So apparently even the NRO has realized how silly the conservative list of History’s Worst Americans is, and Jim Geraghty attempts to correct his fellow wingnuts:
UPDATE: A couple readers argue that I’m being a bit unfair, that clearly many of these bloggers using the measuring stick of how far a figure’s bad deeds reached, instead of who committed the most evil acts in American history.
I actually think you can make strong cases for some of the political figures on this list. Anyone who’s read Liberal Fascism understands Wilson’s inclusion, and there’s a lot of supporting evidence to the argument that Jimmy Carter was the century’s worst, or most ineffective president.
I’m dying over here.
If you start with Liberal Fascism as your authoritative source for history, it’s kind of easy to understand why the list looks like it does.
morzer
Well, you know who else liked “correcting” right-wing extremist lists of political opponents, don’t you?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Serious Conservative Intellectual Paul Ryan cites the “My Mommy Sniffed Some Girl’s Panties” book as a major influence as well.
cleek
now that’s some epistemic closure!
Omnes Omnibus
I was intending to base my wine cellar on Ann Althouse’s “Wines I Guzzled: A Guide” so I might not be the best judge.
freelancer
I read that too, referred back from one of Sully’s posts, were he calls the guy a “sane conservative“. That phrase is quickly becoming a Rorschach, isn’t it?
Anoniminous
When you’ve lost the NRO …
Bob Loblaw
Wait, why are we choosing Woodrow Wilson as a hill to die upon? Because he’s a Democrat? Wilson is a fair inclusion under any conceivable metric, why not focus on the right’s insanity with regards to the rest of their lunatic list?
Omnes Omnibus
@Bob Loblaw: It is not that people are defending Wilson; it is that people are mocking anyone who could use LF as a “scholarly” reference.
cyd
Woodrow “Birth of a Nation” Wilson definitely deserves a place on the list, as far as I’m concerned.
steviez314
If you used comic books as your authoritative source of history, would Lex Luthor be #1 on that list?
Betsy
@Bob Loblaw:
Wilson is a fair inclusion on any “25 worst Americans in history” list? Really?
I’m not a Wilson fan, but that seems a little extreme.
arguingwithsignposts
Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.
Ogami Itto
@steviez314: The Red Skull would be a better choice. He was, after all, a National Soshalist. In other words, a liberal fascist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Skull
Svensker
@Omnes Omnibus:
FTFY
Montysano
Geragthy posits that maybe Charles Manson should be on the list. The very first commenter says “Yeah, Manson was bad, but dude…. Saul Alinsky was much worse”.
Absolutely beyond parody.
arguingwithsignposts
@steviez314:
I’m thinking the Joker.
Steve
Wilson totally came off like an asshole in Iron Jawed Angels, too. Maybe we can have a bipartisan consensus.
Dave Weeden
Seriously, Lincoln isn’t on that list? (I’m a fan, though *habeas corpus* etc really annoy me.) I mean (arguably) starting a war which led to so many American deaths. But John Wilkes Booth is on the list. Lee Harvey Oswald isn’t. WTF? How can anyone vote for George Soros when Timothy McVeigh is on the same list?
And no Martin Luther King? Isn’t it his fault you have Barack Husein Obama? :-p
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Betsy: Considering how much he regressed race relations, he needs to be mentioned somewhere. But they’re mostly going after him for the League of Nations, I bet.
Omnes Omnibus
@Svensker: And then I won’t even need racks; I can just stack the boxes.
BrYan
I’m surprised they didn’t add the guy who suggested putting fluoride in tap water.
Bill Murray
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): yeah they loved the Palmer Raids, I would guess
Omnes Omnibus
@BrYan: … and that man’s name was James Earl Carter, and now you know the rest of the story.
Michael Sullivan
Yeah, I’m pretty sure the reasons I don’t like Wilson aren’t the reasons NRO doesn’t like Wilson.
I see him as a guy who did more to harm black people and race relations than pretty much any other individual person in the 20th century, perhaps the whole history of the country.
But other than that, his politics weren’t all that crazy.
The wingers see him as the guy who pushed for the league of nations ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT OMG.
If the wingers are dinging Wilson for racism (and they probably are, he’s an easy target), it’s a bit rich, given that their stock in trade is pretty much exactly the kind of bs that he was responsible for. They’ve just changed the code words.
