Status games, why not? At least the purpose is upfront and the weather is nice. Here is a list from right-wing bloggers and here is a list from Bainbridge, both in one link with Bainbridge's comments.
It's bizarre that Jimmy Carter comes out as the all-time worst from the right-wing bloggers and I don't have to tell you who is number two. It's also hard for me to see how Bainbridge ends up with Paris Hilton and Michael Moore in his list of the worst and he seems to acknowledge this oddity toward the end of his post.
The most plausible picks are, I think, any number of political figures behind slavery and its continuation (it's debatable who is truly focal here), Woodrow Wilson, the Rosenbergs, and any number of assassins, domestic terrorists, and serial killers.
Who am I forgetting? Are there focal figures who held back public health advances? Led slaughters against Native Americans? What else?
Who is the worst Canadian of all time?
Hat tip goes to Andrew Sullivan.
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Has no one mentioned Dick Cheney? Just a truly bad person, and his daughter’s not much better. You don’t have to be a liberal or a libertarian to see how mendacious and mean spirited the man is. When I was a child Benedict Arnold would surely have made the list – either the revisionists have rehabilitated him or we just don’t teach history any more.
It’s also sad how many people still want to believe that the US was on the “good” side in WWI. There was no good side. WWI was precisely the sort of foreign entanglement George Washington was warning us about, and which Americans had spent the previous 100 years avoiding. It is to Wilson’s everlasting shame that he destroyed, apparently for ever, one of the fundamental principles of American foreign policy.
“(1) Lincoln offered substantial concessions to the rebels, which were rejected, including an unamendable constitutional right guaranteeing the slave states the right to keep slavery. How is he more to blame than the rebels? Especially given that the South had been demanding the surrender of Fort Sumter since before he was inaugurated?”
I agree he offered substantial concessions. But if it was a choice between a terrible terrible war, and a velvet divorce there is no question in my mind he should have taken the velvet divorce.
“Not correct. It was about both keeping the union together and preventing the spread of slavery. If he didn’t care about stopping the expansion of slavery into the territories, he could have had his union without the war. ”
There is a difference between preventing the spread of slavery and ending slavery. If your justification for all that bloodshed was freeing the slaves – well that’s a little different than merely stopping its spread.
If Lincoln had gotten his way, and slavery was put on “course of ultimate extinction” through its limitation to the existing slave states, the ultimate result from the slaves point of view would have been no different than if the CSA was simply allowed to leave. There still wouldn’t have been any expansion, and the institution would have died out in a generation just as it did everywhere else in the world.
Interesting that no one so far has discussed the reasoning for Lincoln’s nationalist sentiment. Over and over again, I have seen libertarian-leaning talk that the North could have just let the South go. It doesn’t work way. Assuming that issues such as the national debt and territorial possessions could be resolved, the end result is two major powers side-by-side that don’t particularly like each other. With a principle “established” that locals can switch loyalties at will. Does Virginia allow 1/3 of its territory to break off & join the North? Does New York allow New York City to join the confederacy?
If (and it is a big if) the CSA had left peaceably, the result would not have been peace but war. War in every generation. Secession threatened to enslave the entire country through war, as is well proved by history.
The North had 3/4 (or more) of the rail & industry, and 2/3 of the manpower. The South had 90% of the decent shots and generals. When neither side could score a quick victory, the result was a long, hard war.
That we had one war on this continent instead of seven means that we lost one war’s worth of liberty not seven.
>It’s bizarre that Jimmy Carter comes out as the all-time worst
Yeah, trashing the livelihood of a couple hundred million co-citizens is no big deal, really. I’m surprised anyone even brings it up.
It’s not like he drowned a woman in his car and ran away, or anything.
FDR
Lincoln
McCarthy
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