A few days ago, we celebrated President’s Day, which used to be called George Washington’s Birthday, wherein we celebrated the father of our country, the man who didn’t lie about cutting down a cherry tree, making him the first and only politician to tell the truth.
But apparently celebrating the first president wasn’t enough and some busybody came along and decided we needed to celebrate all the men who have become president, which, when you really think about it, is a pretty bad idea.
Sure, there are presidents beyond Washington who deserve to be celebrated. Jefferson is the father of our democracy. Lincoln freed the slaves and brought the country through a Civil War. Truman. Both Roosevelts.
But do we really want to celebrate William Henry Harrison? He only served 32 days, most of them in bed, because he decided to deliver the longest inaugural address in history in a cold, driving rain without a raincoat or hat. On the other hand, he didn’t serve long enough to order a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters or have sex with an intern in the Oval Office, so there’s that.
I figure the only reason Harrison got elected in the first place was that the other candidate was Martin Van Buren.
Van Buren was a political organizer who help create the Democratic Party, and he is widely considered integral in the development of the American political system, and you see how screwed up that is today.
James K. Polk is considered by some historians as one of the nation’s best presidents. But I think he only got elected because the other candidate was Martin Van Buren.
Actually, that’s not true. The other candidate was Henry Clay. But Polk was the president responsible for acquiring California and California is the state that gave us Richard Nixon, and Polk needs to be held accountable for that.
Some presidents did things that would have made them unelectable in today’s political climate. John Quincy Adams, for instance, used to go skinny dipping in the Potomac River in the early morning.
Andrew Jackson was involved in as many as 100 duels. He was shot in the chest in 1806, and he took a bullet in the arm in a bar fight with Sen. Thomas Hart Benton a few years later.
William McKinley almost always wore a red carnation on his lapel for good luck. In 1901, while greeting a line of people, he gave the carnation to a little girl. Seconds later, he was shot and died eight days later.
Benjamin Harrison was the first president to have electricity in the White House. But he was so afraid of being electrocuted, he never touched the light switches himself.
Warren G. Harding should be my favorite president. He’s the only president who was a newspaperman. Unfortunately, before his term was over, two cabinets members had been sent to prison for accepting bribed and for running illegal alcohol. Two other prominent members of his administration committed suicide.
But other than the scandal and the corruption, his administration was a smashing success.
It’s OK, I suppose, that we celebrate all the presidents, as long as we acknowledge that some were good and some weren’t. Washington and Lincoln likely will always be considered the best. Yet we may never know how good they could have been.
Neither had to run against Martin Van Buren.