Sentient Puddle
Me, I thought the wingnuts were trying to ding Wilson based off the League of Nations or something. Or at the very least, I think it’d have something to do with foreign policy, what with the reference to Liberal Fascism in there (though I’m guessing at what the book is about here).
And in the case of foreign policy, they would be totally fucking moronic to say Wilson was one of the worst figures in American history because he was the one who kick-started the whole idea of international interventionism that lies at the core of neoconservatism. I mean Christ, talk about undermining your whole philosophy.
Keith G
FWIW…A list of worst Americans must lead off with:
1) Henry Wirz – One of the most inhumane persons imaginable
2) Robert E. Lee
Triassic Sands
An infinite number of monkeys typing forever on an infinite number of typewriters couldn’t come up with a dumber list than these bozos created in just a few minutes. Why, the very idea that Jimmy Carter is more evil than SpongeBob SquarePants is absurd.
As a follow-up, it would be nice to see their list of the top ten issues facing humanity today.
Omnes Omnibus
@Sentient Puddle:
Why would that stop them?
licensed to kill time
Gee, I guess that Bush Worst Modern President thing really stung, huh conservative doodz?
Martha
@Keith G: Yes, but they’d have to know who Wirz was first…I’m guessing that would require too much knowledge of actual history…
matoko_chan
@Cole
so….why is there all the pushback on my liberal/conservative IQ gap hypoth?
every day is a field lab experiment in conservative selection for stupid.
Sheila
@Triassic Sands: When a computer simulation was done of monkeys typing on typewriters, the first comprehensible words to emerge were four-letter Anglo-Saxon “obscenities”, which are far more useful to culture than this list.
celticdragonchick
@Omnes Omnibus:
I
She is writing a sequel on bottom shelf 5 year old blended Scotch brands.
*wince*
BTW…
Disclosure: In the ridiculous 20 worst Americans comment thread at Rightwingnews, Annemarie Dickey is me.
Favorite spectacular wacko wingnut fail:
Pathological.
Hal
Any list that doesn’t start off with Justin Bieber automatically obsolete.
cleek
@Hal:
Justin Bieber = Canadian
feel free to substitute Lindsey Lohan or any of the Cardasians
Emma
I.Am.Not.Going.There. No, siree, bub. No way, Jose. That much crazy has to stick at some point.
Keith G
@cleek: So? All the better.
Mark S.
I could see making an argument for Wilson: he was one really racist son of a bitch and during the war his contempt for civil liberties made Bush seem like Glenn Greenwald.
But Carter? Even if you thought he was a terrible president, what the hell did he do that was evil? These people are utterly insane.
Also, I might have found room on my list for at least one segregationist.
celticdragonchick
@Emma:
The laughter will last a lifetime.
Seriously. Peek in. Progressive commentators have been shredding the site.
PaminBB
So much fail. These guys have the intellectual depth of a kiddie pool.
They should love Jimmy Carter, who left the door open for St. Ronnie.
arguingwithsignposts
Obviously there are not enough Updates.
cleek
@Keith G:
well, the list is “History’s Worst Americans”…
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
Because your hypoth is shit and you play it like a worn-out fiddle?
morzer
@cleek:
What did the Asians with cards ever do to you? If you mean those skanky hos the Kardashians… well, Sir, that’s another matter.
Omnes Omnibus
@celticdragonchick:
My Amazon pre-order is ready.
Betsy
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Oh indeed; I am no defender of him on that score. He was horrid.
But 25 is a small number. I was thinking that there were probably more than 25 people who were the cause of worse devastation than Wilson in all of America’s history.
Zach
Lots of people in the 1910s and 1920s believed in the science underpinning eugenics. A tiny minority of those people, none of which are Woodrow Wilson or Margaret Sanger, thought it logically followed that mass sterilization was a rational step in light of this science. Goldberg’s writing on early-20th-century progressives hinges on the first fact (which is indeed troubling and thankfully is in the past… and led to the institution of peer review) and complete omits the second.
sloan
This is what happens when a political movement is guided by angry clowns like Rush Limbaugh for 20 years. You wake up one day and it’s the year 2010, and Sharron Angle is the Republican nominated to take on the United States Senate majority leader. They knew this race was coming for years and the GOP faithful decided she was the most seasoned, electable conservative in the entire state of Nevada.
Seriously.
