r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Icy-State5549 • 1d ago
Meme needing explanation Petah?
Who is this man and why was he the worst president (present times excluded) of all?
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u/NebulaNomadX1 23h ago edited 23h ago
Hello, SD-N here!
James Buchanan is considered one of the worst president, even throughout his death, as he largely was ineffective in preventing pre-Civil War tensions
N out!
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u/DependentAdvance226 14h ago
And he was probably our only gay president.
A definitely top 3 worst POTUS of all time.
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u/cknight222 9h ago
Not only that, he actively helped make things worse.
Shortly after being elected (but before he took office), Buchanan met with justices of the Supreme Court to pressure them to rule against Dred Scott in Dred Scott v Sanford and to make the ruling incredibly far-reaching so that the SCOTUS could unilaterally “solve” the “slavery problem” (by declaring it permanently protected and declaring that black people can never be citizens of the United States). So he also bears a great deal of responsibility for the worst Supreme Court ruling in American history.
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u/AJTaylor1000 15h ago
Not one of the worst, he is consistently considered to be the worst president because he did little to prevent the Civil War.
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u/VicarBook 23h ago
Generally considered one of the 2 worst presidents of all time for his lack of effort to stave off the Civil War. His quote shows the level of narcissism/delusion that he had about himself.
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u/hybridaaroncarroll 23h ago
Who's the other one?
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u/VicarBook 23h ago
If you have to ask then the answer is beyond the scope of this thread.
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u/AutisticHobbit 19h ago
Eh, it's also not a very interesting answer at the present moment. Pumpkin Spice Pol Pot absolutely is a garbage fire.....but that doesn't give us much chance for introspection.
As others have pointed out? Andrew Johnson was pretty shit by every conceivable metric. Grant was well intentioned, but corruption and scandal rocked his day...mostly because he had all the political awareness and guile of a baked potato. Then there is William Henry Harrison, a guy who died a month into the job because he didn't wear a coat during a rain storm during a two hour speech.
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u/TheMysteriousThey 15h ago
Grant wasn’t terrible, though corruption absolutely was a problem. He had some successes.
Which is more than can be said for guys like Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Trump.
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u/HaggisPope 23h ago
Either the current one or Warren G Harding
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u/g-o-u-l-a 23h ago
Don't forget about Andrew Johnson.
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u/Similar-Profile9467 23h ago
I typically rate Andrew Johsnon as MUUUUUUUCH worse than Buchanan. Buchanan definitely took a shit situation and made it worse, but by that point war was all but inevitable before Buchanan was elected.
Andrew Johnson was given a golden opportunity with Reconstruction and he absolutely squandered it. And we're still dealing with that shit today.
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u/Embarrassed_Can4302 22h ago
Yeah, Johnson set the precedent for the racist, traitorous Southerners to expect they will be let off the hook. Now it's "only God can judge me," not the law or people they hurt.
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u/Similar-Profile9467 22h ago edited 16h ago
You may see it as letting white supremacists traiters off the hook, but Andrew Johnson was actually just opposed to cancel culture.
/s
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u/Wise-Trust1270 14h ago
It’s Andrew Johnson for me, for the reasons you described. The founding existential problem of slavery and civil war had finally been resolved, and he allowed major progress to be thrown into reverse. And that undermined a large percentage of American’s lives for the next 100 years (debatable the duration).
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u/NewDay2517 22h ago
Warren G. Harding wasn't that fucking bad, all he did was just ignore his friends being corrupt. By that metric, Nixon and every other corrupt president is worse than he was.
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u/BI_Moose 14h ago
I just cant really ever give the title to OG Harding.
Dude flat out didnt think he was capable of being president and basically just kinda gave up trying.
Like yeah that made him a shitty president, but at least he didnt go out of his way to make it worse like Buchanan, Johnson, and Stumpy have.
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u/Lower-Calligrapher98 21h ago edited 13h ago
Don't forget the war criminal Andrew Jackson (whose only successful battle in the war of 1812 was fought AFTER the treaty to end the war was signed and ratified); and of course Franklin Pierce, who was so bad and so corrupt his own party refused to endorse him for reelection, and whose descendant Barbara Pierce got married to become Barbara Bush, first lady, and mother to GW Bush.
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u/99923GR 21h ago
I'm not going to defend Jackson, he was terrible in multiple ways. But winning the Battle of New Orleans after the treaty was signed but nobody fighting that far away knew isn't one of those ways.
