axeil posted:

Excellent work, added both to the OP

Alter Ego posted:

Don't forget Part 6 of my Johnson effortpost

axeil posted:

Thanks I missed it!

Are you going to cover the 2000 Florida recount in your next post? Because that was an utter shitshow and if you don't cover it I might myself, except I'm super busy this week so I might not get around to posting about it until Sunday.

Alter Ego posted:

I sure am! And after that, I'm going to go drink myself into a stupor for forcing myself to remember it!

Ofaloaf posted:

Didn't Chester Arthur run through the old political machine but then end up being an ardent reformer in his single term as President? Aside from his 'chops, he's often ignored.

Alter Ego posted:

There have been a lot of shitheads in the office, but there have been a lot of good men, and even a few great men.

R. Guyovich posted:

R. Guyovich posted:

axeil posted:

Jimmy Carter

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

Didn't Jimmy Carter agree to send arms to Afghanistan for basically the sole purpose of bleeding out the Soviets?

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

Didn't Jimmy Carter agree to send arms to Afghanistan for basically the sole purpose of bleeding out the Soviets?

HootTheOwl posted:

I thought this was Reagan.

Ytlaya posted:

Better be careful or people will start accusing you of thinking "nothing matters" for committing the grave sin of acknowledging the reality of American history.

Alter Ego posted:

I'm taking requests for the next guy. Maybe I'll do Carter after Bush. I'd like to write about someone cool and good instead of someone who's bad and sucked.

Seriously, I felt my blood pressure rising while writing that one on Dubya.

VikingofRock posted:

I'd love to read an effortpost about Carter. Bush I and Clinton would be interesting, too.

Azhais posted:

And a minute by minute recount of Garfield's presidency

Azhais posted:

And a minute by minute recount of Garfield's presidency

Alter Ego posted:

William Henry Harrison's would be easier

joepinetree posted:

Carter also made human rights a much bigger part of American foreign policy, to the point where the thawing in the Brazilian dictatorship (which was put in place with the help of LBJ) can be directly traced to that. And this was well known at the time, to the point where Kissinger encouraged the Argentine dictatorship to speed up their brutal torture and assassination program so that the worst was already done by the time Carter took over. Carter wasn't great in terms of domestic policy, but in terms of foreign policy he was probably the best by a wide margin since FDR.

axeil posted:

It was both although Reagan was far more involved. Like JFK vs LBJ on Vietnam. But the Soviets were/are inhuman imperialist monsters so it's all good by me.

Ytlaya posted:

Certainly not any more than America, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.

edit: I mean, I agree that Carter comes out much better than most, if not all, presidents, but this is a kinda dumb reason that doesn't make any sense from an American perspective.

Horseshoe theory posted:

Friendly reminder that Jimmy Carter held 'American Fighting Man's Day' in support of notable war criminal William Calley - he's a skeezy piece of poo poo like virtually all Presidents that came before and after him. And don't point to Habitat for Humanity or his other post-Presidency work, because if you absolve his shittiness because of that, you have to absolve Hoover by the same 'logic'.

quote:

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK

DATE: MAY 1, 1994
FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."
---Revelation 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers -- but they knew there was nothing they could do about it -- not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise -- a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director -- who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says -- and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

poo poo. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man making GBS threads in his own nest. But he also poo poo in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

joepinetree posted:

He's obviously far from perfect. But he is the only president in at least the last half century who actually did something for human rights in places like Latin America. That alone makes him far better than all the presidents that followed him on foreign policy.

quote:

After the grueling 36-day Florida recount battle, Al Gore finally conceded the presidency to George W. Bush on December 13, 2000.
But the controversy surrounding this unprecedented election and its aftermath did not end there.

Months after the United States Supreme Court delivered its ruling to stop the statewide hand recount in the Sunshine State, media and academic organizations conducted their own studies of the disputed ballots in Florida.

Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race...The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all. However, his legal team never pursued this action.

The studies also support the belief that more voters went to the polls in Florida on Election Day intending to vote for Gore than for Bush.

The first major review

The players: A group of newspapers including the USA Today, Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder newspapers conducted the first major review of the Florida ballots.

How it worked: The group hired the accounting firm BDO Seidman to examine more than 60,000 "undervotes" -- ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race -- from all 67 Florida counties. These were ballots the Florida Supreme Court ordered to be hand counted with its December 8, 2000, decision. The newspapers applied BDO Seidman's findings to four vote-counting standards. This was published in April 2001.

The results: The study shows that Bush likely would have won the statewide recount of undervotes even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened to stop the counting. It also reveals that, ironically, the most lenient standard of vote counting —advocated by Gore — gives Bush his biggest lead. However, USA Today cautioned that, "The study has limitations. There is variability in what different observers see on ballots. Election officials, who sorted the undervotes for examination and then handled them for the accountants' inspection, often did not provide exactly the same number of undervotes recorded on election night."

The details, with USA Today's original explanations of the different standards in parentheses:

-Lenient Standard: Bush +1,665 ("This standard, which was advocated by Gore, would count any alteration in a chad -- the small perforated box that is punched to cast a vote -- as evidence of a voter's intent. The alteration can range from a mere dimple, or indentation, in a chad to its removal. Contrary to Gore's hopes, the USA TODAY study reveals that this standard favors Bush and gives the Republican his biggest margin: 1,665 votes.")

-Palm Beach Standard: Bush +884 ("Palm Beach County election officials considered dimples as votes only if dimples were found in other races on the same ballot. They reasoned that a voter would demonstrate similar voting patterns on the ballot. This standard -- attacked by Republicans as arbitrary -- also gives Bush a win, by 884 votes, according to the USA TODAY review.")

