History

Saturday Ethics Warm-Up, 3/7/2020: “Rosie,” Hervis, And An Irish Idiot

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Mornin’!

Boy, I wish I was in Fort Myers, at the Red Sox Spring Training camp, instead of at my desk, obsessing…

1. Report from the social media wars: The tone among the Facebook Borg has shifted dramatically. The Trump Hate is as strong as ever, but the lack of enthusiasm over Joe Biden is palpable, and the Bernie Bros. clearly see the writing on the wall. The posts by the more rational infected are full of hopes that Joe will be so weakened by age and dementia that he’ll let “good people” run the show. Most troubling of all are the discouraged Warren fans, who appear to have been permanently disabled. Even the fact that Massachusetts Democrats had reached the unavoidable conclusion that she was a fraud and couldn’t be trusted—for a “Favorite Daughter” of a state to finish third in a state primary is almost unprecedented—can’t penetrate those Trump Derangement hardened skulls. A genuine friend, not  a pure Facebook variety, wrote that he had read my “arguments” that Warren was a lying fraud and found them “unpersuasive.” This guy’s a tenured college professor! What I wrote weren’t arguments, they were facts. That the mainstream media  didn’t widely publicize those facts—more people know about the President’s typos than know that Warren lied about being “chased around a desk” by a male superior who was in a wheelchair at the time, or her false spin claiming that she had fought for female plaintiffs in a lawsuit where her client was a defendant corporation—is beside the point. The entire period from Trump’s election to the present has been an experiment is selective perception of reality. Every day now, I have to check my ethics alarms to prevent me from posting an intentionally pain-inflicting message that says to the people who have been trading “likes” and “loves” over daily hate-pieces of various levels of truth and have been excoriating anyone who points out the danger inherent to  efforts to undo an election:

“Your party is going to lose, and lose ugly. It’s going to lose because it rejected democracy, and behaved disgracefully, dividing the nation while accusing the President of exactly the misconduct they were engaging in themselves. And you, the mob, have applauded and cheered while they did this, attacking anyone who tried to bring rationality to the discussion. You deserve what’s coming. You deserve the misery it will cause you. I’m sure you will blame anyone and anything in sight, but it will be your fault for becoming weak, biased, arrogant, and hysterical. I hope that you will learn from the experience, but everything I have seen, heard and read since November 2016 tells me that you will only get worse—more angry, more resistant to non-conforming views, more doctrinaire and totalitarian in your attitudes. You had the intellect to behave otherwise, but lacked the integrity and courage to resist  peer pressure and groupthink. I have no sympathy for you.

2. This is a scam. My wife got an email offer from CVS for a “free gift” if she would fill out a questionnaire. When she prepared to submit it, she discovered that the “shipping fee” for the “gift” would be eight bucks, and would require her to send in all manner of personal information.  She deleted the whole thing having wasted 15 minutes she will want back on her deathbed. Our choices are to encourage the government to regulate this abuse of free speech, to find a way to punish the companies who engage in it, or to ignore these devices in sufficiently large numbers that they try something else less obnoxious, or more effective. Continue reading →

Remember The Alamo Today, March 6, When The Fort Fell, And Entered American Lore And Legend Forever.

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

The following post was mostly assembled from past essays here about my favorite event in American History…

I will never forget my first visit to the Alamo, and seeing Texans weeping, openly, proudly, as they read the plaque with Travis’s words engraved on it:

Commandancy of the Alamo
Bejar, Feby. 24, 1836

To the People of Texas & All Americans in the World

Fellow citizens & compatriots

I am besieged, by a thousand or more of the Mexicans under Santa Anna I have sustained a continual Bombardment and cannonade for 24 hours & have not lost a man The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise, the garrison are to be put to the sword, if the fort is taken I have answered the demand with a cannon shot, and our flag still waves proudly from the walls. I shall never surrender or retreat. Then, I call on you in the name of Liberty, of patriotism and everything dear to the American character, to come to our aid, with all dispatch. The enemy is receiving reinforcements daily & will no doubt increase to three or four thousand in four or five days. If this call is neglected, I am determined to sustain myself as long as possible and die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country VICTORY OR DEATH.

William Barret Travis.

The story of the Alamo isn’t taught in schools outside of Texas. It wasn’t taught in my school, either: like most American history, I learned about the event though a thick mixture of pop culture, reading (Walter Lord’s “A Time To Stand” was a birthday present in 1961) and ongoing research. I recently completed “Texas Rising,” which was also just broadcast on cable as a mini-series starring the late Bill Paxton as Sam Houston. Historian Stephen Moore is a plodding writer, but he nicely puts to rest the currently popular politically correct slander that the defenders of the Alamo and the Texas rebels were fighting to keep their slaves, and trying to steal Mexico’s land. The Texians were opposing a dictator who had changed the terms under which they had come to the territory, and anyone familiar with the American character could have predicted what would happen when a despot demanded that they submit to unelected authority. The Alamo was a fight for liberty and democracy, and its martyrs exemplified sacrifice for principle and country.

