RATING THE PRESIDENTS

Buchanan on U.S. Presidents. Whatever else you think about Buchanan, he does know his history:

"Certainly, Washington is our greatest president, the father of our country and the captain who set our course. But Lincoln is great only if one believes that preventing South Carolina, Georgia and the Gulf states from peacefully seceding justified the suspension of the Constitution, a dictatorship, 600,000 dead and a resort to a total war that ravaged the South for generations. As for FDR, he was the greatest politician of the 20th century. But why call a president great whose government was honeycombed with spies and traitors, and whose war diplomacy lead to the loss of 10 Christian countries of Eastern Europe to a Muscovite despot whose terrorist regime was the greatest enemy of human freedom in modern history?

Now consider one of the men whom all the raters judge a "failure" and among our worst presidents, Warren G. Harding. Harding served five months less than JFK, before dying in office in 1923. Yet his diplomatic and economic triumphs were of the first order. He negotiated the greatest disarmament treaty of the century, the Washington Naval Agreement, which gave the United States superiority in battleships and left us and Great Britain with capital-ship strength more than three times as great as Japan's. Even Tokyo conceded a U.S. diplomatic victory. With Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, Harding cut Wilson's wartime income tax rates, which had gone as high as 63 percent, to 25 percent, ended the stagflation of the Wilson presidency and set off the greatest boom of the century, the Roaring Twenties. When Harding took his oath, unemployment was at 12 percent. When he died, 29 months later, it was at 3 percent. This is a failure?

Harding, Coolidge, Eisenhower and Reagan were men who kept us out of war and presided over times of peace, security and often of soaring prosperity. Yet, the 20th century presidents who took us into war and who lost the fruits of war - Wilson, FDR, Truman - are "great" or "near great." These ratings tell us less about presidents than they do about historians, scholars and journalists.

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ELSEWHERE

This anti-Moore site makes it pretty clear that Michael Moore is just an entertainer who is proud of his success in the marketplace: "Michael Moore is a ... millionaire who boasts of wealth as proving his value -- "I'm a millionaire, I'm a multi-millionaire. I'm filthy rich. You know why I'm a multi-millionaire? 'Cause multi-millions like what I do. That's pretty good, isn't it?" So it's the horde of Leftists (particularly in Germany) who treat his glop as revelation who are the suckers. I wonder how many realize that he is a member of the NRA and sends his kids to a private school? He must be laughing all the way to the bank.

Amusing: "House Democratic leadership is pitching a law that would prohibit Pennsylvania doctors from refusing to treat a patient based on the patient's job, political opinions or litigation history." Why? Because some doctors have started to refuse to treat lawyers. Even if the law passes, it will just drive the phenomenon underground: Doctors could send lawyers for heaps of invasive and unnecessary diagnostic tests, for instance -- or refer them to specialists unnecessarily etc. I imagine the law would run into constitutional problems too. Didn't America outlaw slavery somewhere there way back? I myself have in the past refused to take on lawyers as tenants. The less you have to do with them the better, in my view.

Some good comments from a "liberal" supporter of the Iraq war: "Abu Ghraib, in all its horror, shows how much has changed in post-Saddam Iraq. Scrutiny and accountability are possible now. But judging from the tone of much of the comment, you'd think that Abu Ghraib makes the coalition morally indistinguishable from the mass-murdering regime it deposed. Critics of the war also display a creeping sympathy for the coalition's foes. We often hear that Iraqi insurgents are "nationalists", which sounds comfortingly like the French Resistance. But the main rebel factions are the opposite of freedom fighters: former Baathists and religious extremists, who mostly slaughter fellow Iraqis, beat or murder alcohol vendors, and threaten women displaying a strand of hair".

Surprising. Australia's most Leftist newspaper gives Australia's Left a blast for its kneejerk "ban everything" approach to obesity: "A ban on TV advertisements selling junk food to children is no substitute for policy".

Interesting point from Fred Barnes: "The Clinton presidency was, in effect, an extension of the Reagan presidency, though Clinton would be loath to admit this. Completing the Reagan agenda was not his intention".

Michael Duffy on Leftist hypocrisy in Australia: "Before 1996, it was all right to detain boat people because it was a Labor government that was doing it. After 1996, when John Howard started doing it, it became a crime against humanity. Pauline Hanson argued for a reduction in immigration numbers and advocated economic policies that would have destroyed our standard of living. She was widely derided as a racist and an economic illiterate. Peter Garrett supports similar things and, hey, he's welcomed into the Labor Party with open arms. Imagine if the Liberal Party took on someone with Garrett's views on immigration. The sneers and denunciations would still be running on the front pages."

I have just noticed something interesting in this academic survey of Canadian university professors by Nakhaie & Brym. Professors rated themselves on a scale of 1 to 7 in terms of Right to Left -- meaning that a score of 3.5 would mean neither Right nor Left. Table 5 shows that the only subgroups that averaged below 3.5 (i.e. were slightly Rightist) were professors of accounting, finance and mechanical engineeering. Professors in all other disciplines tended Left. The most far-Left group was, of course, the sociologists -- the most meaningless of all the disciplines. I taught in a university school of sociology for 12 years so I have some cause to know the emptiness of most sociology. Leftism sure is pervasive in academe. I explain why here.

A former cop on why drugs are here to stay: "What would a serious attack on drugs require in the US? Most conspicuously, an assault on the black ghetto, where drugs are most obviously sold. This is politically impossible. It would also mean jailing large numbers of influential whites in the suburbs, who use lots of drugs, but not too obviously. It would also mean jailing their children, who use copiously in the high schools. These things also are politically impossible."

I have just put up two good new postings on Leftists as Elitists

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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Leftism is more popular with young people than with older people largely because Leftism is itself juvenile: They criticize what they don't understand. Which makes it ironic that "We know best" and "It's for your own good" are the basic Leftist messages. Leftists have never got past the simplistic thinking or the arrogance that are the characteristic limitations of youth

"Created" equal in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence is a religious way of saying that people are NOT equal but start out with the same rights

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