Tag: us presidents

Bill Clinton Announces He’s Written A Memoir And The Responses Are Hilarious

Bill Clinton has announced that he is to release a memoir, prompting many to ponder what exactly will be contained within the pages.

The Hill reports that the book will be called “Citizen: My Life After the White House” and will be released after the election in November.

Clinton released a statement that describes the book as “the story of my 23-plus years since leaving the White House, told largely through the stories of other people who changed my life as I tried to help change theirs, of those who supported me, including those I loved and lost, and of the mistakes I made along the way.”

The publisher claims that the memoir is a “rare and unflinching look at life after presidency,” saying it gives “fascinating insight into Clinton’s life — both personal and political.”

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SPY AGENCIES SKEWED INTEL TO PLEASE TRUMP, AND OBAMA TOO

U.S. INTELLIGENCE SKEWS its findings to find favor with both Republican and Democratic policymakers, including former presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama, a sweeping new study by the Pentagon-backed RAND Corporation finds. The study draws on interviews, some anonymous, with nearly a dozen current and former U.S. intelligence officials and policymakers.

Despite the popular “deep state” characterization of the intelligence community as a rogue army running roughshod over elected leaders, the study concludes the exact opposite. It portrays an intelligence community that naturally tilts its reports and forecasts to curry favor with presidents and their high-level policymakers in Washington, regardless of party or issue. 

“Policymakers most frequently introduce bias in intelligence assessments from a desire to minimize the appearance of dissent, while the IC” — intelligence community — “tends to introduce bias through self-censorship,” the report says.

The study, “Has Trust in the U.S. Intelligence Community Eroded? Examining the Relationship Between Policymakers and Intelligence Providers,” was sponsored by the Pentagon.

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Recommended reading…

Get it HERE.

“By offering a radical review of the last one hundred years of US history, this work is intended as a counterpoint to the rampant revisionism of the flurry of books glorifying the “American Century”. Beginning with the rather bold and decidedly controversial assertion that the current political system in place in the United States at the dawn of the twenty-first century is fascism, the first part of this book attempts to justify that claim by first defining exactly what fascism iscorrecting various widely-held misconceptionsand then analyzing how closely we as a nation conform to that definition. Also included is a review of some of the hidden history and key events of World War II. Part II offers a retrospective of the twentieth century American presidential administrations, to demonstrate that the steady and inexorable march towards overt fascism was a defining characteristic that remained unchanged. The final section looks at the still very much alive eugenics movement, and analyzes the role played by the psychiatric establishment in validating the fascist state. This book will surely find no shortage of detractors, but if read with an open mind, it just may change the way you view the world.”

Which Presidents Have Seen UFOs? Yep, It’s More Than One.

Early in Ronald Reagan’s second term, he asked his Soviet counterpart a seemingly off-the-wall question. Ostensibly, he and Mikhail Gorbachev had come to Lake Geneva for an arms control summit. But on a private walk around the lake, Reagan turned to his Cold War enemy and said:

‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’” Gorbachev later recounted. “I said, ‘No doubt about it.’ He said, ‘We too.’ So that’s interesting.”

To the U.S. president, the question was an opportunity to recognize a shared desire to protect humanity on Earth, a species that might very well succumb to the horrors of nuclear war. But his reference to aliens as a possible shared enemy wasn’t as random as it might sound. Reagan was a lifelong fan of science fiction and he’d had an encounter with a UFO while riding in plane in the 1970s.

Reagan, it turns out, wasn’t the only president who has had a more than passing interest in the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

For the past half-century, almost every president has come to office pledging — publicly or privately — to get to the bottom of UFOs. Ever since the modern UFO age began during Harry Truman’s administration, presidents have nosed around hoping to find the truth. In 1947 and 1948, waves of “flying saucer” sightings captured the public imagination — the Pentagon feared they represented not aliens but secret Soviet spacecraft built by kidnapped Nazi rocket scientists — and as the sightings increased month and month, Truman’s own interest piqued. One afternoon in 1948, Truman summoned his military aide, Col. Robert Landry to the Oval Office and “talked about UFO reports and what might be the meaning for all these rather way-out reports of sightings, and the subject in general,” Landry recalled. “All manner of objects and things were being seen in the sky by people.”

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The Strange Death Of Warren G. Harding

It was 100 years ago today – August 2, 1923 – when President Warren G. Harding suddenly died. He was in San Francisco, on the tail end of a cross-country promotional tour that had taken him as far as Alaska. It would have been an exhausting trip even for a younger man without a bum ticker. Then Harding contracted pneumonia along the way and, if that wasn’t enough, was laid low by some tainted seafood.

Any or all of these may have contributed to Harding’s demise. But no one knows exactly why or how Harding died when he did. The New York Times attributed the president’s sudden expiration to a “stroke of apoplexy.” Some have suggested heart failure. Others have joked that – battered by a landslide of scandal and humiliated by the corrupt schemes launched by the old friends he had raised to positions of power – Harding simply died of shame.

An autopsy might have helped quell rumors of foul play, but first lady Florence Harding refused to allow one.

There was one character in the mix who claimed he knew how Harding died. His name was Gaston B. Means and he claimed not only to know that the president was murdered, but also who did it. His assertions, to put it mildly, were suspect. But Means could spin a compelling yarn. And he was at one time credentialed. He not only had the badge of a special agent of the Justice Department, he had an office in the department.

Means persuaded no small number of Americans that Florence Harding was the killer. He claimed that she confided in him, confessing that she had poisoned her husband.