Or maybe you get Dr. Laura taunting a black woman with “n*gger n*gger n*gger … We’ve got a black man as president, and we have more complaining about racism than ever. I mean, I think that’s hilarious … n*gger n*gger n*gger … You know what? If you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry out of your race.”
Ruy Teixeira:
There is no law that says the Republican party has to exist forever.
Keith G
@cleek: Which means that those s@cialist Canucks with their stronger economy and better medical outcomes automatically win a (honorary, if you like) top spot on such a list.
Delia
Speaking of Liberal Fascism, why isn’t Jonah Goldberg on the list?
Surely lowering the average American IQ counts for something in worsts.
Omnes Omnibus
@Delia: fine, then let’s put Michael Bay on the list as well.
Clark
@Betsy: Wilson drag the country into the First World War, imprisoned thousands of dissenters and vindictively kept them behind bars after the war (Harding let most out), brought segregation to the federal government, and the list could continue. He seems like one of the worst to me.
Woodrowfan
A few points:
Wilson’s racism was awful, but not out of line with the other political leaders, in both parties, of his day. And, unlike some other American Presidents (cough, Nixon cough) he wasn’t anti-Semitic or anti-Catholic. Reading diaries and letters from the period, as well as the popular press, is jarring to modern sensibilities. You’ll come across the n* word more often than a week’s worth of drunken Dr. Laura rants. There’s nothing like reading the words of a liberal you admire (and not WW) and suddenly coming across a remark like “why are the Europeans so upset about that lynching of some little n*****?” Yet the same person also supported labor rights, ending child labor, breaking up the trusts, etc. But when it came to race they can make Jessie Helms proud. (and the righties of the period are just as bad, often worse).
Wilson’s civil liberties record in WWI was dreadful, but people like Goldberg forget that the Republican right wing wanted him to go further, and thought the Justice Department was too soft on radicals! FYI, Thomas Knock makes a good argument that this backfired on Wilson because he ended up weakening and alienating many supports on the left, which cost him during the League treaty fight.
As for WWI, it’d be more accurate to say he was dragged into the war. His entire cabinet wanted to go to war before he did, and the decision to go to war in April 1917 was very popular, even on the left.
“Iron Jawed Angels” is good, but places the blame on Wilson for the actions of others, and omits his efforts to promote woman’s suffrage, including lobbying Congress starting in 1918. He was a late convert, but he did come around. Alice Paul was not the only activist, and perhaps not the most effective one either.
Woodrowfan
@Zach:
And he omits the popularity on the right of ideas like “race suicide” He always sees the speck in the left eye, and ignores the huge frigging redwood in the right eye.
Woodrowfan
The right doesn’t hate Wilson because of his racism, or his awful civil liberties record. They hate him because he used the federal government to move against the interests of the rich (who hated him as much as they hated FDR later), because he thought the government should intervene in the economy to help consumers, and because he laid the foundation that FDR (and then Truman) later used to build the New Deal.
maya
@Triassic Sands:
Tinky Winky was way more evil and doesn’t even rate a mention.
Steve
@Woodrowfan:
I recall the end of the movie featuring Wilson lobbying Congress as though he had been a huge fan of women’s suffrage all along. I could be remembering wrong.
Woodrowfan
No, that was correct. He did support woman’s suffrage on a statewide level before then, and made a big deal of endorsing a referendum in New Jersey in 1915 including taking the press along to watch him vote in favor of it in Princeton (it lost anyway). This endorsement won Wilson the respect of Carrie Chapman Catt, but wasn’t enough for Alice Paul. That’s not to say Paul was wrong, just that the Woman’s Suffrage Movement was divided on whether Wilson was an ally.
BTW, check today’s entry at the Wilson timeline at the Wilson House. it’s timely.
http://www.woodrowwilsonhouse.org/index.asp?section=timeline&file=timelinesearch_day&id=1172
The Endless Sheriff
No list is valid that does not include Ronald Reagan in the top 10 and G. W. Bush right behind him.
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts: you will see. :)
within the next decade we will see a statistically significant between group difference in IQ between liberals and conservatives.
don’t hate me
because im beautifulbecause you’re stupid, aws.@Delia:
that is the sad thing about conservatives…even their smart people are retards.
arguingwithsignposts
@matoko_chan:
And when those significances show up, you can show me the fucking statistics. until then, stfu.
