Was he the only remotely decent American president of the

>>79086260
he was also the weakest. really makes you think

george bush did LITERALLY nothing wrong

gerald ford was the best

>pass retarded ethanol subsidies
>reinstate draft registration
Good jerb.

>>79086806
Oh, and banning construction of new nuclear reactors because of one minor accident that caused no fatalities.

Successful presidents don't lose their reelection bid in a 44 state blowout.

>Destabalize an entire region because you're a pussy who listened to Cyrus "embodiment of deep state" Vance

Nah

>>79087985
Zbigniew Brezinski was the only guy in Carter's administration who seemed to have an idea that maybe detente with the Soviet Union wasn't working and they were taking us to the cleaners. Other than that, his advisers and cabinet pretty much just continued the Nixon/Ford orthodoxy about friendly coexistence with Moscow rather than confrontation.

>>79088211
>Other than that, his advisers and cabinet pretty much just continued the Nixon/Ford orthodoxy about friendly coexistence with Moscow rather than confrontation
In other words, they were all deep state guys.

Teddy Roosevelt

>>79086260
Nice person, abysmal policies.

Deregulation was a mistake
Volker Shock was a mistake
Neoliberalism as a whole was a mistake.

HISTORY'S
GREATEST
MONSTER.

>>79088484
LEAVE THE PEANUT FARMER ALONE YOU STUPID BRIT

>>79088390
Yes. Ronald Reagan and most of his advisers were self-made men, they weren't Ivory Tower guys like McNamara and Kissinger. That was an important difference, Reagan's people were less wed to the idea of big, centralized government than every administration going back to Kennedy.

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>>79088540
Carter+Callaghan = world's greatest team

>>79088540
Carter
Southern Baptist
Hug the world peace ambassador

Nixon
Quaker
Crazy god of war

Makes you think

>>79088211
>Zbigniew Brezinski
The cunt who literally invented islamic terrorism? He can get fucked in hell and all his descendants with him

>>79088614
Islamic terrorism was actually invented in 632 AD, but I'll leave that go.

>The Shah's visit to the Rose Garden on November 15, 1977 was marred by human rights demonstrators protesting outside. He was hailed by the White House as a champion of the free world. At the end of the year, Carter made a reciprocal visit to Tehran. A US State Department report in August 1978 declared that the Shah's hold on power was "absolutely secure" for at least the next 10 years.

>When the end finally came, it was not from the Marxist Tudeh Party as most State Department officials would have expected, but from something strange and completely out-of-left-field. Actually, anyone who knew enough about Iran could have predicted it, but such people in Washington were few.

>>79088551
Reagan was a neoliberal monster

>>79088551
>be American
>Hate anyone educated so you elect a TV star with Alzheimers
Really makes you think..

>>79088211
Detente wasn't working at all. The Soviet Union was getting stronger and more brazen every year, they had spies stealing everything that wasn't nailed down and infiltrating American universities. Every major defense contractor had Soviet spies funneling out a steady stream of information, and industrial espionage of IBM and other major tech firms was going on around the clock. Not to say this hadn't been going on since they pilfered atomic bomb info right after WWII, but in the 70s it was getting completely out of hand.

After Vietnam, the US Army was a demoralized mess with gangs and drug abuse. It couldn't do jack if the Red Army invaded Western Europe, and the NATO member cunts were even worse off as far as military preparedness. Soviet ICBMs kept getting better and more accurate while we had a bunch of Minuteman missiles that were practically like firecrackers compared to the R-36 ICBM. We had to keep the outdated and deteriorating Titan II arsenal in use years past its planned retirement date to have something of comparable throw weight. In 1980, a Titan II in an Arkansas silo exploded when its aging and dry-rotted rubber seals allowed fuel to leak out and ignite. A live nuclear warhead was launched several hundred feet from the silo.

>>79087985
Tell us more about Vance

>>79088466
Debs should have won every time he ran.

Roosevelt was alright though. He would have been better if he'd won as the Bull-Moose candidate than he was during his first term.

>>79088551
Reagan made the Taliban and therefore 9/11 possible.

>>79088551
Supposedly, right after Kennedy was inaugurated in 1961, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn remarked about McNamara et al "I'd feel a lot better if at least one of them had run for sheriff once." suggesting that these Ivy League pointheads didn't have a clue how the real world worked.

>>79089193
The Soviets had huge underground shelters beneath Moscow to ensure continuity of government after World War III. American civil defense plans never quite came close to the same level of preparedness.

In Sverdlovsk, they had a giant storage depot of biological weapons. A major anthrax outbreak, one of the largest in history, hit the city in 1979. Until the fall of the USSR, Moscow claimed that this happened due to a batch of spoiled meat.

