Posted By: Patriot Tom  on Friday, September 05, 2008

So, lawyers make bad choices as leaders??  Bushes I and II and Reagan have created 80% of the total deficit in the history of America!  Rampant, irresponsible  deregulation, no accountability, squandering money, illegal activities (Contragate, wiretapping, torture), unnecessary wars, etc. etc.  Not sure I see a connection between being good for America and not being a lawyer!

Posted By: CRW  on Thursday, September 11, 2008

George Washington, one of our two greatest presidents, wasn't a lawyer or attended college.  Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer although he never attended college or law school and had little formal education.  Two of our worst presidents, James Buchanan, Lincoln's predecessor, and his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, were formally trained lawyers. James Madison, one of of our better presidents, wasn't a lawyer despite some claims to the contrary, but still managed to help craft the US Constitution.  



Patriot Tom - try reading some history and put some perspective into your judgments.  Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, who attended law school, but didn't graduate (he later gained a PhD in political science amd became president of Princeton University) got the US into World War 1, a far more unnecessary war from a historical perspective.  Also, under Wilson the US saw the Palmer raids and the introduction of segregation into parts of the federal government where it hadn't existed.  William McKinley, a lawyer, a Republican who favored high tariffs (how's that for a switch), was the president when the US fought Spain ( a measure he initially opposed), took over Cuba and annexed Puerto Rico and the Philippines, an open land grab denounced by the then Speaker of the House Thomas Reed, Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and John Dewey and several other noteworthy figures.  And does the name "Vietnam" ring any bells with regard to unnecessary wars?  



Unnecessary wars, corruption, squandering money, lack of accountability, illegal activities - just about everything you mentioned was done as bad or worse under previous presidents.  I don't know about the deficit, but I suspect that corrected for inflation, Reagan and the Bushes administrations account for considerably less than 80%.



"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done there is nothing new under the sun" - Ecclesiastes 1:9  RSV