-Two corner standard: Bush +363 ("Most states with well-defined rules say that a chad with two or more corners removed is a legal vote. Under this standard, Bush wins by 363.")

-Strict standard: Gore +3 ("This "clean punch" standard would only count fully removed chads as legal votes. The USA TODAY study shows that Gore would have won Florida by 3 votes if this standard were applied to undervotes.")

A larger review gives mixed results

The players: Roughly a month later, a larger consortium that included the above outlets plus a group of five Florida newspapers released its review of more than 171,000 disputed ballots. In addition to the undervotes, this study reviewed more than 111,000 overvotes -- ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted.

This study showed that Democratic voters were far more likely to make the mistake of casting an overvote than Republican voters. Gore was marked on 84,197 of the overvote ballots, compared to 37,731 for Bush. USA Today's headline at the time read, "Florida voter errors cost Gore the election."

How it worked: The newspapers tallied up the overvotes, and then used BDO Seidman's undervote counting to test similar scenarios.

The results: This study shows a less decisive result than the count of only undervotes. However, there was no way to correct the overvote mistakes once they were cast, and Gore's team never asked for a hand recount of overvotes during the contentious recount battle in Florida.

Nevertheless, the study does support the theory -- expressed to CNN by both Gore's Florida senior adviser Nick Baldick, and the Republican senior adviser to Katherine Harris, John "Mac" Stipanovich -- that more voters went to the polls in Florida intending to vote for Al Gore than for George Bush.

Above all, USA Today highlighted that its review revealed, "The American system of elections routinely fails to count hundreds of thousands of ballots because of errors by voters, confusing ballot instructions, poorly designed ballots, flawed voting and counting machines and the failure of election workers to adequately help voters."

The details, again with USA Today's explanations cited in parentheses:

-Lenient standard: Gore +332 ("One uses the most permissive definition of a vote. It counts chads that are merely dimpled or bear slight impressions. Under the "dimple standard," Gore would have won by 332 votes.")

-Palm Beach standard: Gore +242 ("The other standard counts dimples as votes only if dimples are found in other races on the same ballot. This is known as the "Palm Beach Standard" because that is the rule that county's elections board adopted to determine voter intent in the early hand recounts of the Florida vote. The board's theory was that if dimples appeared in other races, that most likely meant that the voter just didn't press hard enough. Under this standard Gore would have won by 242 votes.")

-Two corner standard: Bush +407 ("The most widely used rule — that at least two corners of a chad must be detached to count as votes — is used in many states, including California, Oregon, Washington and Michigan. Recounting by that standard, Bush would have won by 407 votes, narrower than his 537-vote official margin.")

-Strict standard: Bush +152 ("By the strictest standard — one that requires a completely clean punch for the vote to count — Bush would have won by 152 votes. Some cleanly punched ballots were disqualified by counting-machines because of glitches, such as two ballots sticking together.")

The Florida Ballots Project

The players: A national media consortium -- composed of CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Palm Beach Post -- paid for the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, at the University of Chicago to review 175,010 disputed Florida ballots -- 61,190 undervotes and 113,820 overvotes.

How it worked: NORC, a highly respected data and research organization, conducted the counting of ballots. Their goal was not to determine a winner, but to "examine the ballots to assess the relative reliability of the three major types of ballot systems used in Florida." Carefully vetted coders reviewed the ballots, and NORC's raw data is still available to the public online.

The study, released in November 2001, took place over 10 months and cost nearly $1 million. The Washington Post explained, "153 field workers spent 6,500 hours describing every dimple, chad, erasure and relevant marking. Typists entered 17.5 million pieces of information into Chicago computers."

The different media organizations applied NORC's raw data to several distinct recount scenarios.

The results: The two major conclusions here are that Gore likely would have won a hand recount of the statewide overvotes and undervotes -- which he never requested -- while Bush likely would have won the hand recount of undervotes ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, although by a smaller margin than the certified 537 vote difference.

A sampling of headlines from the time include "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush, But Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally of all Uncounted Ballots," from The Washington Post, and "Study of Disputed Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote," from The New York Times.

However, as the Post concluded, "While these are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation. There was no set of circumstances in the fevered days after the election that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and undervotes."

The study was also released two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when the nation's focus moved away from the controversial 2000 election to the more pressing War on Terror.

The details:

Full statewide review

-Standard for acceptable marks set by each county in their recount: Gore wins by 171
-Fully punched chads and limited marks on optical scan ballots: Gore wins by 115
-Any dimple or optical mark: Gore wins by 107
-One corner of chad detached or any optical mark: Gore wins by 60

Review of limited sets of ballots

-Requests for recounts in Volusia, Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade: Bush wins by 225
-Florida Supreme Court order for all undervotes statewide: Bush wins by 430
-Florida Supreme Court order, as being implemented by counties, some of whom refused and some counted overvotes and undervotes: Bush wins by 493

Alter Ego posted:

Thanks, axeil. Compared to this, 1824 and 1876 seem like East Hampton clambakes.

gently caress Katherine Harris, gently caress the Brooks Brothers rioters, and most of all gently caress the Felonious Five for stealing a Presidential election.

axeil posted:

Thanks to you as well! Your effort posts have been a real joy to read.

Alter Ego posted:

For all you younger viewers, this is why some of us older folks want Florida to sink into the ocean.

axeil posted:

And also why everyone in their 30s and over were begging students/20somethings not to vote for Jill Stein in 2016. We had all seen this play out already in 2000 and once again, if you add the Dem+Green votes in PA, WI and MI the Dems would've won just like in 2000 in Florida.

Don't vote 3rd party, it really is a vote for whoever you hate the most.