I counsel you to read Rodney Stark, the celebrated contemporary historian. His research and logical study shows the term “Dark ages” (refering to the period of disenlightenment after the great high cultures of Ancient Greece and Rome came crashing down blamed on the rise of Christianity) was knowingly created and spun from whole cloth. One example he used was Andrew Dickson White, the President of Cornell, who concocted a story of Columbus being blocked from enlightened voyages of discovery by Religious zealots who would torture or excommunicate anyone who didn't agree that the Earth was flat. Of course that was a direct lie - as science was driven by Christian universities all throughout the so-called "Dark Ages," and the Church agreed that the Earth was round. The issue was that the Church knew the correct circumferance of the Earth and if Columbus had not encountered an unknown continent, he and his crews would have died by thirst and starvation only a third of the way to the Orient. Columbus argued that it was a little over 2,000 miles to the Eastern coast of Asia. He was wrong and an idiot, but a very, very lucky idiot.In Dr. Bill Bennett's new history book, he also confirms the Stark facts on Columbus and the Church and portrays the voyage of Columbus the way it really was. What is interesting is how all the history text books in use across the U.S. for half a century got it wrong and filled the minds of trusting young Leftists that the Church was anti-Science and full of Flat-Earth zealots.

The most formidable military weapon ever devised was organization and strategy.The most effective hardware can be used against itself, and a simple tunnel can bring down a castle. An armored knight can destroy a legion of unarmored infantry, but bring in a longbow or a crossbow, and the knight is no longer important. The Saracens conquered most of Europe until reins and stirrups allowed knights to use lances effectively against them, and then Charles Martel routed Islam at the Battle of Tours. Basically weapons are like rock:paper:scissors. A sword is good, but a lance is better, but without stirrups and a harness, a lance was untenable. A lance is good, but a longbow brings down a knight. If you remember the 1959 Peter Sellers' film, The Mouse that Roared, you can see how the little bankrupt Archduchy of Grand Fenwick declared war on the U.S, hoping to be defeated and getting rehabilitative aid from the generous victor. However, the bumbling crossbow and chainmail armed Grand Fenwick soldiers entered New York City during a civil defense drill for the dreaded Q- bomb, and ended up capturing the bomb, Jean Seberg, and winning the war.Its all in the strategy, neh?

Gotta agree with nemesisenforcer for two reasons. China and other potential threats are navel-gazers: the world ends and begins in their own sphere and they could care less about the rest of the world. Islam, on the other hand (and not just Islamofascists), is based on total world domination without competition allowed. What's bad about the religion in a cultural sense is Mohammad's claim that his generation was the all-time best and most successful, and that each succeeding generation will be less and less potent. There is no built in concept of growth and betterment, only conquering and taking the leavings of other cultures as homage. Any knowledfge or technology ocurring after Mohammad's time is heretical and worthless, so the technology must be beaten back as well as the infidels.

I've been here long enough now to really be annoyed at the black background when posting replies.There is no worst background. My little I-beam pointer is lost – and the effort needed to post here has ruined my train of thought enough times to promp this complaint. Why make posting a chore rather than a pleasure?The "Please notify me of replies" option is appreciated - perhaps a spell checker would also be useful.

The winners get to write history, so it may be irrelevent to argue whether someone is the worst villain of all time – when we should muse whether that person is a villain at all. The Mai Lai massacre, for instance, was given as an example of U.S. perfidy – but name the mastermind of it. Was Calley bad? He claimed to be following orders and assumed Colin Powell and the others in charge knew what they were doing. Was there even a cover up? If there were secret weapons or soldiers waiting in ambush would he have been a hero? The investigations were all pretty public. The real villian here was the villification of the Vietnam War. A charge could be laid at the feet of Walter Cronkite as the all-time worst villian. He lied about the outcome of the Tet Offensive which we won conclusively, which turned General Giap around and stopped him from surrendering and ending the war. Cronkite's lying news broadcast can be directly linked to causing the deaths of at least 40,000 American solldiers – as well as the millions of Vietnamese and Cambodian deaths. Is this a bigger number than the deaths that Stalin was responsible for? Or the ones of Mao and his little Red Book? Hitler?Is it only the politicians and soldiers who fill out this list, or do we add in the instigators who caused later tragedy, like Karl Marx or Muhammad? Or Rachel Carson who lied about research results which caused DDT to be banned which then allowed Malaria which had almost totally been eliminated from the planey to reawake and kill mor people than Hitler. Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao combined? Or do we condemn instigators like H.G. Wells who argued for genocide to rid the world of its "unfit" populace?I'm much more comfortable contemplating evil from fictinal characters, like Moriarty or Lex Luthor.

