Who was the better american president: Clinton or Bush?

[1337cshacker]

Originally Posted by Aeroflot

So us being retarded means that you can make a grammatical error and we won't be able to see that?

when there nothing else to make fun of, go for the typos. i wasnt born yesterday, nor is english my first language. (iv got t3h micr0 and as you notice i dont capaitolize, spell right, i have run on sentances, omfg english nazi shoot me.... ) oh ya, to stay on topic. because i KNOW how much stalker jsut freaking hates that...

bush was better. simply.

clinton had the chance to get osama, to get sudam, before 9/11. thanks to him... i think he should be in jail.

[Red Menace]

Meh, I vote Reagan.

[FF|JesusAmaro]

I guess The Current Bush.. its ok

[Mephistopheles]

Blood n Goods made a lot of good statements in this thread (sorry, I can't give you reputation again). Clinton was not an angel and Bush is not the Devil. Clinton also did some bad things. But he was just cleverer and masked them (besides the insignificant sexual affair).

On the other hand Clinton didn't alienate the rest of the world and isolated the USA as Bush junior did.
As a European, I suppose Clinton was at least better than the Bush family.

[Pethegreat]

Originally Posted by Ensign Riles

No one is perfect.

Well give me list of presidents who had affairs in office then used his power to try to cover it up. You personal life tells alot about how good a leader you are.

Originally Posted by Ensign Riles

So easy to say in hindsight. Every single president there has been could have done something that might have saved lives.

But this was after the first bombing on the trade center and the embacies in Africa, both were linked to Osama.

[JP(NL)]

Originally Posted by NiteStryker

Any way you want to put it, Clinton F'd up badly in the area of homeland security. He did very little to ever retaliate against the terrorists who attacked us when he had the chance. etc.

International relations by far outweigh homeland defense.

Having your allies and the world on your side will do so much more than a few thousand more troops or more military spending on shiny toys.

[Mast3rofPuppets]

Originally Posted by Pethegreat™

Well give me list of presidents who had affairs in office then used his power to try to cover it up. You personal life tells alot about how good a leader you are.

Sex and the White House

As Graham Hill reports, Bill Clinton is not alone among US presidents in having a wandering eye.
President Clinton may face calls for his resignation and even impeachment over his affair with Monica Lewinsky, but he is in fact carrying on a tradition that dates back to America's first president 200 years ago.
George Washington was linked to a woman named Mary Gibbons.
Another American hero, Thomas Jefferson, was widely believed to have had a long love affair with his black slave and to have had several children with her.

George Washington: original sinner
This century, Woodrow Wilson had a long relationship with Mary Hulbert Peck, who divorced her husband.
Warren Harding, president in the 1920's, was a compulsive adulterer. For 15 years he carried on an affair with the wife of a friend and then, when he took office, he began a relationship with Nan Britton, 30 years his junior.
He was reported to be in the habit of making love to her in a White House broom cupboard.
Franklin Roosevelt had affairs with his secretary, 'Missy' Le Hand and also with Crown Princess Marta of Norway, who lived at the White House during World War Two .
Dwight Eisenhower, president in the 1950s, had an illicit love affair with Kay Summersby, his driver during the war.
Kennedy's romps
However, all of their infidelities pale in comparison with those of John F Kennedy.

Marilyn Monroe: sang Happy Birthday to her presidential lover
His sex drive, which some have put down as a side-effect to treatment he was receiving for Addison's Disease, was seemingly awesome.
JFK's many conquests included the film stars Marilyn Monroe and Angie Dickinson, a stripper 'Blaze' Starr and Judith Exner Campbell, who was also the mistress of a Chicago mobster, Sam Giancana.
The Arthur of Washington's "Camelot" also cavorted with two of his secretaries in the White House pool.
Since then there have been strenuously-denied rumours about Richard Nixon and, more recently, George Bush, having affairs.
Is power an aphrodisiac?
So what is the relationship between sex and power? Carey Cooper, a professor of psychology at Manchester University, says they are two sides of the same coin.

John F Kennedy: serial adulterer
"I think there is a reciprocal relationship because what you have in terms of sex and power is that you have people - usually women - attracted to power in the first place.
"And you have powerful men who on a day-to-day basis are making important decisions who also start exercising the power in other areas of their lives - in sexual relationships.
"Politics attracts people with a high degree of energy who demonstrate this characteristic in a number of ways, including in the sexual arena. We see this historically in all sorts of societies."
Changing attitudes
However, in the past a president's peccadilloes usually remained secret - at least until his death. Unfortunately for Mr Clinton this is no longer the case.

Bill Clinton: no escaping scandal
Professor Cooper says society's attitudes to what leaders get up to in their spare time have also changed.
"The general view now, in contrast to the past, is that the private and public areas are not seen as separate - one is regarded as affecting the other.
"The credibility of a political leader can be affected if he is engaged in private behaviour which society now judges to be immoral or inappropriate."
September 9, 1998
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/events/cl...ure/167068.stm

[Pethegreat]

But did they use their power to cover it up? Also, when all of those happened there was not alot of media attention of the president's personal life aside from kennedy. He did a good job of covering it up, and the media, aside from tabloids would never put that in their newspapers in the 60's

[Tap112]

I have a lot I could say, but I won't. We have to wait for Dubya's term to at least end to make accurate judgement. Preferably wait like 20 years so that we can look back and see how policies he put in place and actions he took turned out. It's pointless to debate this now.

About the scandals, I will say this: media had too much respect for the President to ever do something like that to Kennedy. Clinton actually caused deaths by ordering bombings and air strikes against Iraq during Senate hearings to take public attention away from his scandal. That's all I am going to say on that.

Anyway, I think my days of getting really involved in left vs. right political arguments are over (on this and other internet forums at least).

[S.T.A.L.K.E.R.]

Tap is right, people really didnt get a good look as to how good Reagan was, until anout twenty years later...