Friday, August 20, 2010
Shocker: Conservative Bloggers Select Slave Owners as Top Two 'Greatest Figures In American History'Right Wing News' latest blog poll: Conservative Bloggers Select The 25 Greatest Figures In American History
Out of all the titans in American history -- Presidents and generals, inventors and entrepreneurs, reformers and revolutionaries -- have you ever wondered who the best of the best were? Well, we here at RWN wondered about that, too, and that's why we decided to email more than a hundred bloggers to get their opinions. Representatives from the following 44 blogs responded...
The two slavers were, of course, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. I was one of the participants. Mostly these little polls don't mean too much -- it's just something to get a conversation going and traffic in to RWN (and good on John Hawkins for conducting them). My general rules for responding to John's request is: Don't overthink it, don't spend more than 10 minutes overthinking it, don't spend a lot of time parsing the language of the question, and assume there will be a bunch of names you forgot about when you see the results. That said, here was my response (he asked for up to 20 names in no particular order):
Abraham Lincoln
George Washington
Ronald Reagan
Mark Twain
Martin Luther King
Albert Einstein
John Roy Carlson (who?)
John Adams
Audie Murphy
Jackie Robinson
Benjamin Franklin
Thomas Edison
Booker T. Washington
Walt Disney
Chuck Yeager
Here were the top five (fifth was a tie). You can click through to see the rest:
5) Thomas Edison (31)
5) Abraham Lincoln (31)
4) Benjamin Franklin (32)
3) Martin Luther King (34)
2) Thomas Jefferson (36)
1) George Washington (42)
Any nominations?
How about Stetson Kennedy, the guy who was largely responsible for destroying the power of the Ku Klux Klan?
Billy Mays, RIP.
Holy crap! How could I have forgotten!! I'm still not over it, btw.
If you act soon, I'll throw in Shamwow Vince--limited time offer--for FREE (if he's out of jail).
Nah, Billy Mays was just a pitchman.
You can't put him ahead of Ron Popeil, who not only pioneered that kind of shtick on TV, but also invented the Ronco gadgets he peddled: Veg-O-Matic, Pocket Fisherman, Mr. Microphone, Smokeless Ashtray, Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler, GLH Formula Number Nine Hair System, Showtime Rotisserie, Solid Flavor Injector and many more.
And what do you mean
Soon? No way. It's "If you act NOW," as in "This is a limited-time offer but you must act NOW! Operators are standing by! Call this number NOW."A cold-call hard sell has to first get your interest and then get you to move on it before you have a chance to think about it.
Or maybe you meant Willy Mays?
Hey, watch it. The Pocket Fisherman was no mere gadget...
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Harry Truman
Why LBJ?
LBJ.
Have you ever seen the PBS documentary on LBJ? It's great.
Program transcript!!!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/36_l_johnson/filmmore/filmscript.html
Use your browser to "find" the word "south" as an aid to a quick summary.
Next time the LBJ doc is on, watch it. Long, multi-part??? but absolutely worthwhile.
"McCullough: [voice-over] When Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Bill into law, a century of enforced segregation was finally over. Blacks and whites could ride the same buses, eat at the same restaurants, use the same washrooms, stay at the same hotels. A southern president had broken the southern system of segregation."
Here is another link to a nice summary of LBJs greatest act.
http://www.connecting-the-dots.net/wordpress/?p=61
Spend a minute reading the section entitled "The Greatest". A snippet.
"The Greatest
That would be the passage of civil rights legislation. There is no way to overstate how important those laws were and have been ever since, or how monumental were the obstacles that Johnson overcame to get them passed.
...
All of which is to underscore how great a thing LBJ did in outlawing the legalized oppression that was Jim Crow. As an act of presidential leadership, it ranks behind only Washington’s establishment of the country, Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War and freeing of the slaves, and FDR’s leadership through the Depression and World War II."
Heres mine...
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Paine
George Washington
Ronald Reagan
Dwight D Eisenhower
George Patton
Steve Jobs
Bill Gates
Theodore Roosevelt
Tea Party Activist
Abraham Lincoln
Ullyses S Grant
Benjamin Franklin
Ted Nugent
Thomas Sowell
Albert Einstein
Samuel Adams
Asser Levy
Thomas Edison
Buckminster Fuller