Who was the worst president of our time?

I know what you’re thinking...

Worst president of my lifetime?

There’s a lot of competition for this booby prize.

Johnson was complicit in the murder of JFK, which elevated the Deep State above the elected government. Although he is responsible for a great deal of progressive domestic legislation, he committed the US to a disastrous war in SE Asia.

Nixon prolonged the Vietnam war five extra years when even Robert McNamara was telling him it was useless. The cost was more than a million Vietnamese lives and tens of thousands of Americans’.

Carter presided over the worst inflation and the highest interest rates in US history. The economy stagnated for the first time since the Great Depression.

Reagan gutted protections for workers, consumers, and nature. He drove a stake in the heart of organized labor and normalized the practice of corporate outsourcing routine services that the Federal Government had been performing better and more cheaply with direct employment.

Under Bush the Elder, the Deep State was no longer an outsider corrupting the Federal government; the fox was invited into the henhouse. Iran-Contra was the visible tip of a corruption iceberg. His economic policies led to the S&L crisis — 1300 bank failures. 

Clinton’s “triangulation” normalized the worst excesses of the Reagan era. Making good on his proise to “end welfare as we know it,” he shredded the safety net for millions of Americans. His signature legislation was NAFTA, which subjugated US environmental, safety, and labor regulations to an unelected body of international capitalists.

Bush the Younger placed the US in a permanent state of “War on Terror”. The unconstitutional Patriot Act was prepared months before the 9/11 attacks that justified it. Torture became public policy, out in the open. We lost 1st Amendment freedom to protest and 4th Amendment protection against search and seizure, as well as the ancient right of habeas corpus. Devastating and counterproductive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were justified by lies. 

Obama was a Constitutional scholar, elected on a platform of peace and a promise to reverse the horrors of his predecessor. But once in office, Obama continued all the worst policies of the Bush era — domestic surveillance, militarization of domestic police, torture in Guantanamo to name a few. Obama started unnecessary wars of his own in Libya and Syria. Overthrowing the elected government in Ukraine has led predictably to the present situation which has thrown a great nation into ruin and brought the US and Russia to the brink of nuclear war.

If Obama had done what he was elected to do — what he promised to do during his campaign — the crimes of the Bush era would have been prosecuted, and the unconstitutional legislation would have been repealed. The nation would have turned a corner, and the previous eight years would be seen in history as an anomaly. Instead, government secrecy, endless war, and the abrogation of civil liberties became a bipartisan consensus.

Trump appointed the justices who overturned Roe v Wade, and launched an illegal and unconscionable campaign to prosecute Julian Assange. But his greatest sin by far, in my opinion, was Operation Warpspeed. Supporters will say that he was deceived by his own CDC and NIH, and that’s true. But I know people who were advising him to prioritize COVID treatments over vaccines. The best thing you can say in Trump’s defense is that he wasn’t smart enough to distinguish tried and true public health policy from the snake oil that Fauci and Birx were peddling. 

“Joe Biden” is routinely placed in quotes by my favorite commentators because they presume he is not in control of his own administration. Whoever is pulling Joe Biden’s strings is arming Israel for a genocide in Gaza and they’re playing nuclear chicken on a second front in a proxy war against Russia. Under Biden, the deadly experimental “vaccine” became mandatory for millions of Americans and hundreds of thousands died from these “safe and effective” products. Biden officials have instructed the social media platforms whom to censor, and his Court appointees have failed to call this an obvious violation of the 1st Amendment. In my way of thinking, a free press is a necessary condition for democracy.

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Our era has been termed a “polycrisis” or “metacrisis”. Ecosystems worldwide are in freefall. The global economy has been optimized for efficiency, and in the process, has become massively interdependent and dangerously fragile.

The rich get richer while the middle class sinks into debt. The global reserve status of the Dollar has not just been abused; it has been weaponized to the point where more productive countries are creating an alternative. The possibility to live well on imported goods is precarious, and the Americans middle class is riding for a fall. Everybody talks about our crumbling infrastructure but nobody does anything about it. Meanwhile, weather control has been quietly adopted as a weapon, when it should be a safety net. As rule-based bureaucracies and then computers have replaced human beings in running our world, flexible common sense has been lost. The AI singularity pales in comparison to impending UFO disclosure.

No politician has a clue, let alone a plan. Expect the unexpected.