There is another issue in listing American transgressions of civility with the all-time most evil perps, in that much that drives this is part and parcel with the whacko conspiracists who see a portion of the iceberg and think they know it all.Look at Ward Churchill stating authoritatively that the US Army deliberately created a smallpox epidemic among the Mandan people in 1837 by distributing infected blankets. Almost every word was non-factual and proven to bemade-up hokum - yet to this day - it is firmly believed to be true.J. Edgar Hoover is laughed at by late-night comedians and Leftist elitists as being a cross-dresser. But it is totally untrue. We know the jilted ex-wife of a mafia husband who she tried to hurt by making up the Hoover story, saying her husband provided him with blond German boys when he came to her husband's mafioso parties. That such a story has become so firmly believed by so many losers is a sad commentary on intelligence in general.The Oswald - KGB connection is another conspiracy that grew huge in whacko circles because no one knew the whole story. Now we know that Morris Childs was a deep mole who sat in the Kremlin's inner sanctum with the Politburo and was there when the news of JFK's assassination came in. Because of his inside knowledge, the FBI knew the Soviets had nothing to do with the shooting, but the FBI's lack of visible investigations into that area left the conspiracists with a ready-made hole to drive their whacko trucks through. They couldn't explain their lack of inbterest in the Kremlin, because to do so would have exposed Childs. Even the CIA didn't know he was a counterspy because Childs knew there was a mole in the CIA.The NIST report scientifically documented every step of the WTC towers collapse - yet conspiracists still say building 7 was "pulled."Much of the CIA'a and FBI's early histories and documents have been declassified, and they show a very honorable effort to do right. Whackos love to say how the CIA propped up dictators - yet their own records prove they only tried to minimize the evil effects of such miscreants.Dumb often trumps truth - so it is wise to not follow whackos in lock step.

Don if you are throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, okay – but I hope you're not serious about your list of U.S. villainies. Almost every issue you posed is moot. I could argue the historically correct analysis of each itew and mitigate most fears of evil and villany. I am compelled to answer disinformation when I see it, but going over each item is too time intensive for me at the present.I can point out a few mitigations...3/5 compromise of the Constitution and the Dred Scott decision: The Dred Scott decision during Buchanan's administration was not just a state's rights question against federal intrusion, but whether one state's statutes could override another state's. That it denied Scott his freedom rallied the Republicans to preeminence, and Lincoln's rise to the Presidency. The 3/5 compromise was not a pro-Slavery edict - but an anti-Slavery one. It was done to deny Slave owners from conflatingtheir votes with their slaves. If you argue slavery is evil, then both of these things added to goodness and virtue.Red Scares of A. Mitchell Palmer in the 1920's and Joseph McCarthy in the 1950's: Revisionism. McCarthy was the wrong personality to win popular acclaim for his actions, but since Peristroika and Glasnost opened the KGB files we have inarguable documentation now that the Communists he was after were foreign agents emplaced to destroy our government. Much of the appearance of evil was engendered by the media misrepresenting the crimes of those he exposed. Watergate: Nixon was faced with a difficult proposition. There were individuals within his own intelligence agencies who were leaking classified information that looked bad, but only defensible by revealing further classified information. His Plumbers were put together to ferret out the traitors and anti-American operatives in these agencies. Liddy and his men did trace leaks to the DNC, and had Forrest Gump not called the front desk (just kidding) the plumbers might have stopped much of the leaks, thrown many anti-war activists in the Democrat party into prison, stopped much of the anti-war disinformation (Like Conkrite's broadcast that led General Giap to reconsider his surrender after Tet) and as many as 40,000 U.S. soldiers might not have died there.