no clue if it was real or not - how crazy.

I disagree with you saying Hitler wasn't a nationalist. The Jewish bankers had run Germany into the ground under the Weimar Republic. The average German suffered much, while the average (German) Jews prospered.
This is the most likely source of his hatred for them, and his reasoning to destroy them.
Therefore, in his crazy mind, he was doing what was best for Germany.

But I agree totally with you on FDR.

 

Hey buddy, if FDR and Churchill knew Hitler was going to kill all these jews, they sure did an awesome job dealing with connections to the camps when written/photographic evidence of the camps was known to exist and the allied high command had reports from escapees of what the camps really were yet one of the main things the allies took flak for after the war was the fact they did nothing to stop it.

And Mein Kampf, do you know many people in the 1930's read Mein Kampf? FDR, Churchill, and about 30 million other people.

Also, FDR didn't take us into a war with Germany, declaring war on Germany could've been a risky move when it had been only the Japanese who attacked us, and Germany and Japan were not in an all out alliance(hence why Japan was not at war with the Soviet Union) and only had to defend each other if one of them was attacked. Hitler, on December 11th, declared war on the US, so really Roosevelt did nothing to bring us into a war against Hitler except let a lot of people die at Pearl Harbor

 

Jewish Bankers ran Germany into the ground? Have you been reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion again? The German economy was ruined because Kaiser(roll) Wilhelm borrowed heavily to finance his war and because the Allies exacted heavy War Reparations in the Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler only helped the German people because doing so was only a means to an end.

Many historians say that FDR and Churchill didn't do anything to stop or slow down the Holocaust because they believed that doing so would divert resources needed to destroy Germany's ability to make war. hmmm... Then again I think that a few bombing raids on the rail lines and the ovens at just one or two Camps (ie Aushwitz,Dachau) would have made a big difference.

Ponder this. Russia and Japan didn't hold up their end of their respective Treaties because neither of them declared war on the other when Germany and Enlgand went to war. However Russia didn't declare war on Japan until '45 but did so only for their own selfish, self serving reasons.

 

The camps in the west were sometimes bombed because they were work camps where arms were being produced.

Japan had nothing to hold up in it's treaty, it didn't sign the treaty until after the war in Europe began. Germany attacked Russia, Germany was not attacked by Russia, if that was the case Japan in theory would have had to declare war. Just like Germany was not required to declare war on the US since Japan attacked the US, but Hitler still did.

 

Good analysis MadCap...

 

It's the truth

 

...who is a Democrat and whose a Republican in every one of these threads.

Okay, my ranking of the best and worst presidents:

1) George Washington - he defined the office and had the greatest cabinet in history.
2) Theodore Roosevelt - he could even convince Mark Hanna to be on his side...and if you know history, you know how hard that was to do.
3) Abraham Lincoln - legacy saved by a bullet...reconstruction would have been his downfall. But he had the mastery of Washington in terms of learning from a brilliant and diverse cabinet.

Worst

1) James Buchanan - Buchanan sucked, but U.S. Grant voted for him, because he said "With a Democrat elected by the unanimous vote of the Slate States, there could be no pretext for secession for four years" - now, if that's not a ringing endorsement, I don't know what is!

2) Martin Van Buren - he was a party man first and a party man second...he also was the overseer for the second longest depression in American history.

3) Herbert Hoover - there may not have been a better "human" as president. His care and compassion completely blinded his judgment and he took every wrong road in the name of helping his fellow man. That is why he's not last.

Overrated

1) Thomas Jefferson - a brilliant man and a visionary...but a political hack. For all of Washington's ability to find consensus, Jefferson brought disunion and party politics. For all the brilliance of buying Louisiana, he was a hypocrite for deriding Hamilton for the same Federal use of power. He wishy washed his way through the impressment crisis and left it for his buddy James Madison to deal with in the War of 1812. At least Madison would lead his army, which I doubt Jefferson would have done... Jefferson is a top 15 president, but not top 5 by any means.

 

To be fair Jefferson didn't authorize the Louisiana purchase and was actually worried about it when he first got news for the fact he thought it could be unconstitutiona since he wasn't even sure of the legality of purchasing New Orleans since acquiring territory was never written into the constitution. He sent envoys to France to attempt to purchase New Orleans, and to the surprise of the Americans the French delegates offered up the entire Louisiana territory for barely more than the US had been ready to pay for just New Orleans. Delegates made their own decision and agreed to purchase it. We paid the modern inflation adjusted figure of about $225 million. I think we got a pretty bangin deal.