Hail to the Chiefs (Who Drank, Bullied, and Spent Their Way to Disaster)

One might wonder what exactly it is we celebrate on President's Day...

It’s Presidents’ Day…

Today, we celebrate the 45 fine, upstanding gentlemen who have led us over the past quarter millennium of our existence as a (mostly) free country.

It’s no easy feat to spend us close to $40 trillion into debt… write an estimated 270,000 pages of regulations… and bluff and bluster our way into 123 military conflicts… only five of which we’ve officially declared to be wars.

Mere mortals like you and me clearly lack the vision and perseverance required for such a monumental undertaking.

So today, let’s celebrate a few of my favorites…

Womanizing Alcoholic

We’ll start with our illustrious 29th president, Warren Harding…

He only served two years, dying of a heart attack while on a trip to San Francisco.

It seems that his love of late-night poker games, copious amounts of booze (during Prohibition, no less!), and his habit of juggling multiple mistresses decades younger than him took its toll on his health.

Harding was a busy man. Too busy to govern. So, he did what any reasonable, womanizing alcoholic would do. He let his poker buddies run the country!

That went about as well as you might expect.

The highlight was the Teapot Dome Scandal, which, more than a century later, remains the worst case of overt corruption in U.S. history.

Named after the Teapot Dome oilfield in Wyoming, it involved the secret leasing of federal oil reserves by Harding’s Secretary of the Interior to private companies in exchange for bribes.

Note to self: If I ever become president, don’t let my cabinet sell oil leases in exchange for bribes.

Harding was a buffoon.

So, let’s celebrate a far more sober gentleman…

One who promised to “make the world safe for democracy.”

World’s Policeman

That would be Woodrow Wilson…

Decades before the words “military industrial complex” entered our vocabulary, our 28th president clearly grasped the importance of being the world’s policeman.

By sheer force of will, he persuaded a reluctant nation to join World War I – a war that had been a stalemate for three years and, without Wilson’s intervention, would have likely ended in a negotiated settlement.

It’s unclear how this made the world safe for democracy.

Germany was already transitioning to constitutional monarchy. Britain and France – our two main allies – had vast colonial empires that weren’t exactly democratic.

We know how this ended.

America’s entry tipped the balance. This allowed Britain and France to crush Germany and set punishing conditions on it in the Treaty of Versailles… which fueled the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism 20 years later.

Wilson was also an apologist for the Ku Klux Klan. And during his tenure as the president of Princeton University, excluded black students from attending.

Clearly an early pioneer for civil rights!

Big-Stick Diplomat

Teddy Roosevelt, our 26th president, was known to “speak softly and carry a big stick,” which gave rise to the term big-stick diplomacy.

But it was Lyndon Bains Johnson, our 36th president, who practiced a different sort of “big-stick diplomacy.”

Reportedly well endowed, LBJ was known to drop his pants when talking to reporters as a display of dominance.

He reportedly also had a habit of urinating in front of aides and even on the tires of his car in full view of others. He even went so far as to conducting meetings while sitting on the toilet – often leaving the door open while barking orders at aides.

It’s unclear whether these stories about LBJ become exaggerated over time. But there are so many of them that I have to assume some of them are true – including the first-hand reports about the size of his manhood, which he nicknamed “Jumbo.”

He used that same swagger to get the U.S. mired in the quagmire of the Vietnam War.

Of course, you don’t have to go all that far in the history books to find outstanding examples of presidential vision.

Record Spenders

As 43rd president, George W. Bush’s vision was so acute, he saw weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that never existed!

He then followed that up with an undeclared war there. And he installed a Shia-dominated government that immediately allied itself with Iran.

Brilliant!

Bush Jr. also presided over the 2008 financial crisis and the bank bailouts that followed – and set new records for deficit spending. Records that would stand until… the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

As hard as he tried, alas, our 46th president, Joe Biden, couldn’t beat Donald Trump in the deficit spending race.

But in an Orwellian masterstroke, he gave us an Inflation Reduction Act that contributed to rising inflation. That was a real accomplishment given that he spent most of his presidency napping in a rocking chair.

And our current occupant?

How can you not celebrate the fine culinary taste of a man who orders his steak well done with ketchup and pairs it with Diet Coke in a dining room gilded with gold leaf. Whatever one’s political leanings, all civilized people should be able to agree that eating burnt steak with ketchup is beneath the dignity of the office. Or at least it damn well should be.

Happy Presidents’ Day, dear reader. I’m going to spend the rest of my day pondering the virtues of anarchy.