Man, Duncan, I don't know where to start --
<<violating the Neutrality Acts>> I'm glad he did, along with a few hundred million other people. Would you have preferred Hitler in London and Moscow?
<<knowing about and allowing the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor?>> He probably knew that the Japanese were going to attack US installations in the Far East; they had been threatening to do so for months. He didn't know when or where, and he certainly didn't expect them to attack Pearl. Neither did the US Navy, which had been warned of possible acts of war but did virtually nothing to increase readiness.
<<sending Oriental Americans to concentration camps?>> An inexcusable act which had only two positive outcomes - it prevented widespread attacks on Asian-Americans (not just Japanese-Americans), and it was a
means of getting certain legislators to support war financing.
<<trying to pack the Supreme Court>> He did nothing illegal - sneaky, yes, and underhanded, but he did not get far enough along to be illegal. Had he done anything impeachable, he would have been impeached. At the time, he wasn't even popular in his own party.
<<How about FDR illegally using the IRS to harass former US Treasury
Secretary Andrew Mellon and his other critics?>> I can't respond to this because I never heard about it - I do know that Mellon was the Republican party coordinator of judgeships and ambassadorial posts. Political gamesmanship, perhaps?
<<Or using the Federal government as an extention of his re-election campaign? (sounds like Clinton doesn't it?)>>
Sounds like every President back to Andrew Jackson.
And BTW, it was Goldwater who mentioned nuclear weapons and North Vietnam in the same sentence. Nobody wanted to hear that, not even the Republicans. And although Cicero's quote is grand, it's lousy political advice.
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