Comparing 43 to 18

No. This is not mathematics. It's a comment about our standards for a president.

Comparing the current Republican president to the 18th president, also a Republican, whose birthday is today, is a lot like comparing a majestic tiger to a chihuahua. They share some of the same qualities, but not all.
Though both Bush and Grant served in the military,(we’ve still a good many unanswered questions about number 43’s time and place of service,) the military successes of President Grant are well documented. President Bush did most everything he could to avoid proper military service to his country. Being a fortunate son of privilege he was assigned to the National Guard, then a method of avoiding active duty, a branch of the service that was at the time filled with the sons of ranking politicians and the sons of giants of industry.

Where as Grant came into a conflict, the American Civil War, as a decisive commander who brought the fighting to an end, Bush began a war in another country, a nation that was at peace, and created an ongoing civil war that appears to have no end.

U.S. Grant was a military strategist who had a plan and worked it. G.W. Bush is a "stratgerist" who began a war with no idea of how to end it.
President Grant was a man, a soldier, who, he himself went into battle and he, himself, confronted the enemy. President Bush is the entitled leader who delegates the administration of the war to subordinates. He is the president who refuses personally to be accountable if his Secretary of Defense or generals or CIA agents decide to abuse, utterly humiliate and torture the enemy. Bush is not responsible.

U.S. Grant is seen as a man of great compassion. G.W. Bush has only shown caring toward his constituency, the Haves and the Have-mores.

If, at the end of his time in office, GWB receives an offer to pen his memoirs, and even if he hires several ghostwriters and revisionist historians to do so, his account of his life story will never measure up to the great literature that Grant’s book is considered by many critics to be.

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More About the 18th President: U.S. Grant

April 27th is the birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, soldier and 18th president of the United States. From Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac:

Grant's book did not appear in bookstores, but was sold by subscription, and it was Mark Twain's idea to send out former Union soldiers, in uniform, to sell the subscriptions door to door across the country. The book eventually sold more than 300,000 copies. It provided Grant's family with $450,000 in royalties, the largest amount of royalties that had ever been paid out for a book at that point in history.Critics and writers of the time were shocked at how well Grant wrote. His book Personal Memoirs (1885) is one of the few books ever written by an American president that qualifies as great literature. Among the most famous passages in the book is Grant's description of Robert E. Lee's surrender at the Appomattox Court House.

Grant wrote,

"What General Lee's feelings were I do not know ... [but] my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause (slavery) was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."

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ULYSSES S. GRANT 18th President of the United States

Today is the birthday of Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States. Born April 27, 1822 in Point Pleasant, Ohio, he was a successful general during the American Civil War having commanded the Union armies. Following service in the military, Grant, a Republican, was elected president and served for two terms in office from 1869 to 1877.As Garrison Keillor writes in The Writer's Almanac

"Upon leaving the White House he joined his son in an investment banking business.The banking venture was extremely profitable for a few years, and then the bubble burst. One of the bank's partners had been keeping false books and embezzling money into his private account. Grant, who had thought he was a millionaire, found out that his partnership in the failed bank left him several million dollars in debt. Less than ten years since he had been president of the United States, he had gone completely broke.
He had previously rejected requests to write about his experience as a Civil War general. Now he desperately needed the money. Mark Twain offered him 75 percent of the profits if Grant would publish with Twain's newly started publishing house.

But by that time, Grant had also been diagnosed with throat cancer and his health deteriorated rapidly. He realized that he didn't have long to live, and wrote his memoirs as fast as he could. In extreme pain, and in a daze from pain medication, he still managed to write 275,000 words in less than a year. In the last few weeks of his illness, he couldn't even speak, but he kept writing and revising, and checking everything he wrote against the official records to make sure it was all factual. He finished his memoirs in July 1885, and died four days later.

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News We Can Use

Occasionally during our staff meetings here at YTW Henry Gandolph, our editor and publisher will pontificate, speechify and wax eloquent on recent news events. We publish his remarks for your review.

Henry Gandolph’s thoughts on:

President Bush’s appointment of Tony Snow, formerly of Fox News as the new White House Press Secretary. The president said,

"My job is to make decisions. And his job is to help explain those decisions to the press corps and the American people.....he's going to work hard to provide you with timely information about my philosophy, my priorities and the actions we are taking to implement our agenda."

That job description destroys all hope of getting "news we can use" instead of more "News to Confuse".

I wish Tony Snow much success as he tries to explain why this president's philosophy, priorities and agenda are good for our country.

When Snow gets a break from disseminating propaganda for the Bush administration perhaps he'll be taking questions from the press. We, the public, have got a legion of unanswered questions about what happened on 9/11/2001. We can't get to the bottom this matter despite the president's own investigating commission, known in some circles as the "Ommission Commission." We can’t even get the current crop of investigative journalists and media reps, who we’ve been told by President Bush, you know but elected to take the job anyway, to investigate and give us the information we desire. (Click on the link to the right of this page for examples of the kind of rational questions thinking Americans have about the details, as told by our government; we want clarification of the fantastic explanations we've been given of what took place that tragic day in our history.)

On the law suit filed by Bianca Nardi, a producer for nearly six years for Maury Povich's tv talk show. The suit names Maury Povich, his production company, his television show's executive producer Paul Faulhaber, and his alleged mistress Donna Benner Ingber as defendants in a sexual harrassment case. The plaintiff is seeking at least $100 million:

All Povich had to do was name the baby's daddy and go home. Have all these people been booked on Springer, yet?

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