Triassic Sands
@maya:
It’s OK, Maya, Tinky Winky, being a Brit, isn’t eligible for this list.
But thanks for reminding me that I have yet another reason to live in constant fear. After all, it’s just a matter of time before Tinky Winky gets his/her/its hands on a nuke…
Paris
Why isn’t William Kunstler on the list? I’m really disappointed in their knowledge of recent history.
Triassic Sands
If asked for a list of the 50 stupidest Americans today who are in some way involved in politics (politician, candidate, lobbyist, fundraiser, journalist, blogger, etc.), I’d simply take the names of the 43 bloggers who responded to this poll, add the names of Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Dick Morris, Bloody Billy Kristol, Jonah Goldberg, Erick Erickson, and Orly Taitz and I’d have a pretty good list without breaking a sweat.
Note: George W. Bush doesn’t really seem to be involved in politics anymore, although we’ll be feeling the pain of his stupidity for decades, if not centuries, to come. George deserves to be on any list of complete morons.
And Another Thing...
The list is just bizarre, disturbingly bizarre. I know a bit about history and political science and it’s a challenge to figure out why some of the names are on the list. It’s likely that their list of 20 most worthy Americans would be just as baffling. The contributors to the poll seem to have the institutional memory of fruit flies. Harry Reid fergawdsakes. He’s one of the least influential Majority Leaders ever and will disappear into well earned oblivion. And he’s tied for 13th of the worst Americans evah….sheesh.
devtob
At least Geraghty had the sense to write this: “No Jefferson Davis or anyone else associated with the Confederacy beyond John Wilkes Booth? ”
To defend slavery, traitors like Davis, Lee, etc., started a war that killed about as many Americans as all the rest of our wars combined.
Somehow, that’s a blind spot for today’s conservatives, in many ways.
morzer
Meet the next decade.. same as the old decade. Sorry, Tokie, but promises ain’t facts.
Uloborus
@matoko_chan:
I could believe it will happen, although like the others I’d demand proof. But it won’t be *evolution*. It won’t be due to the inheritance of genetic traits. You keep using that word, but I really am not sure you understand the amazing amounts of time it requires to make a noticeable change in a population.
New Yorker
I’m still aghast that an act of mass treason over the right to keep human beings as farm equipment that led to the death of 600,000 Americans in war contains one person on the list of “worst” Americans, John Wilkes Booth.
How about we add Jefferson Davis, Preston Brooks, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Jubal Early, and Henry Wirz. They’d all make my short list of worst Americans.
Cain
Some of the right wing stuff comes I think from prejudice. Race relations is very murky. My good friend has been swallowing all the fox news stuff due to his prejudice of blacks. The prejudice comes from his observation that they don’t work hard, and use the race card to keep themselves from getting fired or reprimanded.
My brother who is as liberal as me (I’m more liberal than anybody in my family I think) has seen the same thing when he’s interacted with certain characters. Talk on the phone all day long, come in late, etc.
That leads to the problem of people not wanting their tax dollars to support such deadbeats. Nobody wants to support deadbeats, but I think if he confronts where this philosophy comes from he might change his politics.
But the point I’m making is that a lot of the people who are this crazy have some peeve that they observe that causes them to turn away from liberalism altogether while in practice are in fact liberal in the way they act with their friends.
Just something to humanize right wing assholes. :)
cain
New Yorker
Also, other non-Confederates who would make my short list of worst Americans would be Aaron Burr, Roger Taney, George Wallace, Charles Coughlin, and Jerry Falwell.
edit: and McVeigh, the Rosenbergs, and William Calley.
Ryan
Look at the bright side: That Upton Sinclair & Eugene V. Debs didn’t make the list may be a bellwether for the Socialist cause.
Clark
@Woodrowfan: As for the Iraq war, it’d be more accurate to say he was dragged into the war. His entire cabinet wanted to go to war before he did, and the decision to go to war in March 2003 was very popular, . . .
Clark
@Woodrowfan: “The right doesn’t hate Wilson because of his racism, or his awful civil liberties record.” So, he was a racist and his civil liberties record was awful. In addition, his decision to take us into the war was arguably disastrous.
Cris
I assumed he was referring to Gul Dukat.
Woodrow L. Goode, IV
I can’t believe that some people here are searching for logic behind these choices. Saul Alinsky makes the list mainly because Hillary Clinton did her senior thesis on his work. He also organized in Chicago and Barack Obama worked for some group that had a restroom where Alinsky once took a dump. William F. Buckley also called him a dangerous radical, but said he was close to being an organizational genius.
