5
President Obama Drone Bombed Thousands Of Civilians To Dust
President Barack Obama has a lot of legacies to choose from. Many will fondly remember him as the first black president, or as the president who got them healthcare, or as the only president in a twenty-year span who could string together more than two coherent sentences. But in certain parts of the world, he'll always be remembered as the president who bombed more weddings than a reading of 1 Corinthians 13.
Obama may have been the first black president, but he was also the first drone president. During his eight years in office, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate let the CIA launch over 500 drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya combined. At the height of Obama's reign as king of drone mountain, it was estimated that the U.S. dropped a bomb on a brown person every three hours for a year -- all in the name of being tough on terrorism.
Wikimedia Commons /Lance MansBecause nothing says anti-terrorism like making entire populations live in fear of being blown up out of nowhere.
And while pretending these drones struck with surgical precision, they were often fired off with all the care and accuracy of your drunk cousin holding a Roman candle in front of his dick on the 4th of July. On Obama's watch, drone strikes have turned weddings into funerals, funerals into even bigger funerals, and have cost the lives of (depending on the source) thousands of innocent bystanders, including pregnant women, children and several U.S citizens. And it took years before Obama was pressured into passing legislation limiting the use and increasing the transparency of drone strikes, including mandatory annual disclosure of all civilian casualties in 2016. Which might've meant something if he hadn't already left the drone door open for all future presidents, some of whom won't have their conscience kick in at all, let alone in the last four seconds of their presidency.
4
FDR Killed Anti-Lynching Legislation
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the president so nice, they elected him four times. By that metric alone, that makes him the greatest Democratic president in American history. And it's not hard to see why. He ended the Great Depression, set up the first social security system and minimum wage law and wanted to shove a grenade up Hitler's ass before that became fashionable in America. FDR was a president who got things done and knew how to focus on the things that mattered.
Unfortunately, what didn't matter, were black lives. During his presidency, FDR refused to back not one, but two attempts to pass an anti-lynching bill despite the fact that mobs were still murdering African Americans down South. This caused not just a rift between FDR and early civil rights activists but also between him and Mrs. Roosevelt, who was an outspoken civil rights activist herself. So outspoken she drew the hatred of racists everywhere, with the Ku Klux Klan putting a $25,000 hit on the First Lady's head while future FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (old-timey Alex Jones with a badge) tried to sink her husband's presidency by spreading rumors that she was mixed race.
Wikimedia Commons/FDR Presidential Library & MuseumCan't get hung up on the small stuff.