Thursday, September 03, 2009

When I started this, it was about Old Bethpage Village. I'm not sure how John Tyler got involved.


It's a mystery to me why this brilliant contraption isn't a staple of retail establishments across the country. Perhaps it's because nobody makes four pies at a time to serve at the nearest barn-raising anymore. More barns! More pie! That's what I say. I also say...


Harrison and reform!

I'm not sure whether this is referring to William Henry Harrison or some local Long Island politician, but from my advantageous position 168 years in the future, I would actually urge people not to vote for the Harrison who became president. He did have the best ever campaign slogan ("Tippecanoe and Tyler Too"), but then he died 31 days into his presidency, and it turned out Tyler was not such a winner.

Tyler's Various Distinctions:
1. All but one person in Harrison's cabinet resigned due to the fact that he had found a way to deadlock the government by twice vetoing a law proposed by his own party
2. Not surprisingly, his party expelled him
3. He's the first president to have had a veto overridden
4. He's the first president to have had impeachment proceedings brought against him (though they didn't get far)
5. He had the highest number of unsuccessful nominees for the Supreme Court of any president (four; and one was rejected twice)
6. He inaugurated the sectional politics that exacerbated North-South tensions and led to the Civil War
7. He is the only president also to have been elected to office in the Confederacy, and is therefore the only president who was not officially mourned in Washington after his death

But it wasn't all bad. He also annexed Texas and made Florida a state! So we can thank him for making George Bush's presidency possible. Wait, I guess it was all bad. Why couldn't Harrison have just taken some echinacea?

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