How's That For Radical?

During his speech at the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference, former Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) used the terms "radical" and "radicalism" on six separate occasions to describe President Obama and his administration. In fact, Gingrich referred to President Obama as "the most radical President in American history", which was then repeated by numerous conservative nitwits, including Sean Hannity. But since Gingrich opened the door, let's examine some other Presidents who are clearly more radical than President Obama:

George Bush
1. He attempted to justify the country's invasion of Iraq by lying about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and then he and his administration mismanaged and underfunded the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for the next eight years.
2. Yes, economic, environmental and other blunders permeated his presidency but did you not read example #1?

Abraham Lincoln
1. Offending his political opponents and supporters alike, Lincoln took a strong stance on many of the topics which defined his presidency, including secession, slavery, emancipation and Reconstruction.
2. During the Civil War, Lincoln utilized his war powers to (1) proclaim a Union blockade in order to prevent the passage of trade goods, supplies and arms to and from the Confederacy; (2) suspend the writ of habeas corpus; (3) spend money before those funds were appropriated by the United States Congress and (4) imprison as many as eighteen thousand suspected Confederate sympathizers without trial.

Andrew Jackson
1. In his third annual message to Congress in 1831, Jackson proposed the elimination of the Electoral College and the establishment of a one-term presidential limit by "giving the election of President and Vice President to the people and limiting the service of the former to a single term".
2. The charter of the Second Bank of the United States was revoked by Jackson in 1832 because the organization was, among other things, serving "to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful".
3. With the signing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, Jackson rescinded previously approved treaties with Native American tribes. The federal government's policy of Indian removal resulted in the Trail of Tears, during which thousands of Native Americans died from exposure, disease and starvation while en route to their destination of present day Oklahoma.

Franklin Roosevelt
1. The New Deal, the large series of economic programs from Roosevelt's first term, created the foundation for our country's modern welfare state.
2. With the Supreme Court serving as the primary obstacle to Roosevelt's programs during his second term, Roosevelt proposed the Judiciary Reorganization Bill of 1937, which would have allowed him to appoint five new justices as a "persistent infusion of new blood". However, Roosevelt's plan to "stack the court" experienced intense political opposition (including from his own party) and, as a result, was defeated.
3. After George Washington declined to run for a third presidential term in 1796, the two-term limit was simply an unwritten rule until the Twenty-Second Amendment was passed in 1947 by the Congress. At the same time, former Presidents Ulysses Grant and Theodore Roosevelt were criticized for their attempts to secure a third non-consecutive term. With that being said, in order to improve his chances for a third consecutive term, Franklin Roosevelt changed the location of the Democratic National Convention to Chicago, a city which strongly supported the sitting President. And as we all know, Roosevelt was eventually elected to four presidential terms (although he only served three months into his final term before suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage).

John Adams
By signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts during the threat of war in 1798, Adams suppressed Republican opposition by essentially prohibiting anti-government dissent and restricting freedom of speech and freedom of the press. For example, the Sedition Act (officially An Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes Against the United States) specifically forbids the practice of "writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States".

The five examples above certainly provide enough evidence that President Obama is clearly not the most radical President in history of the United States. But if that wasn't enough, here are two more:

Andrew Johnson
1. The seventeenth President was impeached on eleven articles outlining his "high crimes and misdemeanors", including (1) removing Edwin Stanton from his role as Secretary of War despite the Senate's order to reinstate Stanton and (2) delivering three speeches with the intent to bring "disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach" against Congress amongst the citizens of the United States.

Richard Nixon
1. Watergate. Enough said.