Everybody loves Cheney - Ann Althouse notes that Dick Cheney should be pleased that only 23% of Americans think of him as the worst vice-president ever: "Because it's not as though most Americans have a whole list of ex-Vice Presidents to call to mind at a moment's notice. Most everyone knows Cheney. And then who?"
All this poll indicates is that Americans have a wafer-thin understanding of history. Spiro Agnew, anyone? Aaron Burr? How about John C. Breckinridge who left to fight for the Confederacy during the American Civil War? Please.
Extra - Forgot about John C. Calhoun.
7 comments:
Spiro Agnew? REALLY? A garden variety palm-greased chiseler and snarling demagogue is worse than an oil-soaked land-seizing thug (and snarling demagogue)? How does that one work?
Does anybody remember the smug aftermath of the 2004 elections? And now, a blink and a half later, this is what the permanent GOP majority has been reduced to:
"Cheney is soooo not the worst Vice President ever... he's only the worst of the last 150 years! And Bush is really Truman, except it won't be official until we're all dead, so we'd better hurry up and assume it now."
Re Anon 5:02PM:
Does anybody remember the smug aftermath of the 2008 elections? And now, a blink and a half later, this is what the permanent DEM majority has been reduced to:
"This conservative blogger is soooo stoooopid for launching into an esoteric discussion of the relative merits / demerits of vice Presidents."
Seriously, do you know how petty, small, and ignorant you look?
Blogs are all about inconsequential side discussions and who's the best / worst X is quite common.
My apologies to the host for feeding the troll. You take far too much anonymous dumb*ss abuse and I was sick of watching it.
What happened to the "Bush and Cheney won't give up their power and will cancel the elections," etc.?
I miss those conspiracy theories. They were always good for a laugh.
Eh, traffic is so low after the election that I'm just happy to see a troll once in a while. It doesn't bother me.
Er... wasn't it a CNN poll that triggered this "side discussion," not a blog? And wasn't the question asked in light of a major "legacy" effort by the White House? Sorry, but that preemptive revisionist spin deserves to be mocked, and mocked hard.
And it will be, everywhere, for years. (Much to the relief of the Breckinridge and Calhoun families.)
It's true that people fixate too much on the "now." But it's odd to critique Americans' shortsighted misreading of history at the same time one proposes Spiro Agnew as having been worse than Dick Cheney.
Let me distill this down: if Americans had been asked to name the best vice-president ever, then 23% would have said Cheney because it's likely the only VP they could name.
The poll is as silly as this discussion.
Silly indeed. But trying to deodorize the stink of Cheney's reputation by jumping to the Civil War, that's real insight.
The 0-16 Detroit Lions woulda kicked the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers' 0-14 butts. So if Americans think this year's Lions are an empirically terrible team, they're underinformed.
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