From the official Alamo website:

While the Alamo was under siege, the provisional Texas government organized at Washington-on-the-Brazos. On March 2, the convention declared independence and the Republic of Texas was born, at least on paper. The Alamo’s garrison showed its support for independence from Mexico by sending its own delegates to the convention.While they were unaware that Texas had declared independence, the roughly 200 Alamo defenders stayed at their post waiting on help from the settlements. Among them were lawyers, doctors, farmers and a former congressman and famous frontiersman from Tennessee named David Crockett. While the youngest was 16 and the oldest defender was Gordon C. Jennings, age 56, most defenders were in their twenties. Most were Anglo, but there were a handful of native Tejano defenders as well. Legendary knife fighter and land speculator James Bowie was in command before falling ill and sharing duties with Travis. Several women and children were inside the Alamo, including 15-month-old Angelina Dickinson. Just before the final battle, Travis placed his ring around her neck, knowing she would likely be spared. One of the last messages from the Alamo was a note from Travis asking friends to take care of his young son Charles.

The final attack came before dawn on March 6, 1836. As Mexican troops charged toward the Alamo in the pre-dawn darkness, defenders rushed to the walls and fired into the darkness. Travis raced to the north wall but was soon killed. Bowie was most likely killed in his bed, while reports differ as to Crockett’s death. Many believe Crockett survived the initial attack but was put to death by Mexican soldiers soon afterward.

Mexican soldiers breached the north wall and flooded into the compound. The fierce battle centered on the old church, where defenders made a last stand.

The battle lasted about 90 minutes.

From the San Antonio Express News: Continue reading →

Women’s History Month Ethics: Should We Remember Hanna Reitsch? [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 30 Comments

Note: the photo originally included in this post was not Hanna Reitch. Thanks for the correction is due to author Clare Mulley, whose book, “The Women Who Flew For Hitler,” is well worth reading.

If Women’s History Month is truly intended to honor remarkable women whose stories have been neglected over time, shouldn’t we spend a bit of it learning about Hanna Reitsch?

Born in 1912, she was intrepid, irrepressible, bold and brave, and few women—indeed, few men— of her generation could claim the kind of exploits she had completed by the time of her death in 1979. Yet I’ll wager you never heard of her.

There was one teeny little problem with Hanna, though. She was a Nazi.

Hanna Reitsch was the first female test pilot in world history. She left medical school  in Germany to take up flying full time, and quickly became superb glider pilot. The Germans built gliders because they  fit through a loophole in the Treaty of Versailles, which forbade the defeated nation from  building “war planes.” Reitsch also did stunt flying in movies. At the age of 21 she broke the world’s flying altitude record for women (9,184 feet). More records and firsts were to follow after she became a test pilot in 1935: the women’s gliding distance record, the first woman in the world to be promoted to flight captain,  the first woman to fly a helicopter, the  world distance record in a helicopter, the first pilot  to fly a helicopter inside an enclosed space, and the women’s world record in gliding for point-to-point flight, among others.

Reitsch was made an honorary flight captain by Adolf Hitler, and  in 1937 she became a test pilot for the Luftwaffe, as she completely embraced National Socialism.  She  flew  German troops along the Maginot Line  during the Germans’ 1940 invasion of France; later in the war, she earned  an Iron Cross, Second Class, for risking her life trying to cut British barrage-balloon cables. Among the warplanes she tested was the Messerschmitt 163, a rocket-powered interceptor that she flew at 500 mph. Hitler awarded her an Iron Cross, First Class, after she crashed while testing the ME 163 and managed to record everything that had happened before she passed out. Continue reading →

Elizabeth Warren, The Presidency, And The Female Leadership Problem

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for President is reportedly running out of money, and the other woman in the race for the Democratic nomination is counting on prevailing as the “none of the above” candidate, a long-shot at best. Meanwhile, the party that pronounced itself “the party of women” in 2012—with Bill Clinton as its star convention speaker!—now seems to be looking at a battle among three white men in their late seventies. This is not where progressives thought they would be at this point in the giddy summer of 2016.

