Nobody asked but …
This morning, an online friend responded to my latest rant about the current edition of POTUS, by questioning how many years — or decades — it would take to recover from the current administration. I hold no such optimistic view. I generally consider the office of POTUS to be a carbuncle on the derriere of human achievement. No such source of grief ever goes away, it merely subsides among many sources.
I have written, at various times, many complaints that all boil down to the presidential scorecard of 45 attempts, 45 failures. I believe the office of POTUS is ill-conceived. In one sense, it was an attempt by our founders to finesse their fears about getting too far from the British monarchy style of statehood that spawned our recalcitrant colonies. Then, to make sure that the construct was even more nonsensical than rule by heredity, the founders decided to pursue a flawed overlay of bastardized republican democracy or democratic republicanism.
There is a touch of the fallacy that if you process manure enough, eventually it will resemble ice cream.
In the main, I look up to Thomas Jefferson as a man of broad, if sometimes misdirected, talents. But being POTUS was not one of his strengths. His highest contribution as POTUS was to have saved us from a second term by John Adams.
What I am saying is that the best of persons cannot redeem the hodge-podge of a concept such as POTUS.
Beyond that, we have insured that the federal government becomes more unmanageable every day, by grafting onto it scheme after scheme even more ludicrous than that of selecting a competent chief executive.
We have no more chance of healing from the current POTUS than we do the thievishness of Grant, the income tax of Wilson, the mega-bureaucracy of Roosevelt, the lies of LBJ, or the cynicism of Nixon.
— Kilgore Forelle