Woodrow Wilson is here partly because he got us into a “European War” (that’s how some folks think of World War 1, folks) and mostly because he pushed the League of Nations, the predecessor to the UN. Wingnuts posit, with no sense of irony, that the LoN played a part in the rise of the Nazis, saying that harsher treatment of Germany might have prevented it (when, very arguably, the conditions caused it.)
Wingnuts aren’t much for intellectual rigor. Margaret Sanger was adamantly opposed to abortion. In 1920, she wrote “While there are cases where even the law recognizes an abortion as justifiable if recommended by a physician, I assert that the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed in America each year are a disgrace to civilization.”
16 years later, she wrote “Abortion was the wrong way—no matter how early it was performed it was taking life; that contraception was the better way, the safer way—it took a little time, a little trouble, but was well worth while in the long run, because life had not yet begun.”
But, because she founded an organization that became Planned Parenthood– and, long after she stopped running it, began advocating for legalized abortion– they hate her.
Woodrow L. Goode, IV
A postscript: For people who rail about Fox News and the RIght Wing echo chamber, progressives sometimes show a disturbing cluelessness about how it works.
It just takes one talking head with a bug up his or her butt (because of something they misinterpreted or overreacted to) to get things cranked up. Limbaugh is really the fountainhead for most of this stuff, because he has to generate so much outrage. But all it takes is one guy with a grudge, which might have nothing to do with substance.
Someone told me that the reason Joe McGinniss got such rough treatment from Fox about Sarah Palin– even though he wrote a gossipy and hostile book about Ted Kennedy, which ought to make him a darling– is that Roger Ailes (the media guy on Nixon’s 1968 campaign) has never forgiven McGinniss for writing The Selling of the Presiudent, which does not paint Ailes well.
I have no way to confirm it, but it jibes with other things I have seen. Don’t look for fairness from these people, folks– it ain’t there.
Ken Lovell
John Hawkins easily tops the list of ‘Biggest Fuckwits Ever to Write a Blog’.
matoko_chan
@arguingwithsignposts:
make meh. youre just pissy cuz i showed you were a retard on shariah.
@Uloborus:
how many times do i have explain this?
there are four paths of inheritance; genetic, epigenetic, behavioral and symbolic. selection for lower IQ individuals in conservatism is SELF-SELECTION based on behavioral and symbolic traits, and SELF-SELECTION based on EXISTING IQ and g. there might some mild assortative mating GENETIC/EPIGENETIC effect over the last 50 years but its likely diluted by regression to the mean anyways.
Here are three reasons this has happened/ is happening.
1. the savannah principle and evolutionary biology operating in the EEA.
2. the biological basis of political affiliation and self-selection for mindset traits.
3. social leveling for IQ and education. High IQ correlates positively with more education and higher SES (socio-economic status). Conservatism gives “skillups” to level IQ and education…..religiosity and “commonsense” are highly valued and intellectuals and highly educated people are despised and denigrated. in game theory this is called rubberbanding, because it levels a skillarchy.
4. the negative correlation of religosity (not religion!) with IQ. xenophobia also correlates with low IQ. conservatives exhibit high religiosity and high levels of xenophobia (racism, fear of outgroups).
matoko_chan
great.
now im in moderation. halp plz?
@Uloborus:
well….the thing is Douthat realizes this. that is why he is always concern trolling meritocracy. He knows that conservatives can’t compete on Jeffersonian meritocratic values anymore (‘talent’=intelligence) and (‘virtue’=honor and honesty) so he wants to come up with some different meritocratic values like, say, soulless rapacious greed or free market “ingenuity”. Beinart is essentially talking about affirmative action for IQ when he talks about IQ bussing intelligence-challenged redstate heartland students to Harvard.
We already have IQ bussing to Harvard.
Look at George Bush.
Also look at the ‘smart people’ on the right.
wallah…..Jonah Goldberg and Mark Levin? any uni in the country (except bible colleges and Brigham Young) would laugh their opus magni out of the door.
even their smart people are retards.
they know this. like Julian Sanchez says conservatism is an inferiority complex masquerading as political philosophy. this is way Palin put fake Plato quotes in her book…..they want desperately to look smart.
