Greatest ex-president ever.
Thomas Jefferson was before my time but was supposed to also be pretty good.
Plantation/Slaveowner and sorta rapist that paved the path for manifest destiny and westward expansion of the US
pretty good
Pick one
Also said that he was against slavery but didn’t free his slaves even though he could have done legally in his state.
Nah.
Lincoln
Honorable mentions:
FDR (that is, if you weren’t ethnically Japanese)
George Washington (that is, if you weren’t black, he’d been a great president)
Yea I feel like every “Great” leader has a dark shadow. There are no saints in leadership, especially not a leader of a large country.
Of the names you listed, only Washington was ever an ex-president. Lincoln and FDR died in office.
Ex-President
Dead is technically an ex-president. They are no longer a president. Former, now dead, president.
Washington was a pretty bad president if you were Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Iroquois).
FDR left a legacy of betraying allies in the post WW2 world. Fuck him.
FDR died before the end of WW2? How would any betrayal of the US allies post WW2 be on him?
Yeah that’s why I used the word “legacy”. He took part in the Yalta conference and along with Churchil they basically gave away Polish sovereignity to fucking Stalin. They also gave away Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Chechoslovakia, Romania and East Germany. He literally trusted one of the original invaders in 39’. He is the main reason the cold war even happened.
Oh. The Yalta Myth, I should’ve guessed. A contender for the founding enemy within type myth for the modern American far right.
What do you think they should have done instead? Immediately gone to war with the Soviets? Congrats! WW3 is much worse than the cold war.
The Soviets already held nearly the entirety of Poland by the time of the Yalta conference. The rest of the allies probably couldn’t have done anything to prevent that level of Soviet imperialism, even militarily. See: operation unthinkable, the korean war, the chinese civil war
A decent essay with citations, even if it is from a firmly neoconservative source. https://nationalinterest.org/article/the-yalta-myth-1052
An article from an american liberal source, responding to the same W. Bush Speech as the previous essay, and whose talking points you echo. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2005/05/what-really-happened-at-yalta.html
Finally, to round it out; a pair of articles by Alger Hiss, who attended the Yalta conference, and who was later investigated by McCarthy’s House Unamerican Activities Committee, specifically by then rising star Richard Nixon. One from the 50s: https://algerhiss.com/alger-hiss/in-his-own-words/yalta-modern-american-myth/ Another from the 80s: https://algerhiss.com/alger-hiss/in-his-own-words/two-yalta-myths/
What should he have done? Maybe not sell out their allies to an invader. Calling it “a myth” is such a fucking evil take it’s not even funny.
That’s not an answer. What should he have done? How do you prevent the cold war in February of 1945?
The man did more after his presidency to help people than many do their entire lives. One can agree or disagree on his policies as a president, but he kept working with his own two hands to help people almost all the way to the very end. It says a lot that I recognize that about him far more than his legacy as President.
Of a broken heart no doubt.
RIP, my friend. I’m sorry we couldn’t pull it off in the end. Hopefully things won’t turn out as bad as we fear. It’s a small chance, though we may even exit this time of turmoil better than we were.
What a legend. If only more presidents would aspire to be like him.
That would be awesome. I’d also settle for non convicted criminals that aren’t mentally retarded pathologic liers though.
So excited Suharto gets to meet back up with his old buddy so they can kill a bunch more innocent people together like they used to in the good old days,