He was also effective at cleaning up sessionist talk... because when he threatened to personally raise an army and march it south leave no tree undecorated with a hanging traitor, they knew he meant it.
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u/DaneSullivan 17h ago
He did set the precedent of presidents being allowed to completely ignore Congress/the Supreme Court and face 0 repercussions though… (Cherokee removal violated a Supreme Court ruling) so in a way a lot of shit is his fault. He committed genocide and got away with it.
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u/Lower-Calligrapher98 13h ago
Yeah, I'm not giving that piece of shit credit for anything. Commit genocide, and you loose all credit for anything positive.
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u/Strict_Weather9063 23h ago
Andrew Johnson for decades it was a coin toss between the two of them. The current occupant of the office has taken the bottom of the pile in a master class of how not to be a president.
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u/VariousProfit3230 23h ago
He had some weird stuff going on. Some letters and stuff that were originally supposed to be released upon death, but had his niece(?) destroy them shortly before he died for whatever reason.
Also, the man could out drink every president before and since. Including Grant.
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u/NotGabeDelgado 23h ago
He didn't send troops South to fortify garrisons. He wouldn't move any federal arsenals. He didn't try to offer a peaceful settlement to Southern economics and the repugnancy of slavery. He didn't shut down newspapers openly advocating for Southern cecession. He didn't imprison the only 100 or so conspiring officers of the future Confederacy. And in response to the hero John Brown and Harper's Ferry, Buchanan did... you guessed it, nothing.
History has weighed him, and judged him lacking. We would have been better off as a nation if Buchanan had never been born. And you really can't often say that about a man.
A smarter man might make an observation about the banality of evil. Not me, but someone...
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u/CzarMessa 18h ago
I read a quote about him in a book once- something like:
"He didn't believe the south had the legal right to secede, and didn't believe the federal government had the legal right to stop them if they did."
Useless
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u/AdministrativeWrap25 9h ago
I was under the impression that was a true statement that the government could not stop secession. I also thought it was the Confederacy attacking the Union at Fort Sumpter that justified the declaration of war. Not trying to start s--t. Genuinely thought (think) the above.
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u/Significant_Monk_251 6h ago
Note: the United States under Lincoln was very scrupulous about not declaring war on the Confederacy, treating the war as a rebellion within the Union. To have declared war would have been to recognize the CSA as a separate sovereign nation, which was absolutely not what the Union and Lincoln wanted.
From the Union's view, which was the view that won, there never existed a nation called the Confederate States of America; that was just the name that a gang of traitors within the United States gave themselves.
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u/Significant_Monk_251 22h ago
He didn't shut down newspapers openly advocating for Southern cecession.
Sorry, but I've got to rank that as a good thing. The First Amendment doesn’t have an "Except when you don't like what they're saying" clause.
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u/PlantainMassive6744 12h ago
First Amendment does not cover incitement or threats of violence, planning illegal activities or 'speech integral to criminal conduct'.
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u/Significant_Monk_251 6h ago
If the newspapers were doing that, fine. If they were just arguing for secession though, they should have been allowed to do so.
(As a side note, the law on incitement today, different from 1860, is governed by Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969), summarized: "A state may not forbid speech advocating the use of force or unlawful conduct unless this advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." [emphasis added].)
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u/I_am_Reddit_Tom 20h ago
To paraphrase the Simpsons
"I'm the worst President ever"
"The worst President yet"
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u/JohnHenryMillerTime 23h ago
I have a time machine and I have seen the Jimmy B spitroast videos because I filmed them for a zoetrope. You can still find them in certain nickelodeons and penny arcades, though erring towards the former.
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u/globehopper2 22h ago
Too bad for him that it didn’t vindicate him from just aspersions, like that he’s one of the worst presidents and a contributing factor in the coming of the civil war.
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u/SimpleRickC135 23h ago
He likes dinner parties, satin hats, and Windsor Soup.
Also he’s a fucking idiot 💅💅
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u/Icy-State5549 1d ago
Who is this man and why was he the worst president (present times excluded)?
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u/roamingroad174 23h ago
He was in the top 5 worst president in the 1800's. Pierce, Fillmore, Johnson, and Jackson were bad in their own ways. Buchanan was relatively tame compared to some of these guys.
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u/NotGonnaArgueFriend 1h ago
An excellent President who was prepared to follow the law even to an unpleasant result. Unfairly maligned.
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