But i don’t see how they fix this.
it is probably impossible to fix.
when the stats get published, im wondering if there will be IQ riots or wingers will change their voter registration to look smarter. im bettin on the riots. consider how impossible it is for conservative leadership to switch off the racism against blacks even when they desperately need to.
matoko_chan
ill try this one more time.
how many times do i have explain this?
there are four paths of inheritance; genetic, epigenetic, behavioral and symbolic.
it is memetic evolution based on memetic self-selection.
selection for lower IQ individuals in conservatism is SELF-SELECTION based on behavioral and symbolic traits, and SELF-SELECTION based on EXISTING IQ and g. there might some mild assortative mating GENETIC/EPIGENETIC effect over the last 50 years but its likely diluted by regression to the mean anyways.
Here are four reasons this has happened/ is happening.
1. the savannah principle and evolutionary biology operating in the EEA.
2. the biological basis of political affiliation and self-selection for mindset traits.
3. social leveling for IQ and education. High IQ correlates positively with more education and higher SES (socio-economic status). Conservatism gives “skillups” to level IQ and education…..religiosity and “commonsense” are highly valued and intellectuals and highly educated people are despised and denigrated. in game theory this is called rubberbanding, because it levels a skillarchy.
4. the negative correlation of religosity (not religion!) with IQ. xenophobia also correlates with low IQ. conservatives exhibit high religiosity and high levels of xenophobia (racism, fear of outgroups).
there are statistics. 94% of scientists are not republican. 99% of conservatives are nominally christian. those are scary stats.
there is an emerging body of work that is going to incontrovertably prove the IQ. and the difference is that unlike blacks, conservatives self-select. there are both gene expression and meme expression.
one can be born with conservative tendancies, and not express them, but blacks can’t change their racial affiliation.
Religion can be changed, religiosity not so much. Conservatives are 99% christian.
mclaren
@Betsy:
The guy who helped kick-start WW II by agreeing to levy viciously unsustainable reparations payments against Germany shouldn’t be a list of 25 worst Americans?
The guy who helped Hitler rise to power by drafting a declaration that required Germany to sign a statement that it was solely responsible for WW I and then forced the Germans to sign that declaration by maintaining a food blockade that starved hundreds of thousands of German women and children to death for 6 months after the end of WW I, he shouldn’t be on that list?
The sociopath who rammed through some of the worst civil-rights-violating laws in American history, including the Sedition Act of 1918, a law stating that any American who spoke out against WW I could be sentenced to prison and stripped of citizenship…he shouldn’t be on the list of 25 worst Americans?
Woodrow Wilson, who chortled with glee when Eugene Debs was convicted and sentenced to prison for 10 years and stripped of his U.S. citizenship for speaking out against American participation in WW I, this asshole shouldn’t be on the list?
Woodrow Wilson should be at the head of the list, buckaroo.
Wanna know why America is in Iraq today?
Because asshole Woodrow Wilson helped draw the boundaries for the phony made-up country “Iraq” in 1919 in order to grab a bunch of oil, that’s why.
@Dave Weeden:
History lesson: the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter first. Abraham Lincoln did not start the civil war. Southern states started the civil war by seceding and then attacking Union fortifications.
Protip: when people start bombarding U.S. army forts with artillery, this is known as “starting a war.” Giving speeches is not “starting a war.” Getting elected president is not “starting a war.” Assembling an army (the Army of Northern Virginia) to invade Washington D.C. is what starts a war.
You may want to read a history book sometime, Dave, and learn something.
