Venezuela furious at Obama's comments on ailing Chavez

[Ken Burch]

111. It's Democratic Underground...NOT "DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTS MUST NEVER BE CRITICIZED Underground".

I've thought Carter was wrong to back the Shah ever since he did it, back in '78-'79. I did vote for Carter against Reagan in the fall.

Clearly, there was no reason to back the Shah once it became clear that virtually everyone in Iran wanted him overthrown.

Are you seriously arguing that we should treat all Democratic presidents as infallible? If we'd done that, we'd have renominated LBJ and we'd probably still be BOMBING Vietnam.

For the record, while it was great that JFK set up the Peace Corps, I thought there was no excuse for him to greenlight the Bay of Pigs invasion and bring the world to the brink of destruction in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He should never have sent more advisors to what most Americans then called "Indochina". And he took his own sweet time deciding to back the Civil Rights movement(by 1962, he should have known that all the white Southerners were going to vote GOP in '64 no matter how much fence-sitting he did on that issue).

I thnk Truman was great on some things but was wrong to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki(we already had the war won) and wrong to help rev up Red Scare paranoia(the CPUSA would have died a natural death without McCarthyism, simply by its mindless insistence on defending Stalin). I liked most of what FDR did but hated his accommodations with segregationists, his refusal to back Upton Sinclair in the 1934 California governor's race(as the Democratic nominee, Sinclair had the right to EXPECT FDR's support) and his completely unjustified wartime decision to intern Japanese-Americans. And, while I admired the progressive things Woodrow Wilson did, he was horribly wrong in my book to get us into World War One(it wasn't worth spilling American blood...let alone the blood of the workers of Europe...deciding which decaying empires would get a few more years to survive before being deservedly cast on the ash heap of history-that and it sucked that he had a White House screening for BIRTH OF A NATION. The League of Nations was a good idea, though.

I liked the good things they did...but have the right to call out the bad things...and so does anybody else. Do you really have a problem with that?

I believe in the values of the Democratic Party...one of which is free speech and the right to hold all leaders, including all DEMOCRATIC leaders, accountable for their actions.