If we look at the big wars, WWII, WWI, Civil War, I believe you are right, though neither Lincoln nor Roosevelt survived the wars they were supervising at the time.
However, does that hold for our lesser wars?
Korean War--Lots of presidents have changed hands since this began, and with no peace treaty ever signed, its still going on.
There was an armistice signed in 1953, and that was the year Truman and the Democrats lost to Eisenhower and the Republicans. Hence they lost before the war was concluded.
Vietnam War--Started in 1964, under the Democrats of Johnson. Ended in 1973, under the Republicans of Nixon.
Is our war on terror, or our invasion of Iraq more like WWII or these lesser wars?
Does the fact that the US has been directly attacked make it WWIIish?
Does the fact that no formal declaration of war has been enacted make it more like the Korean Conflict?
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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quote:but the fact is that a war time United States President has never lost
But does it count if you started the war...perhaps just so you could be a wartime president, and therefore win the subsequent election?
quote:Democrats want high taxes and big social programs to transfer wealth to the poor
As opposed to Republicans who 1) lower taxes, and 2) cut social programs, in order to 3) transfer money to the wealthy. (And, by the way, they leave huge deficits, too. Clinton left office with a Federal budget SURPLUS, and he got a little extra nookie on the side).
Maybe you'll find this in the the Republicans' political platform, but you'll surely find it if you examine how they enact legislation.
quote:But does it count if you started the war...perhaps just so you could be a wartime president, and therefore win the subsequent election?
Hold on. You can claim he mishandled or misdirected the war. He didn't make it up out of whole cloth just to boost his presidency. We were freaking attacked on our own freaking soil.
Posts: 1539 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
My thoughts exactly. There's still a significant portion of the country, I think, that believes that this war was started by the WTC pilots.
Posts: 270 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Is our war on terror, or our invasion of Iraq more like WWII or these lesser wars?
Does the fact that the US has been directly attacked make it WWIIish?
I would say that this war isn't even like Vietnam yet, since there is no draft.
In order to become like WWII, I'd say that it would have to get to the point where the war impacts the everyday lives of Americans. Right now, if you wanted to ignore the war on terror, you could.
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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But wars are defined as military conflicts between two nations, ideologies, or groups. Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy.
Perhaps then what we mean by "war on terrorism" is war against the terrorists who attacked us.
War on AlQueda and their supporters (ie Taliban).
That explains our invasion of Afghanistan, but it does not explain our invasion of Iraq.
Is Iraq a separate war from the war on Terrorism? Iraq did very little to support terror. He paid off a few families of Hamas suicide bombers, and one Al-Queda person may or may not have been in his country. Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia have done far more to back and support Al Queda.
The current reason we toppled Hussein, according to the President of the US, is because he was an evil dangerous man.
Fine. Good job.
However, that does not make him a terrorist ally.
So perhaps we are fighting two wars, one on Al-Queda and one on Iraq.
Wait, we won the one in Iraq. The evil man is out of power. The evil army is scattered. Now Iraq is full of Terrorists, so maybe we are fighting just the war on terror.
But congress never declared a war so officially we are not at war.
Then again, congress never declared war on Korea or Vietnam either.
I'm not sure we ever had a clearly defined set of objectives in Iraq or Afghanistan.
And declaring a "war on terror" is like declaring a "war on drugs" - not intended in the literal or legal sense, but as a PR campagin. Some sort of overwhelming effort designed to beat the problem into submission.
quote:Hold on. You can claim he mishandled or misdirected the war. He didn't make it up out of whole cloth just to boost his presidency. We were freaking attacked on our own freaking soil.
I never thought I'd use this smiley:
Refresh my memory: which of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqi again? I forgot which ones they were...
Posts: 1170 | Registered: Jan 2003
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So, when I was in High School--the summer between Junior and Senior year, this kid snuck up behind me and whacked me on the head with a large stick.
I went looking for him for months, but he must have gone off on vacation or something, because I could never find him.
But there was this other kid, who I never really liked, who was always picking on the other kids in his class (none of my friends, though), and who flipped me the bird every once in a while.
So I told everyone that he had hit me with a large stick, and I pounded the living crap out of him.
Wanna be my friend? Wanna help me hold this kid down so we can all beat on him some more?
Posts: 1862 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Johnson would have lost, had he run for reelection. Instead, his party did.
According to Bush, our mission in Iraq was accomplished. So we are not physically at way at this moment, neh? Theoretically, the War on Terror goes on, but on what front are we currently fighting it? I would say that Bush junior qualifies as a wartime president no more than Bush senior did, and he will go down in pretty much exactly the same flames.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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And Mabus, I seem to recall having read that wealthy Americans became wealthier during the Clinton administration, not poorer.
I don't believe that the policies of the Bush administration have led to opportunities for people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, as you seem to think republican policies do. Lessee . . . jobs are outsourcing overseas, and I heard today on the radio news that the IRS reported that wages decreased for the second straight year last year, for the first time in the last fifty years.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
Icarus, I believe I said that that was a theoretical Republican ideal--not something that necessarily gets translated into practice.
Posts: 1114 | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote: Look at it this way--the Republicans at least theoretically will allow a person to get rich, even if in practice wealth tends to get confined to those who are already rich. The Democrats want to take all our money so that everyone is poor, then dole it back to us in the form of social programs controlled by the government
The implication is that democratic policies are less likely to allow a person to get rich than republican ones. And all I'm saying is that during the last sixteen years, the presidency under which most people prospered most was a democratic one.
I'm not trying to read anything into your statement that you didn't say, just pointing out that it doesn't seem to describe recent history.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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The wealthy will almost always get wealthier.
But how about the poor? And the middle class?
How did they fare under Clinton, or other Democratic administrations?
GWB really opened up the flood-gates for the wealthy to get wealthier. To do so, he both put the country into a huge debt, and cut out many social programs for the poorer classes.
I went to Google the following phrase, to see who created it. The results page, however, is pretty telling in its own right:
See how people typically judge nations. Then consider what GWB has actually DONE (not what he says he will do--what he has actually DONE) based on the various criteria listed. The GWB way (and I would propose the "Republican" way) is diametrically opposed to treating is poor and downtrodden with anything remotely approaching compassion. Their actions almost uniformly tend to benefit the well-to-do, at the expense of the less-well-off.
If you're not already rich, you will not become rich under Republican rule. Or, at least, you will have a better chance under Democratic rule. I'll have to back that up, but it feels true, and makes sense based on what my wife and I have experienced (she used to be an attorney who represented this same lower-economic-class, and saw what Ronald Reagan's laws did to these people). But it's the type of statement that demands verification.
The Democrats are commonly called "Tax and Spend" by Republicans trying to shame them. However, the Republicans have shown themselves as "Borrow and Spend." But, for some reason, when Clinton did it (Tax & Spend), the nation as a whole prospered. With GWB doing it (Borrow & Spend), the nation as a whole is backsliding economically, and has a multi-hundred-TRILLION dollar defecit.
Posts: 1862 | Registered: Mar 2000
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I'm pretty sure the deficit is only 450 billion. But the national debt is a hair less 7 trillion dollars, and each one of these deficits adds to the debt.
The kicker is, we have to pay interest on this debt. And the interest payments account for the third largest expenditure in the nation, social security excluded.
There is the virtue of fiscal responsibility. The lower our debt is, the more money we are going to have in the long term, and the strong the integrity of the nation. Running at a deficit is like inheriting a property with a whole lot of bills attached to it. The best the country can do is chip away, every year, chip away, but people like credit cards.
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