For my part, I’m fascinated in peoples’ short memories. Look at all the people who should be on that list and aren’t: Sacco and Vanzetti, Klaus Fuchs, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Roy Cohn — a homosexual who persecuted gays, a Jew who was a vicious anti-Semite; the Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler, Lars Ulrich, Jack Valenti, Jesse Helms, Senator Bilbo, George Wallace, the assassin of Martin Luther King (Arthur Bremer), the asshole who murdered John Lennon (Mark David Chapman), the corporate criminals who polluted Love Canal, the head of Standard OIl John D. Rockefeller who ordered the murder of hundreds of independent oil wildcatters during the Oklahoma oil wars in the 1870s by hired company killers, Andrew Carnegie who ordered the murder of striking Pullman workers, the Ford executives who let the Pinto continue to be manufactred with a defective gas tank and thus burned to death hundreds of families in rear-end collisions, the head of the Pinkerton Detective Agency who eagerly sent Pinkerton agents down to West Virginia to murder striking coal miners in the Coal Wars in the 1920s, Attorney General Palmer who raided and convicted on trumped-up charges thousands of innocent American citizens in the Red Scare of the 1920s; the Ford company goons who beat union organizer Walter Reuther with axe handles in the 1937 strike at the River Rouge Plant; J. Edgar Hoover, who collected dirt of senators and congressmen and blackmailed them for their sexual pecadillos while he crossed-dressed and had gay sex with his aide Clyde Tolson; the National Guard troops who shot down unarmed students at Kent State like dogs, Ronald Reagan who urged them to do it 4 months earlier by proclaiming in a speech about Viet Nam war protestors “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with — no more appeasement!” The owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory; the sociopathic supreme court justices who handed down the lethally self-destructive Dred Scott decision and paved the way for 300,000 Americans to kill each other in the civil war; General Curtis LeMay, who ordered countless WW II napalm bombing raids on Japanese cities each of which burned in some cases 150,000 men and women and children alive in cities with no war production; Lt. William Calley; Henry Kissinger, Neshoba County sheriff Lawrence Rainey and his deputy Cecil Price who murdered 3 civil rights voting drive workers in 1963, the man who murdered Medger Evers in his own driveway and then got off on trial for more than 30 years, Byron De la Beckwith…none of these people deserved to be on the list of 25 worst Americans?
What the hell…?
RSA
This is a weird equivalence. It suggests that if you ranked the Presidents by what they were able to accomplish, the ones at the bottom would be the worst. For me, the idea of “Worst Americans” gets at things people actually did, rather than things they didn’t do.
mclaren
@matoko_chan:
Because IQ is junk pseudoscience.
Every effort to correlate Spearman’s g with intellectual attainments has failed. Louis Terman, the mastermind behind the effort to test for an quantify Spearman’s g, assembled a group of kids he thought would attain great things based on their high IQ scores — they were known as Terman’s Termites.
From that group 3 kids were cut because their IQ scores just weren’t high enough: Richard Feynman and Luis Alvarez and William Shockley.
All three went on to win Nobel prizes.
IQ is garbage. It’s pure pseudoscience, like the Meyer-Briggs personality tests or kirilian auras.
matoko_chan
@mclaren: this attempt has not failed.
tell it to the neuroscience and the fMRI imaging, bio-luddite.
anectdotal data is not proof of anything, retard.
Statistics 101
matoko_chan
anecdotal data is not evidence.
it is what conservitards use to support global warming denialism, for example.
it is not warmer where they are locally therefore global warming cannot exist.
Chris Dowd
Jimmy Carter as the “worst President ever” among reich wingers has always perplexed me a bit. I mean what horrible big government initiative did he enact that so upsets conservatives to this day that he is listed as the “worst President ever” among them repeatedly?
After thinking about this for a minute it hit me.
Carter is the only Post WWII President to ever make substantial real cuts in military spending (at least during his first two budgets).
It really is that simple. A good proportion of reich wingers are Fed Gov teet suckers of the military or military contractor variety and they have NEVER forgiven Carter for their TWO lean years.
That is the real reason they “hate” Carter- because he took some sugar out of the mouths of MIC parasites who pretend to be “small government conservatives”.
It really is that simple and that self serving. Oh- they will say that it is his reaction to Iran and the hostage thing and all that- but nope- don’t be fooled. They “hate” Carter for shortening their MIC gravy train. Pure and simple.
sloan
@mclaren: “the Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler, Lars Ulrich”
Is there another Lars Ulrich I don’t know about? The only one I’m aware of is this guy. You’re not Sean “Napster” Fanning, are you? Or Jason Newsted or Dave Mustaine? Because that I could understand.
Michael Finn
Ha, I called them out on their Pro-Simpson bias…
Snarky McSnarksnark
@matoko_chan:
Please just stop posting about this. It’s stupid.
mclaren
@matoko_chan:
IQ is garbage pseudoscience and a vast mountain of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles prove it.
Spearman’s g is supposed fixed and unalterable, yet the Flynn Effect shows that IQ scores constantly rise over time.
