You mean "better" I hope, not "worse". Nobody else comes close.
It's hard to say exactly what "living memory" should mean, but let's call it WWII. The worst would then be FDR, followed by LBJ or Obama. All caused great harm.
Nixon is an interesting one. The major screw up was relations with China. Other than that, he wasn't bad.
Except that ... Benghazi was an error, no corruption ; the IRS did not target conservative groups, Obamacare did not mandate you change doctors in any way ..
Normally I assume it is stupidity rather than malice, but now ...
Well if we're playing loose with language and all:
- the IRS didn't target conservative groups specifically, they just chose to stand down the audits on billionaires and add extra auditing of groups with particular keywords in their name, keywords such as; tea, party, people, patriot, country, or 9/12 to name a few. These tax exempt or applied for exempt status groups were likely funneling money and investigation was needed. Results inconclusive.
- Affordable care act mandated that you could keep your doctor. And you could. You just might not have been able to keep or afford to keep your health care plan. So it's really the fault of the people who didn't keep or couldn't afford to keep their plan, giving the ACA a bad rep.
And my personal favorite,
- Hillary may Have ordered action taken on contractors and other actors when she released sensitive documents about certain employees from her private server.
I normally attribute such things to malice, but I've learned to never underestimate the gullibility of people who listen to MSNBC, CNN and occasionally FOX.
Because there was absolutely nothing to be gained from testifying. Conservatives were going to go after her regardless of what she said, so why talk at all?
It's the ultimate "don't talk to cops", nothing you can say can ever help you and everything you say can hurt you, except Congressional Republicans don't even have to adhere to the very low standards that cops do. They can literally just say whatever, so there is flatly no upside in talking to them at all.
Pretty Ironic that this is the excuse you’re going with after all the times your party lambasted Trump for doing similar things. Your belief in the ends justifying the means is the root of all your hypocrisy. People are sick of hearing why it’s ok for you but not for them. You will lose badly this year as a result. For god sakes you have Bloomberg running after half your party was just outside occupying wall street no less than 3 years ago.
> For god sakes you have Bloomberg running after half your party was just outside occupying wall street no less than 3 years ago.
Independent of all the other points under discussion, I'm not sure how this is a fair a critique? It's not like there's a vote to decide who gets to run in a primary; the whole point of a primary is to vote to see who gets to run, and that isn't anywhere near being decided yet. If five months from now he gets nominated, that's another story, but there's not much evidence to suggest that will be the case.
It's a fair critique when he went from 4% to 19% in two weeks after spending 400 million on TV ads. I mean we all know the DNC will choose whomever they want because of their superdelegates, but don't act like democrats aren't starting to view him as their best option.
You aren't the victim of division, you are the creator of it.
> It's a fair critique when he went from 4% to 19% in two weeks after spending 400 million on TV ads
It's a testament to the power of completely controlling messaging people have about you because you are buying so much airtime to send your message and most of the country is at best vaguely aware of you otherwise, but I suspect as post-debate polling rolls in we're going to see Bloomberg, as many others have before, is going to realize the sharp limitations that often runs into in campaigns (Trump's 2016 performance notwithstanding.)
> I mean we all know the DNC will choose whomever they want because of their superdelegates.
Superdelegates have no first-ballot voting rights[0], as a result of reforms pushed successfully by the Sanders faction after the 2016 election.
> but don't act like democrats aren't starting to view him as their best option
Sanders is the one with a wide and widening lead, so, no, your description isn't accurate (and despite claims that this is just because there are more centrist candidates, in the few primary head to head polls he clears an absolute majority head-to-head against each of the other major candidates.) Sanders is who the Democrats are increasingly seeing as their best choice.
[0] well, unless the outcome is certain because of a pledged-delegatr majority, in which case they can vote though it won't change the outcome.
I'm not sure why your comment is stated in the second person; I have not voted in any primary, participated in any caucus, responded to any survey, or joined any sort of political association with regards to the 2020 election. I understand (and happen to disagree with) the point you're trying to make, but I don't understand why you're implying that myself or other commenters on Hacker News are personally responsible for who is running in the primary.
> For god sakes you have Bloomberg running after half your party was just outside occupying wall street no less than 3 years ago.
OWS movement peaked about 8 years ago, wasn't anywhere close to half the size of the Democratic Party, and mostly consisted of people not in the mainstream of either major party.
But, in any case, Bloomberg is free to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to allow the other candidates to preview how they’ll go after a candidate like Trump, though it's weird to see someone volunteer to be a tackling dummy, much less pay for the privilege.
I mean, "casually state talking points as fact without citation" is exactly what the original commenter did, so I don't see why the responder should be held to a higher standard.
There's a reason why we don't like political topics on HN, and this thread is proof.
> Initial reports described the selections as nearly exclusively of conservative groups with terms such as "Tea Party" in their names. According to Republican lawmakers, liberal-leaning groups and the Occupy movement had also triggered additional scrutiny, but at a lower rate than conservative groups. The Republican majority on the House Oversight Committee issued a report, which concluded that although some liberal groups were selected for additional review, the scrutiny that these groups received did not amount to targeting when compared to the greater scrutiny received by conservative groups. The report was criticized by the committee's Democratic minority, which said that the report ignored evidence that the IRS used keywords to identify both liberal and conservative groups.
- Obamacare / You can keep your doctor
I'm not sure "compromise to allow _any_ version of a bill to pass rather than being blocked by Mitch McConnell" (who, lets not forget, famously said that he would block any of Obama's legislation, regardless of its merit or good for the country, just to block it) is "corruption".
- NSA PRISM Surveillance System
PRISM began in 2007 in the wake of the passage of the Protect America Act under the Bush Administration.
- Holder committing perjury multiple times
Did Obama have the power of puppetry over Holder's actions, alleged or actual?
How do you compare this to Trump explicitly blocking his administration from testifying, multiple times?
Thank goodness Obama was scandal free, and good thing we keep catching Trump trying to expose all those crimes committed by Obama administrators (Clinton emails & Russia, Biden & Ukraine, Obama & Iran, Loretta Lynch and Clinton Tarmac meeting, Comey & FISA, etc...).
You understand that the Obama administration oversaw an illicit investigation of a political rival on the basis of the Steele dossier, which was bought and paid for by the DNC. The FBI and CIA knew the Russia narrative was false and pushed it anyways. Look if you need a Progressive source for this info because you can't appreciate alternative points of view, then Jimmy Dore did a very good job of breaking it down:
FISA warrants cover two hops. If person Y communicates with both X and Z, a FISA warrant on person X will allow spying on person Z. In this case person X is Carter Page, and person Z is Donald Trump. It is certain that a suitable person Y exists. Such a person would be anybody who communicated, no matter how briefly, with both Carter Page and Donald Trump. Numerous journalists would qualify as person Y.