Naturally, feminists and the news media are determined to explain this as the result of plain old, typical, anti-female bigotry.  The explanation is simpleminded, hypocritical and incoherent. From the Times:

[I]n dozens of interviews with Democrats over the past several months, at events for Ms. Warren, debate watch parties and polling places, many professional, college-educated women say they have been enraged by the obsession with electability in the 2020 race. These are women who see themselves in Ms. Warren and argue that simply by asking whether a woman can be elected, pundits and voters who fancy themselves as such, are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. For mothers, this moment includes the difficulty of speaking about gender to school-age girls who do not care about the finer points of policy details, but are happy to declare, “I want a woman president.”

Let’s look at the components of that statement, from a piece about how women allegedly feel that her gender has kept Elizabeth Warren from being a strong contender for the nomination.

  • It is the Democrats and progressives, specifically the “resistance,” who have made “electability” the primary factor in choosing the blue party’s nominee in 2020. Such minor items as policy, experience and character have been thrown aside by constant repetition of the myth that anyone, literally anyone, would be preferable to having President Voldemort in the White House. The members of the Facebook Borg constantly say that they will vote for whoever the Democratic Party nominates, which means that they have surrendered any discretion regarding qualifications for leadership. All they care about is winning. In that context, of course electability is essential.

Saying so isn’t sexist. Continue reading →

Great. Now We’re Cancelling Bells…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

BAD bell! BAD BELL. Nobody likes you, Bell. You’ve been bad!

Apparently Louisiana’s Tulane University believes in curses, or maybe it is the irredeemability of inanimate objects. What ever you want to call it, its theory is bats.

In a letter emailed to the Tulane community, President Mike Fitts and Board Chairman Doug Hertz said they were informed last week that the “Victory Bell” was originally used to direct the movements of enslaved people on a plantation. This means, apparently, that the bell itself is no longer fit to be seen or heard by decent people.

“It is terribly disheartening to learn that it is, in fact, a vestige of a horrific part of our nation’s past,” Fitts and Hertz wrote. “Now that we understand its history as an instrument of slavery, continuing to use this bell in a celebratory manner would run counter to our values.”

What values are those, exactly? No wonder substantial numbers among recent generations of Americans think that we are obligated to eradicate all images, symbols, memorials and references to the Confederacy, slavery, Jim Crow or other aspects of racial discrimination, if a piece of metal has to be banished because of what it was rung for over a 150 years ago.

The Victory Bell was cast in 1825 and donated  to the school by  a former Louisiana governor and Tulane law school graduate. Beginning in 1960, the bell stood in front of Fogelman Arena and was rung after Tulane basketball victories for decades. In 2011, the bell was refurbished and moved to the front of the university’s McAlister Auditorium, where, at least as far as anyone can tell, it has not been proselytizing students about the joys of slavery, ringing out “Dixie” all by itself, or attacking unwary students with its clapper. Nonetheless, I’m certain students would tell you that they won’t feel “safe” with a plantation bell around.

It’s a bell. Continue reading →

From The Ethics Alarms “Butt Out!” Files: Now Members Of Congress Are Telling The Hall Of Fame Who To Enshrine

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Yesterday,  U.S. Rep. David Trone Trone (D-Md.) and  Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.), Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) held a news conference calling  on the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame’s Golden Era Committee to nominate and elect former centerfielder Curt Flood when the committee meets in December. Trone said he was looking for something that both parties could agree on, and hit on this, which is, coincidentally, something neither party has any expertise about whatsoever.

“This really resonates across both sides of the aisle,” Trone said.  “Everybody in America, whether you’re Republican, Democrat, independent, white, black or brown, believes in the American dream and fairness and decency. Decency and fairness and justice. And we all believe in that at our core, in all parties, in all colors.’’

Trone says he polled colleagues in each party about supporting Flood “because Washington is such a broken community, nobody is doing stuff together. We ought to try where we can actually do something together to honor somebody who really paid a price. Curt Flood paid a pretty horrible price. He put everything on the line — his whole career, his whole life, he put it all out there on the line. It’s been really easy for people to come together and say, ‘You know what? We have to do something about this. Let’s do something decent for a change and speak to who America really is.”

Grandstanding. Race-pandering. Virtue -signaling. Abuse of position.

Also ignorant and stupid. Continue reading →

And The Winner Of The “It Would Be A Better World If Everyone Read Ethics Alarms” Contest Is…Aalst, Belgium!

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

From the BBC:

Israel, Jewish groups and Belgian Prime Minister Sophie Wilmès were among many who strongly condemned the costumes in Sunday’s parade in Aalst.  Some critics said likening Jews to ants was similar to Nazi anti-Semitism, which persecuted Jews as “vermin”.

The Aalst mayor’s spokesman told the BBC “it’s our humour… just fun”. Peter Van den Bossche said “there isn’t a movement behind it” and “we don’t wish harm to anyone. It’s our parade, our humour, people can do whatever they want,” he said. “It’s a weekend of freedom of speech.”