The KGB also placed numerous secret weapons caches around in Western Europe that could be picked up and used if war ever broke out. The Communist Party of the USA, led by the phlegmatic Gus Hall, received a $40 million annual subsidy from the USSR until 1990. Leftist terror groups in Europe like the Baader-Meinhof Gang and Red Brigades also received extensive Soviet subsidies.

What about Lyndon Johnson, why doesn't anyone like him?

>>79090740
Because he passed the civil rights act, and americans are racist.

>>79090740
Welfare and 50,000 bodybags would be a start.

>>79089193
>The Soviet Union was getting stronger and more brazen every year
It appeared to be.
In actuality it was going through the era of stagnation.

Soon after losing the Republican primary to Gerald Ford in 1976, Ronald Reagan began making plans for another go in '80. In 1978, he toured Europe with aides to meet with European leaders, most of whom snubbed him aside from British opposition party leader Margaret Thatcher. When a European journalist sarcastically asked Reagan how he would handle the Soviet Union if elected president, he replied "It's simple. We win, they lose."

>>79086260
He was also the last true Christian president and it was evangelicals that campaigned against him.

>>79086260
Richard Nixon was unironically the best President post-WW2. The best of the

>>79086260
>gave away the canal zone when he didn't have the legal right to do so
It was Bush Senior btw

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>>79089294
>Debs should have won every time he ran.

>>79090054
The CIA estimated the Soviet nuclear stockpile in 1976 at around 30,000 warheads, it's now known that the total was between 40,000-60,000 warheads.

>>79086806
>>79086952
What happens when you let hippies override science. Meanwhile, France and Japan now get half or more of their electricity from nuclear power.

>>79093685
>Japan
You really sure you want to use them as a case for the use of nuclear power, nigga?

>>79093766
>building a nuclear reactor in a tsunami-prone area
Yeah, probably not.

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>Reagan
Literally the biggest retard before Bush Jr, who in turn was literally the biggest retard before Trump. He "beat" the Soviet Union by pure nuclear gambling and because it collapsed on its own, and did absolutely nothing of value otherwise.

>>79093685
So Trump is a hippy now?

Under Reagan's administration, the entire notion of how to fight the Cold War that had prevailed over the last five presidencies was rolled back. There was no talk now of accepting Soviet communism as an alternative, but legitimate system of governance. Instead, it was to be called out for the totalitarian oppression it was. It is difficult to imagine Reagan (or for that matter Margaret Thatcher) sitting down and reading the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Che Guevara, or Ho Chi Minh to try and "understand" the world from the Soviet POV any more than one could imagine FDR and Churchill reading Mein Kampf to understand things from Hitler's POV. Things were boiled down to a simple "They're the bad guys, end of story" mentality. As Henry Kissinger would later admit in the 90s, after the USSR fell, "[Reagan] was the first president to take the ideological and geostrategic offensive against the Soviet Union."

>>79093875
This, unironically.

>>79086260
2nd worst, after Obama

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>>79097174

>>79086260
Carter was a fanny who let the Iranians dick him about on a world stage

>>79097306
That was great, but believe me, he earned it.

>>79097174
2nd worse is Clinton, Carter was a cucked pansy who didn't have the balls to implement harmful leftist policies like Clinton and Obama did. Carter's responsible for Iran and the 2008 housing crisis.

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>>79097581
>Carter was a cucked pansy who didn't have the balls to implement harmful leftist policies like Clinton and Obama did

He did. It was called ethanol subsidies and the ban on construction of new nuclear reactors. Carter also said that at current (1970s) rates of consumption, the planet would completely run out of oil by 1990.

>>79097581
Good point.

>>79097705
Nice to have some fellow oldfags here who know the difference between memory and wiki.

After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979, Carter expressed with dismay that "Brezhnev had lied to me". He promptly revived draft registration and began sanctioning the USSR and declared that the US would not participate in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. Sino-US military cooperation increased and the US also began operating listening posts in Pakistan, which was now being flooded with US, Saudi, and Chinese money. No direct attempt to stop the Soviet invasion would be performed, instead efforts were limited at harassing the Russian bear as much as possible. Carter also suggested that perhaps the NATO member countries needed to increase their military spending just a smidgen. Earlier plans for the complete withdrawal of US troops from South Korea and Europe were scrapped.

However, the US military's readiness had deteriorated markedly after the Vietnam War, a situation exposed by the failed attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages in April 1980, which ended in two Air Force helicopters crashing into the desert and killing eight servicemen. The failure of the operation was blamed on inadequate preparedness and coordination.

