• jaschen@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    I mean, outside of Nixon, who else had a major scandal?

    • Alto@kbin.social
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      9 months ago

      Andrew Jackson committed a genocide

      If you squint hard enough and hate him enough, you could argue Wilson as well (not the genocide part, but that depends on how much you think an earlier American entrance into WW1 would change things.

      Edit: I should add that Wilson is basically single handedly responsible for the rebirth of the KKK

      • Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Not coincidentally, Andrew Jackson is one of Trump’s favorite presidents. He once displayed a portrait of Jackson in a room he was meeting with Native American leaders in.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I’ll ignore what could have happened with Teddy at the wheel entering the war as quickly as he could.

        Wilson wrote Southern Revisionism, as you said refounded the KKK, segregated The Federal Government, expanded the presidential powers to tyrannical proportions with the sedition and insurrection act, erected a bunch of statues that we are finally tearing down, of people that said they never wanted statues because they were traitors, started and expanded wars in South and Central America to create banana republics, and fostered endless US wars with Wilsonian Doctrine.

        Just what he did doesn’t require squinting at all.

      • Alto@kbin.social
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        9 months ago

        Which is conveniently very rarely talked about in history classes.

        • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          I did a report on that in middle school. Pretty much because I thought it was interesting and wasn’t talked about in class.

      • Pohl@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Let’s go ahead and reserve the word concentration camp for the industrialized murder factories hitler built in Europe. The Japanese internment was a horrible policy and it shows a real paucity of humanity. We are right to condemn our grandparents who perpetrated and supported the policy.

        But,

        It was NOTHING like the final solution.

        • Maalus@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Emmmm no. Let’s not do that, because that’s not what a concentration camp is. What you are thinking of is “death camp” or “extermination camp”.

        • egonallanon@lemm.ee
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          9 months ago

          Concentration camps were used by both the spanish in the 1896 Cuban rebellion and the British in the 2nd boer war. They are not a uniquely nazi thing.

        • thecrotch@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          Concentration camps are, by definition, places where lots of people are crammed (concentrated). These were absolutely concentration camps. Hitler had death camps. They are not the same thing.

          It was NOTHING like the final solution.

          You’re right. It was more like the years leading up to the final solution, when people were shoved into ghettos or camps because of their race and the perceived threat of being that race

        • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Why don’t you ask George Takei what he calls them? He was in one, though he’s far more forgiving about the experience than I suspect many of us, including myself, would be.

    • ramenshaman@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Bill Clinton, I guess. By Trump’s standards what Clinton did is a walk in the park tho.

      • niktemadur@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        What still gets to me is Gingrich leading with the goddamned trumpet against this… unconscionable marital betrayer from the Democratic Party… then gets his multiple affairs and betrayals exposed. So he quits. The trumpet is proudly picked up by Livingstone… who promptly gets his Washington extramarital affair exposed.

        It’s incredible how republicans turned all of our politics into a toilet, arrogantly huffing and puffing as some sort of self-appointed moral and christian “keepers of the flame”, and they cannot handle a lesson as simple and crucial as that story in the Gospels - “He who is without sin, cast the first stone”.

        And look at them now. Today republicans are worse in every respect, including mental/emotional health or balance, by an order of magnitude. They don’t care about optics anymore, have gone up their own assholes several times over, like some sort of fleshy klein bottle.

        republicans are warped beyond reality and decency, by a hypocrisy from a self-imposed ignorance, that is as corrosive as greed.

        EDIT: it was during a late-90s afternoon, driving on the highway from Bakersfield to Los Angeles while listening to the Clinton impeachment charade live on NPR Radio, that something clicked inside my head and I clearly realized that republicans are an enemy of the true common good. That’s when I started hating that group of political cancer cells on society. Then we got cheney and baby bush.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Wilson, Jackson, Polk, Reagan. If you really want scandalous Jackson is easily the most scandalous President in history. The country was shocked when he got in, and he went on to cause the Trail of Tears, and the deepest (by percentage, not actual dollar value) and longest depression in US history, by paying off all the national debt, and rendering the country unable to trade with other countries for a few years.

      Wilson wrote Southern Revisionism, refounded the KKK, erected a bunch of statues that we are finally tearing down, segregated The Federal Government, and may have caused WW2, and definitely set the stage for endless wars with Wilsonian Doctrine. He also caused and expanded several conflicts in South and Central America creating banana republics. Oh yeah, he expanded the presidential powers to tyrannical proportions with the sedition and insurrection act.

      Polk did Manifest Destiny, and was generally an asshole to the natives, and Monroe created The Monroe Doctrine, continuing the general assholery towards the natives, though those two probably weren’t considered scandalous in their day.

      Reagan had Iran Contra. That did give us some fun video games though.

    • /home/pineapplelover@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      Us history: the list is too long

      Lots of presidents have done bad things even Obama with his invasion of privacy cyber monitoring to “keep us safe”