“IQ on the rise: the Flynn Effect in rural Keynan children,” Tamara C. Daley, Shannon E. Whaley, Marian D. Sigman, Michael P. Espinosa and Charlotte Neumann, Psychological Science, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2003, pp. 215 ff.
“All Brains Are the Same Color,” Richard Nisbett, New York Times, 9 December 2007.
See “Ethnic Social Milieu and Black Children’s Intelligence Test Achievement,” Moore, Elsie G., Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 56, No. 1, 1987.
For a general debunking of claims about the alleged measurement invariance of so-called “intelligence tests,” see:
“Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect,” Jelte M. Wichertsa, Conor V. Dolana, David J. Hessena, Paul Oostervelda, G. Caroline M. van Baalb, Dorret I. Boomsmab and Mark M. Spanc, Intelligence, Volume 32, Issue 5, September-October 2004, Pages 509-537.
From the abstract:
IQ turns out to be junk pseudoscience because most of the Flynn Effect comes not from the math or language segments of the tests, but from the subtests involving similarities. But these similarities are largely determined by acculturation, not innate intelligence.
“None of the Above: What I.Q. doesn’t tell us about race,” Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, 17 December 2007.
Let’s summarize:
[1] I.Q. scores of new immigrants fall far below the I.Q. scores of people born in America but within several generations rise to the median;
[2] I.Q. scores of black children in black families are as far below the median for whites as were the I.Q. scores of immigrants from Southern Italy in the 1930s — however, when black children get adopted by white parents, their I.Q. scores magically rise 13 points.
[3] Spearman’s g is supposed to measure an invariant innate biological quantity, but instead it varies wildly over time and depending on the geographic location of the people tested, and the geographic origin of the people testing them.
“None of the above: what I.Q. doesn’t tell us about race,” Malcolm Gladwell, 2007, op. cit.
You’re an ignorant crank, matoko_chan. Provide 3 (three) peer-reviewed scientific journal articles directly refuting each of the above citations, or stand revealed as a crackpot spewing ignorant lies.
matoko_chan
@mclaren: you are quite mad, bio-luddite. i was talking about memetic selfselection and game theoretic rubberbanding in conservative affiliation.
not race.
conservatism is selection for stupid.
it is not genetic, it is memetic.
matoko_chan
@Snarky McSnarksnark: its not stupid.
conservatives are stupid.
and i guess balloon-juicers are bioluddites.
and stupid.
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
@matoko_chan:
No offense, but you really need some new material.
Snarky McSnarksnark
@matoko_chan:
The topic is stupid, and serves no useful purpose.
You are an interesting character: I have occasionally read a comment of yours, and found that it provided a nugget of insight that I hadn’t seen elsewhere.
But more commonly (and by that I mean, like, 98% of the time) you are just an obsessive, monomaniacal creep: the internet equivalent of a stalker, posting 10, 20, 30 times in the same thread to push some notion of yours that has captured you. It’s genuinely spooky, and this IQ notion of yours is a really un-useful and destructive line of “inquiry.”
arguingwithsignposts
@DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective:
this is her schtick. she’s memetically selected that way!
matoko_chan
@Snarky McSnarksnark et all: its science.
it doesn’t matter if you “like” it or not, and it explains pretty accurately what is happening in in the evolution of the american political landscape.
don’t like what im saying?
refute it or don’t read it.
im sick of being scolded by stupid old people mired in the past.
in general, people cannot refute meh, because they are bio-luddites and the only reason they are protesting is that the biological basis of behavior is offensive to their magical thinking and noble egalitarian fee fees.
matoko_chan
you guys sound like Peggy “just keep on walking” Noonan.
Snarky McSnarksnark
@matoko_chan:
Let me put it even more bluntly: you are mentally ill, and your behavior is obsessive and sick.
You’ve put forth your thesis literally hundreds of times, on a dozen or more blogs, and have found no takers. So you pester, and bicker, and harangue, and troll.
You are clearly an intelligent person, but you are equally clearly emotionally stunted and obsessive.
Please see a therapist.
LanceThruster
Enough already with the digs at Carter (those doing the digging).
Len Hart (of Existential Cowboy blog fame) makes a case for Reagan being the worst ever – http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2010/08/worst-ever-president.html
and Carter has fairly good economic numbers to boot. It’s just that goppers will spread their toxic memes and have them accepted by the clinically dense as fact.
see: http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/2010/03/why-gop-policies-are-cruel-fraud.html