Today’s Washington Post opinion section serves up in the guise of analysis pure leftist partisanship from such sources as radical historian Eric Foner.
Foner would really fit in among the radical wing of the Republican Party in 1859, or possibly among the Parisian tricoteuses of the French Revolutionary Terror.
His editorial notes a current near unanimity of academic opinion on just who the good and the bad presidents were, which is hardly surprising in an era in which former 1960s radicals typically monopolize university history departments. The “great” presidents, if you’re a Marxist, are those who most dramatically expanded the powers of the state: Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Wilson, Lyndon B. Johnson.
The worst presidents, from the Bolshie perspective are all the pre-Civil War presidents who failed to make war on the Southern states on behalf of the Negro, all the post-Civil War presidents not keen on continuing to punish the South, the interloping 1920s Republicans, and the diabolical Richard Nixon.
Foner adds President James Knox Polk to his personal worst list. Polk annexed Texas, balanced the federal budget, negotiated a settlement with Britain securing the Oregon Territory, defeated Mexico, and acquired California and the territories of today’s Southwest United States, all in a single term.
Obviously, George W. Bush ought to be flattered at being compared to Mr. Polk.
Dominique R. Poirier
Here is a summing up of the dangers, in politics, when one invests too much of oneself into one’s beliefs. Historically, it inescapably led to devastating extremities such as the New Economic Policy in Soviet Union, the Great Leap Forward (sic) in China, Muslim fundamentalism in Iran and Afghanistan, I don’t know what in North Korea, tales of world Jewish bankers conspiracies and other UFO invasions, and McCarthyism in United States.
At a smaller scale anyone can experience it anytime, it tantamounts to desperately trying to justify deeper half-hidden subtle meaning in a movie or a story truly made for mere entertainment.
Despite all those fancies America and all of his politicians – including John Kerry, Ed Kennedy and Howard Dean – are still today, and fortunately, the greatest evil of Communists (or Socialists, for those who are eager to hide their true extremists feelings), Muslim fundamentalists, UFO believers, three-huggers, far rightists, and other envious and frustrated people.
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