Well that hit me like a ton of bricks. How true! I mean, unless you count the death of the credibility of the feminist movement, which I don't.
For those of you who aren't as "up" on politics as I am, the bumper sticker was, of course, comparing the innocuous perjury and finger-wagging self-righteousness of Bill Clinton to FDR's devious maneuvers designed to get the U.S. into World War II. Until the day I encountered this bit of wisdom (wisdom = truth that rhymes), I had always figured that FDR's omissions and exaggerations were justified by the defeat of Nazism and Japanese imperialism, but that bumper sticker awoke me from the untroubled slumber of the credulous. To me, those five little words contained more truth than all of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged edition).
Armed with this new paradigm, I was able to see the Nixon administration in a whole new light. What, after all, is the term "constitutional crisis" but a fancy way of saying "wacky hijinks in which no one died"? Yammer all you want about "high crimes" and the loss of faith in government, but I reply with these five words, zen-like in their simplicity: "Nobody died when Nixon lied." Game over, dude. The anti-dying side wins again. Those of you on the pro-dying faction might want to rethink your allegiances.
Really, lying is such a minor offense that it's hardly worth worrying about. As this bumper sticker makes clear, what really matters is whether people die as a result of the lie. In fact, the same could be said of anything someone says, whether it's true or not. If I yell "fire!" in a crowded theater and six people get trampled to death on the way to the exit, then I was probably in the wrong even if I did come up with the correct four letter word for "conflagration."
My point is that we should really focus on whether somebody dies because of something I say, not whether what I say is technically "true" or "false," or what the definition of "is" is. This is particularly true in the case of presidents, who are in a unique position to cause people to die merely by opening their mouths, whether or not they had been eating garlic fries at the time. Now I'm not saying we can determine the relative competence of our leaders simply by counting the number of people who died under their command. That would be a ridiculous oversimplification. To get a truly accurate measurement we would also need to include deaths from tornadoes, earthquakes, Great White concerts and the like. On such fine points I will defer to the historical statisticians, or perhaps statistical historians, who have, over the past 3 decades, outnumbered the former three to one.
I think, however, that comparing the number of combat-related deaths will still give us a pretty good indication of the mettle of each president. Unlike other methods, which take into account nebulous notions of "value," "leadership," and "context," my method has the virtue of being completely objective. After a little quick research, I was able to compile the following 100% objective list of the Best and Worst U.S. presidents.
The Worst Presidents in U.S. History
10. George H.W. Bush
9. George W. Bush
8. William McKinley
7. Dwight D. Eisenhower
6. Abraham Lincoln
5. Richard Nixon
4. Lyndon Johnson
3. Woodrow Wilson
2. Harry S. Truman
1. Franklin D. Roosevelt
The Best Presidents in U.S. History
10. Jimmy Carter
9. Calvin Coolidge
8. Franklin Pierce
7. Chester Arthur
6. Herbert Hoover
5. Andrew Johnson
4. Millard Fillmore
3. John Quincy Adams
2. Zachary Taylor
1. James Garfield
Makes you think, doesn't it? Oh, in case you're wondering what that smell is, that's Pulitzer, baby.
Mattress Tags: humor George W. Bush Bill Clinton
Labels: Politics
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