Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Townhall Poll Is Blatantly Skewed

Well, nobody expects a really scientific result from a poll that asks one question with two options for answers: "Is Obama the best President ever, or the worst President ever?"

He's certainly not the best, but...has everyone out there read some sort of history or group-biography of his competition for the title of "worst"? LBJ got us into Vietnam. Nixon got caught cheating at the political game. Clinton got caught cheating in just about every other way, but blamed most of the bad things on people who worked for him, including his wife, and if we didn't have term limits for Presidents I'm sure he would have found ways to blame Socks and Chelsea. A few older people can still remember excellent reasons to hate the Roosevelt (FDR) administrations too.

Then there are the bad Presidents whom nobody actually remembers any more. You have to read history books to feel contempt for them. I can sort of sympathize with Theodore Roosevelt wanting himself and everything else to be "bully," because he was compensating for a sickly, nerdly youth, but...how many of youall have read about his Bull Moose Party? Warren Harding (an ex-Adventist who bequeathed a building and lots of money to the Adventist college I attended, but...) was sort of like Nixon, only, so far as I can tell from what I've read, more so. James Buchanan is generally credited with setting us up for the Civil War but what historians really buzz about, when they consider him, is whether he was sleeping with his Vice-President or his niece.

Then there was that lousy little creep, Martin Van Buren, whose attitude toward the Cherokee Nation really did inspire Adolf Hitler to construct his policy toward German Jews. (That's not an example of hysterically calling people Nazis; Hitler admitted it.) Van Buren was the one President of the United States who deserved to have been assassinated, but unfortunately he wasn't.

Maybe I'm biased, but I think Van Buren was the worst President ever. LBJ's not even a close second, and Obama...may or may not succeed in doing us more financial harm than any other President, but I doubt he'll ever touch Clinton's record on tackiness, Nixon's on off-puttingness, or Harding's on corruption.

(By the way, I notice interest in the "Left-Handed Presidents" quiz is still running high, but so far nobody's claimed the prize. Hint: Cormac O'Brien's book, Secret Lives of the U.S. Presidents, identifies the first one for you.)

Anyway, if you get this poll in the e-mail, Gentle Readers, you don't need to bother with the results. It's been sent to a select group of people who are likely to say that, of the two, he's closer to being the worst, and taking the poll turns out to be a way to get onto the mailing list of a spin-off 'zine called WallStreetDaily.

Which may well be an excellent 'zine for those of you who have a lot of money, but until a lot more of you start using some of your money to support this web site, all I can do with e-mails about protecting investments, choosing investments, buying precious metals, etc., is feel morose as I delete them.

No link here. This post is a warning. And if Blogspot offered the little emotional "faces" that LiveJournal encourages bloggers to embed in every post, this post would end with the "Mr. Yuk" face.

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