According to Means’ account (and it should be noted he was an inveterate liar), while he was a special agent for the federal government, Florence Harding tasked him with investigating her husband’s dalliances. Means claimed to have compiled a dossier detailing Warren’s affair with Nan Britton, a young Ohio woman. The Hardings had a knock-down, drag-out row over the child the president had fathered with Britton, Means claimed, adding that not long after that, the first lady took charge of giving her husband his meds.

Means would peddle the story for years, claiming the first lady was enraged that Harding fathered a child by a young woman, Nan Britton, smitten with the president. A notorious con-man, hustler and trickster, Means was also a special agent in the investigative agency that would morph into the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For those shocked that today’s FBI plays politics and seems to struggle to shoot straight, it’s worth remembering that the agency is in some part a legacy of Gaston B. Means. Which is to say, misinformation and disinformation are nothing new. A fabulist of the first order, Means’ fabrications were interlaced with enough detail drawn from actual events that he managed to convince many that his tales were true. Books such as Will Durant’s “The Story of Philosophy” and H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History” were among the best-selling nonfiction books of 1930, but they didn’t come close to selling as many copies as Means’ memoir, “The Strange Death of President Harding.”

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Every Living Former U.S. President, Except Donald Trump, Direct Descendants of Slaveholders Including Biden and Obama

A Reuters investigation into the genealogies of America’s leading political figures reveals a legacy of slavery in the nation’s corridors of power.

A staggering fifth of the country’s lawmakers, living presidents, Supreme Court justices, and governors can directly trace their lineage back to ancestors who enslaved Black people.

This finding includes Joe Biden and every living former U.S. president, with the single exception of President Donald Trump, are direct descendants of individuals who once enslaved Black people.

According to Reuters, the list includes former presidents Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and – Barack Obama through his white mother’s lineage. Trump’s family immigrated to the U.S. after the abolition of slavery.

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Bad Quotes of Some Bad Presidents

Presidents’ Day is just around the corner. Should we celebrate?

People who love liberty and live in a free society don’t bow down and worship politicians. We understand that politicians wield power, to be sure, but we also know they still put their pants on one leg at a time. As President Reagan once put it, “America is a nation that has a government, not the other way around.”

The best of America’s presidents worked to keep the peace and our liberties. They didn’t view the Constitution as public window-dressing while they undermined it inside the store. The worst ones expanded power in Washington, burdening future generations with dubious programs, bureaucracy, taxes, debt, and foreign adventurism. The truly good ones are few and far between.

So whoever it was who decided we should have a Presidents’ Day in February, I can assure you it wasn’t me. I’d prefer to celebrate an Entrepreneurs’ Day. Or an Inventors’ Day. Or, of course, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. If I had my way, we’d have a Capital Day too.

America’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, regarded government employment with a healthy wariness. In a 1799 letter, he warned, “Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.” Twelve years later in another letter, he said, “I have never been able to conceive how any rational being could propose happiness to himself from the exercise of power over others.”

Presidents’ Day, fortunately, is still welcomed by most Americans more as a day off work than a day to glorify presidents—even Washington and Lincoln, whose birthdays were “consolidated” into the holiday in the first place. But there’s still too much presidential glorifying that goes on for my tastes. In the spirit of Jeffersonian skepticism, my way of noting the holiday this year is to offer five of the many bad things some bad presidents said.

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20 US presidents who belonged to shadowy secret societies

Secret societies always get the ominous treatment in fiction.

Are there any movies with remotely benevolent secret orders? Most fictional secret societies are usually more bogged down with dressing in outdated robes, chanting ominously, doing sacrifices, or hatching nefarious global plots.

So, to the paranoid mind, it probably sounds somewhat startling that 20 out of 45 US presidents have been affiliated with some kind of secret group. Just keep in mind that many of these societies function a bit like social clubs, charitable organizations, and business networks. In many cases, beneath the secret handshakes and mysterious rituals, they’re kind of like adult frats (or actual frats, in the case of the college groups on this list).

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On This Presidents Day, Stop Worshiping the Imperial Presidency

Ah, Presidents Day: a much-needed moment to slow down and commemorate presidents past and present, because we definitely don’t have enough of that in this country.

I jest!

Walking around Los Angeles, you’d be hard-pressed not to pass someone sporting BIDEN-HARRIS merchandise—a shirt, a bumper sticker, a sweatshirt, a mask. Back where I grew up in Virginia, the same is true, though they have a different hero: For years, “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” adorned the lawns, cars, and hats of those who wanted you to know they stood, and perhaps still stand, with former President Donald Trump.

That’s not news. Public displays of affection for the U.S. president have become standard in everyday American life, extending well past election cycles and rock-concert-esque inaugurations, as if who you voted for is a personality trait. That’s the conventional wisdom, it seems. So, on this fair Presidents Day, a reminder: Presidents aren’t saints. They aren’t monarchs. They aren’t celebrities. And they aren’t your friends! The executive leader is an employee of the country—someone whose job was, and still should be, limited in size and scope.

It has become something decidedly different over the years, with each president becoming more powerful than the last. That maybe explains, to some degree, why the political fangirling has grown in tandem. Though I can’t step back in time to the 18th and 19th centuries, I would venture to say Americans weren’t donning shirts with presidents’ faces or branding horse-drawn carriages with the names of current and erstwhile U.S. leaders. Nor do I think former President George Washington, whose birthday serves as the inspiration for this holiday, would have wanted that sort of hero worship, when considering that the bedrock of America’s founding specifically sought to create a new order—one without a king or king-like figure.

“The founders of our republic did not want to put that much [power] in the hands of a single leader,” Mark Rozell, the founding dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, told The Christian Science Monitor. “America’s addiction to executive power has become dangerous for this country.”

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