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>>79093875
>have the opportunity to end the cold war earlier
>choses not to because he saw star wars and thinks scientists can create something similar to the death star

>ameritards

>>79097705
Carter's advisers said that on the plus side, the Soviet Union would also run out of oil. :^)

>>79097581
>Clinton
>Obama
>leftist policies

Leftist? Such as passing NAFTA, deregulating the media, deregulating the banks (which had a larger impact on the housing crisis), passing a Republican healthcare plan that caused insurance companies to post record profits despite being called """socialist""" Obamacare, cutting welfare, being the worst president for whistleblowers in history, literally suspending habeas corpus and renewing the Patriot Act, bombing a pharmaceutical factory in a pathetic distraction from the fact that you were blown by a fat Jewess, continuing the Bush policy of destabilizing Syria which led to the rise of ISIS, the destruction of millions of people's lives, and set off the largest wave of human migration in almost a century.

But yeah, they waved rainbow flags and said some nice things about blacks and Muslims, so they're 100% leftist.

>Carter
>responsible for Iran and the 2008 housing crisis
He may have contributed to the housing crisis, but he is in no way responsible for Iran. Not even remotely.

>>79089193
>After Vietnam, the US Army was a demoralized mess with gangs and drug abuse. It couldn't do jack if the Red Army invaded Western Europe, and the NATO member cunts were even worse off as far as military preparedness
NATO militaries in the 70s were a gaggle of different and incompatible weapons systems that couldn't interchange spare parts or ammo. Much of it was very outdated as well. One thing that can be said about Soviet totalitarianism was that it had imposed rigid uniformity on the Warsaw Pact, all of whose armies had the same equipment. By that time, nobody took the European states seriously anymore as military powers, and in the event of a Soviet invasion, their role was limited largely to guerrilla warfare or passive resistance.

>>79099196
Go to bed, Justin.

>>79100504
Justin Trudeau is cut from the same cloth as those two. He'll pad the pockets of big business, support stripping away the rights of everyone, support nation-destroying policies abroad, all while pretending to fight for the common man. And most people will fall for it (both those that love him and those that hate him) because he wore a pair of $15 Ramadan socks and can say a few nice words.

>>79086260
Not really, no.

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>>79086260
He tried to warn us. We didn't listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8npcT1dPEdo

>>79086260
Harry Truman is the best.
He saved Korea 4 times. against Japan, North Korea, China, and MacArthur

>>79103372
The summation of this speech: "We're going downhill and there's nothing we can do about it so...uh...put on a sweater and carpool to work."

Great, inspiring leadership.

>>79104068
Always found this interpretation of the speech to be an amazing insight into the American psyche.

The line that sticks with me as much more historically prescient is as follows:
>In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

Basically, because Carter was a socialist, he wanted us to be like Eastern Europe with breadlines and rationed electricity. Of course, lefties thought this was just great. "Yeah, y'know we've enjoyed far too high a standard of living for too long."

>>79086260
He put solar panels on top of the white house.

From Reagan's inaugural address. "There are those who would have us believe that we're doomed to an inevitable decline. I believe we have the right to dream heroic dreams and America's best days are still ahead of us."

>>79104620
Hehehe, that's right stupid goy- I mean, fellow white patriot. We must consume more and more. It's the American way! Anyone who says otherwise is a socialist and probably a Muslim, too! Anyone who thinks we can't sustain infinite economic growth is just a stupid pessimistic communist! Hehehe...

*rubs hands vigorously until glowing embers of dead skin fall to the ground*

Sunny ways for the future, fellow patriot!

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>>79104620
>Carter was a socialist
>deregulated airlines, trucking and banking
>didn't use the provisions of the Humphrey-Hawkins act to create jobs

>>79104814
Americans respond well to that kind of optimistic rhetoric (Reagan was possibly inspired by FDR's "Happy Days Are Here Again" slogan), but it was less effective when Thatcher did same with Britain, a very different culture and society.

>>79086260
no
reagan, bush the father, clinton, obama

>>79103372
listen to this guy. all doom and gloom. but that generation did just fine. as most others before and after.

>>79089193
There was a lot of Soviet technology theft but it didn't automatically mean they could build a 1v1 copy of an F-14 fighter. Outmoded Soviet industrial capabilities and the inefficient planned economy still handicapped what they could do. Plus a lot of military/aerospace tech relies on unwritten, intuitive knowledge they didn't have.

It's no different than China's numerous shitty copies of Russian, US, French, etc aircraft. They can build something that looks kind of like a B-2 stealth bomber but it's just a low-quality knockoff without all the capabilities of the real thing.

>>79090935
>Welfare is a bad thing
This is why your society is a fucking joke.

>>79097581
>>>/pol/
And stay there. What you idiots call "left" isn't actually left, it's merely not pants on head stupid to the "right". There is no left in American politics, only slightly not as far right as the other major party in that two party preferred dog and pony show.

