Happy President's Day

Today is President's Day. If you recall, we used to have a National Holiday for George Washington's Birthday, and Abe Lincoln's Birthday, but these two holidays were merged into a President's Day to make room for Martin Luther King Day. Now we celebrate all the Presidents, Good, Bad and Ugly.

This year, CSPAN released a poll of historians that ranked all the Presidents based on "Leadership". Surprisingly, George W. Bush did not finish last. Abe Lincoln finished first, George Washington second.

In honor of President's Day, I give you a quick synopsis of the 6 Presidents that did such a shitty job, they rank lower than the Decider.

#36 - George W. Bush. The Decider. Loved the Google and the Internets. I assume you are familiar with his body of work, and are among the 70 percent of American's that think he royally fucked the country over.

#37 - Millard Fillmore. Fillmore served in the House of Representatives for 10 years (1833-1843) before launching an unsucesssful bid for Governor of New York in 1844. In 1848, Fillmore (New York state Comptroller at the time) was nominated by the Whig Party as Zachery Taylor's running mate. Taylor won, and Fillmore ascended to become our 13th President when Taylor croaked 15 months into his term. Fillmore proceeded to enact the Compromise of 1850, which Taylor had opposed. The compromise of 1850 was a series of laws designed to placate both sides of the raging slavery debate, and included the Fugitive Slave Act, which required Free States to return runaway slaves to their state of escape. Fillmore failed to win the nomination of his party in 1852.

#38 - Warren G. Harding. Harding was our 29th President, from 1921 until he croaked in office in 1923. Harding was a Senator from Ohio when he was nominated as the Republican candidate at the 1920 convention, and upon taking office, he appointed his pals from Ohio to major posts in his administration. And his pals were crooked. The biggest scandal was the Teapot Dome scandal, in which his Secretary of the Interior was taking bribes in exchange for federal oil leases (deja vu all over again?). Harding was also screwing around with two women, and the affairs were fairly public. Harding came down with a case of food poisoining while on a cross country trip (one in which he was the first US President to visit Alaska), and died in San Francisco, CA. Some historians suspect his wife was behind the poisoning, wishing to spare her husband the scandal that was unfolding around him, or for even more sinister reasons.

#39 - William Henry Harrison. Harrison was elected our 9th President in 1840, defeating the incumbant, Martin Van Buren, who was Andrew Jackson's hand-picked sucessor. The Whigs ran a modern, populist campaign to bring down Van Buren, painting him as an aristocrat, blaming him for economic woes, and playing up Harrison's folksy image. Inauguration Day was cold and wet, yet Harrison gave a two hour speech without a coat or hat. He came down with a cold, which turned into pneumonia, and he was dead in a month. Oh, yeah, he was 68 at the time of his speech. Dipshit. The fact that he's not last on the list is the only surprise here.

#40 - Franklin Pierce. 1852 was a complete fiasco in American Politics. The Democratic party was sharply divided between antislavery northerners and pro-slavery southerners. At the Democratic convention, 34 ballots had failed to yield a nominee. Franklin Pierce, a pro-slavery New Hampshire Congressman, was nominated on the 35th ballot, and the Democratic delegates finally said "fuck it" on the 43rd vote and chose him. As mentioned prior, Fillmore was fucked with the Whigs, because the compromise of 1850 didn't work out so well, but they had similar problems, and took 53 votes before they settled on Gen. Winfield Scott. Scott pissed off the south, and got blown out. Pierce had a lot of troubles before he entered the White House. He had already lost 2 of his 3 children, and two months before his inauguration, his last remaining child was killed in a train accident in front of him and his wife. His wife went kooky, and Pierce went aloof. However, his presidency was doomed by his signing the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, which overturned the ban on slavery in Northern US territories. This so enraged the North that the Whig party croaked, the Democratic Party was severely weakened, and the Republican Party was born.

#41 - Andrew Johnson. Lincoln ditched his Republican VP in favor of a Southern Unionist Democrat (Johnson) in the aftermath of the Civil War. After Wilkes did his deed at Ford's Theater, Johnson became President and was handed the untidy task of reconstruction. And boy did he fuck that up. At odds with Congress over how to administer the re-admission of Confederate states to the Union, he battled for years with the Congress. Showdown finally came when he fired the Secretary of War while Congress was in recess, Congress came back into session and re-instated the guy, and Johnson proceeded to fire him again. He was impeached by the House, but was spared conviction in the Senate by a single vote. Because Johnson had never named a vice president, if he were convicted, Senator Benjamin Wade, President pro-temp of the Senate, and a radical Republican, would have ascended to the Presidency. Wade as the alternative is the only reason Johnson wasn't convicted. Johnson's legacy is that of a blatant racist who did more to further strife in America than heal war wounds. His impeachment also severely weakened the role of the President and shifted the balance of power from the executive to the legislative branch for decades. Way worse than Bush.

#42 - James Buchanan. Note that with the exception of Harding, Presidents leading up to the Civil War and the one that fucked up reconstruction after Lincoln are the only ones worse than W. Just wanted to point that out one next to last time. Buchanan was elected our 15th President in 1856 as a Democrat over the first Republican nominee in history, John Fremont, who was against allowing slavery to expand westward. As President, Buchanan sought to retain southern Democrat support, and was sympathetic to southern concerns, and thus never took a hard stand on the slavery issue. He also clashed with Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois on how to handle the slavery issue in Kansas. The clash between Douglas and Buchanan fractured the Democratic Party, drew the country to the doorstep of war, and ensured the election of little known lawyer Abraham Lincoln as the 16th President of the United States.

Bottom line is Bush was a douche. A severe douche. A Historical douche.

Have a Happy President's Day. Your best in 8 years, I reckon.