Monday Open Comments

You know folks, there is a reason you should never, ever let your daughter date a political scientist.  Plumbers, truck drivers, auctioneers and oilfield trash are a much more intelligent choice of prospective son-in-laws.  This article by the outstanding polymath Robert F. Graboyes dissecting the trainwreck of “experts” is brilliant.  [Bold emphasis in the original]

In February, 154 political scientists ranked all 45 U.S. presidents in terms of “greatness,” yielding a dog’s lunch of clickbait. The results are discredited most clearly by the fact that respondents (“experts”) placed Woodrow Wilson near the sunlit peak of Mount Olympus (#15) and Warren Harding in the gloomy depths of Hades (#40). The survey provides journalists with a Viagra/fentanyl cocktail, as seen in the New York Times headline and subtitle:

“Poll Ranks Biden as 14th-Best President, With Trump Last: President Biden may owe his place in the top third to his predecessor: Mr. Biden’s signature accomplishment, according to the historians, was evicting Donald J. Trump from the Oval Office.”

One needn’t admire Trump nor despise Biden to recognize that placing the hapless, doddering Biden 31 rungs higher than Trump represents boosterism, not scholarship. More on Trump and Biden later, but any ranking that doesn’t place Woodrow Wilson at or near the bottom is best suited for birdcages.

it only gets worse and worse,

Trump is certainly and intentionally a polarizing character—a provocateur. But how does one justify 170 votes for Trump as “Most Polarizing,” versus only 33 votes for Abraham Lincoln? Inexplicably, Lincoln also received 60 votes for “Least Polarizing” president. Consider the record:

In 1860, Lincoln’s name did not appear on the ballots of 10 states, he received less than 40% of the popular vote, conspirators sought to assassinate him before his inauguration, and his election led 11 states to secede from the Union, triggering the bloodiest war in U.S. history. In 2017, a professor wrote that Lincoln was reviled:

“as an ass, blackguard, buffoon, butcher, Caesar impersonator, clown, despot, dictator, federal vandal, fool, royal ape, tactless boor, treason’s masterpiece, tyrant and usurper … a man of ‘weak, wishy-washy, namby-pamby efforts’ … [a president who made America] ‘the laughing stock of the whole world’ … a small-town rube lawyer who in a big city ‘could pass for no more than a facetious pettifogger.’ … [A Louisiana paper said the U.S was] “so shamed and debased before the world by the ridiculous, vulgar and pusillanimous antics of the coarse and cowardly demagogue whom a corrupt and crazy faction [Yankee Republicans] has elevated to the chair once filled by Washington, Jefferson and Jackson” [and that] Lincoln’s “silly speeches, his ill-timed jocularity, and his pusillanimous evasion of responsibility, and vulgar pettifoggery, have no parallel in history save for the crazy capers of Caligula, or in the effeminate buffoonery of Henry of Valois.”

and you thought today’s politics were nasty and ugly ?

In 1982, Biden threatened to cut off aid to Israel during its War in Lebanon—eliciting a legendary face-to-face response from Menachem Begin:

“Don’t threaten us with cutting off aid to give up our principles. I’m not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”

God bless Israel.

In the era bookended by Teddy Roosevelt and Joe Biden (1901-2024), precisely two presidents have made the case for limited government and lived by those principles as president: Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan. Amity Shlaes made the case for the 30th president’s greatness in her magisterial biography, Coolidge. In a Forbes article, Shlaes offered a lyrical metaphor:

“A windsurfer looks as though he’s doing nothing at all, just riding the wind; however, the sport takes great strength. Even in a gust of wind the windsurfer must minimize his movement, holding still or pulling in. President Coolidge often looked as though he were doing nothing, and his peers, as well as later observers, mocked him for it. But in fact the Coolidge style of government, which included much refraining, took great strength and yielded superior results. Nowhere did the Great Windsurfer demonstrate such strength more than on the waters of economics.”