>>79104620
>global_poker_face.jpg

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>>79093875
>someone was butthurt enough to make this
>europoors are literally SEETHING

I'm more disturbed by Carter's post-presidency Muslim ball-licking. He called it "a beautiful election" in 2006 when the West Bank elected Hamas.

>>79104653
Reagan immediately got rid of them and lefties shit their pants.

>>79086260
King George III was America's last decent leader

>>79106556
>He called it "a beautiful election" in 2006 when the West Bank elected Hamas.

Likely because neocons and neolibs were shitting themselves because the "wrong" party won. Hillary Clinton was recorded talking about how to influence the Palestinian elections. Also likely because Israel essentially created Hamas as a way to divide the Palestinians, and it bit them in the ass.

Lot of angry people with peanut allergies ITT

>>79106452
>"No! This can't be happening! Everyone has to like Reagan! Y-you're all just b-butthurt europ-poors!"

>>79105773
He's all doom and gloom because Americans were all doom and gloom at the time. (As were most countries, certainly most anglosphere countries.)

His fundamental message is optimistic: America has had problems and overcome them before, and will do so again. That so many Americans manage to miss it makes it all too clear why the standard of political communication has slid off the face of a cliff. (And just for reference I'm not even referring to Trump here, Clinton/Blair was hell.)

>>79107143
do you agree that Robert Muldoon did nothing wrong
Yes [_]
Yes [_]

>>79108726

What's your take on >>79105491

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>>79109543
I mean, Thatcher was much more two-pronged. Her message was less the overt optimism of Reagan and more along the lines of restoring Britain's status in the world. The other side was remarkably depressing and still in use today - to say "Yes, this hurts, but there is no alternative." as unemployment hit 12%, there wasn't so much of a pretence at unity. Britain - even when viewed as great - never really had the sort of cheerfulness to it that Americans seem to have. I think it probably didn't help that Reagan was probably on the whole less radical, relatively speaking, than Thatcher. (Particularly since Carter had in many ways laid the groundwork for some of the more socially contentious parts of his policy, like deregulation, where Callaghan in the UK had tried to balance monetarism with the status quo.)

Reagan gives off a far less confrontational impression, PATCO strike aside. Perhaps because he's both head of state and head of government, where we could love our head of state (the Queen) while abhorring the head of government, or perhaps due to separation of powers and term limits making him seem less invincible. That's probably the biggest thing I'd note.

There's an interesting Adam Curtis film about Thatcher's use of patriotism in messaging, actually.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hm-I3hOGBA

Interestingly it was made in the mid-90s, just as Britain recovered a longing for "society" as distinct from the more individualist thinking of Thatcherism. The then Conservative government was, even at the time of filming, struggling with the fact that the British people realized this after electing them for a fourth term. (Despite pre-election polling suggesting Labour would win.) In some ways it's an unresolved problem, since the next Labour government was - in Thatcher's words - her greatest achievement. (This doesn't come up in the film iirc, it's from the history book "A classless society: Britain in the 1990s", but it's interesting context.)

One of the big problems was that Britain didn't have a real equivalent of the American dream, and that it also struggled with the class issue, so a lot of people just took Thatcher's agenda as selling out the working man to the posh class.

And yes, she was a very combative, temperamental individual who lacked Reagan's "lovable grandfather" image.

>>79110148
>or perhaps due to separation of powers and term limits making him seem less invincible
Having term limits is one thing I'm very glad for. I mean, shit, if we didn't have them, Bill Clinton would still be president. Yet, Germany can't get rid of Merkel despite the mounting disaster she's caused. She can keep running for chancellor forever.

>>79110148
>I mean, Thatcher was much more two-pronged. Her message was less the overt optimism of Reagan and more along the lines of restoring Britain's status in the world.

More like restoring the British Empire...but then again, Deng Xiaoping kind of showed her up for the reality that the 19th century was over.

>>79090740
LBJ was a piece of shit

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Who was the best American president? My top 5 are:
>George Washington (though a traitor)
>Thomas Jefferson (though a traitor and aspie)
>Abraham Lincoln (though a dictator)
>Theodore Roosevelt (though a retarded narcissist and the living embodiment of all yank sterotypes)
>John Kennedy (though a slut and leftist)

>>79110429
>"ids dime to lisden to my obinion about german polidigs guis!!!"
Into the trash it goes.

>>79111995
>no James "Cincinattus" Polk
>no Andrew "Fuck the Banks" Jackson

>>79114514
Jackson was an accident, don't know much about Polk sorry

>>79111995
Top 5:
George Washington
Abraham Lincoln
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Teddy Roosevelt
James K. Polk
Honorable Mentions:
Harry Truman
Lyndon B. Johnson
Woodrow Wilson