John Quincy Adams is pretty much uniformly recognized as the biggest asshole to win the presidency. He was brainy all right, but a complete tool when it came to dealing with people. When he was sworn in, he tossed a bunch of way cool ideas over at Congress and basically said, “Here, morons. See if you’re smart enough to recognize how great these ideas are. And don’t forget, if you think otherwise, you’re just proving how retarded you are, and really, why do I even bother, since we already know from square one what pack of world-class cretins you are.” (Shown above is the famous presidential painting “Take it Or Leave It, Chumps.”) Oddly enough, the reaction on Capitol Hill was to instantly send the proposal to the Fuck You Subcommittee. Things went steadily down hill from there. [As for the use of the word, "retard," bear in mind that those were simpler days. They also referred to people with dyslexia by the technical term "stupid."]

And just to show that this attitude of his was not something he had to work on, here’s a snippet from a letter he wrote upon entering Harvard. For the previous five years he’d live with his father in Europe while the latter was engage in diplomatic work, so JQA now considered himself smarter than the rubes teaching at Harvard. This situation made him feel that it was “hard for me to submit to” what he considered the haughty faculty. Nonetheless, he believed that deferring to the authority of these idiots:

may be of use to me, as it mortifys my Vanity, and if anything, in the world, can teach me humility it will be to see myself subjected to the commands of a Person that I despise.

Talk about your lose-lose attitude! His self-indulgent arrogance means that he thinks he’s smarter than his teachers, yet he’s willing to give in to their erroneous views because such “humility” will make him a better person.

You know, the only bigger asshole president is generally considered to be JQA’s own dad, John Adams, so you can see that JQA came about his passive-aggresssive smugness honest. But you’d think that the voters might have learned better the first time around. Seemingly, not. And it doesn’t take a lot of empathy to see why Andrew Jackson (who beat JQA in the popular vote in 1824 but lost out to him when Congress decided the election) absolutely loathed the man.

Actually, there’s no need to cite Jackson. Everybody hated John Q. Adams, including the man himself. With good reason!