Aalst lies 31km (19 miles) northwest of Brussels – the heart of the EU…The city drew much criticism for parading caricature Jews last year – so much so that it was dropped from Unesco’s cultural heritage list in December. After the outcry, Aalst itself had asked to be taken off the list….

There were also people parading in Nazi SS uniform-

– despite the fact that, in World War Two, the Nazis deported about 25,000 Jews from occupied Belgium to the Auschwitz death camp, where most were murdered…In Sunday’s parade some caricature Jews posed with a mock-up of the Western Wall – often called Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, a holy site for Jews. It was labelled “the wailing ant”, in Dutch “de klaugmier”. The Dutch for “wailing wall” is “klaagmuur”.

“This doesn’t encourage anti-Semitism; the reaction last year was over the top,” Mr Van den Bossche said. “Two hundred percent it’s not anti-Semitic.”

Continue reading →

Morning Ethics Warm-Up,2/25/2020: Remembering “Float Like A Butterfly, Sting Like A Bee” [CORRECTED]

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Notice of a correction: in the first version of this post, I mistakenly wrote that the famous photo above was  of the first Liston fight. It was not: this was the dramatic scene that ended the rematch. Thanks to Tim Levier for reminding me.

Good Morning!

1. Cultural literacy thoughts: I wonder…how many Millennial Americans—or among the post-boomer generations—recognize the context of the photo above? On this date in 1964, a brash 22-year-old black boxer named Cassius Clay (1942-2016) pulled off one of the great upsets in sports history, defeating world heavyweight boxing champ Sonny Liston, an 8-to-1 favorite, in a seventh-round technical knockout. The now iconic photo above captured the dramatic finale of the 1965 rematch, ending the speculation that Clay’s victory over the previously frightening Liston had been a fluke.

Indeed, the 1964 fight was just the beginning of a remarkable story.

After his stunning victory, the sudden celebrity attended a victory to a private party at a Miami hotel. In attendance was Malcolm X, the outspoken leader of the rising African American Muslim group known as the Nation of Islam. Two days later, Cassius Clay announced he was joining the Nation of Islam, and renounced his “slave name”  to adopt  the Muslim name, Muhammad Ali. As Ali, he became one of the most influential social and political figures of his era, affecting civil rights, politics, public attitudes, language and culture…and sports, of course, as  professional boxing’s greatest champion. After successfully defending his title nine times, Ali surrendered it in 1967 after he refused induction into the U.S. Army on the grounds that he was a Muslim minister and thus  a conscientious objector. His stand against the Vietnam War galvanized national opposition to the war, especially among students and the young. In 1971,  the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Ali’s draft evasion conviction, and in 1974, he regained his heavyweight title in a match against George Foreman in Zaire, enshrining his phrase “rope-a-dope” in our lexicon. Eventually Ali became  the first boxer to win the heavyweight title three times. His post-retirement diagnosis  of pugilistic Parkinson’s syndrome and the sad spectacle of the once loquacious and witty athlete’s slow decline into near speechlessness and impaired motor functionscontributed to the collapse of boxing’s popularity. Ali was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, and lit the Olympic flame at the opening ceremonies of the1996  Summer Games in Atlanta, Georgia.

My mother, who like virtually everyone in her first generation Greek family was uncomfortable around blacks, once met Ali, who was seated next to her at a Harvard College function when she was Assistant Dean of Housing. She said later that he was the most charming, charismatic, beautiful man she had ever met in her life.

2. You can lead an idiot to child-proof packaging, but you can’t make him think. A study in the Journal of Pediatrics aimed at figuring out why there has been a steep rise in accidental poisonings of U.S. children according to CDC figures has come to a disturbing conclusion. Researchers analyzed nearly 4,500 calls to five U.S. poison centers in Arizona, Florida and Georgia over an eight month period in 2017. They found more than half of the prescription medicine poisonings occurred because parents and grandparents removed  pills and medicines from child-proof packaging to make them more easily accessible, to help the adults remember to take them, or more convenient for travel. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “KABOOM! At What Point Do Parents Blow The Whistle On Flagrant Ideological Indoctrination In Our Schools?”

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

This superb Comment of the Day by Steve-O-in NJ, on the post, “KABOOM! At What Point Do Parents Blow The Whistle On Flagrant Ideological Indoctrination In Our Schools?,” needs no introduction.

It just needs to be read.

A USAF F-16 Fighting Falcon, mainstay of the last 12 years of the Cold War, launches to fly a patrol. In those years it could have been anywhere from Italy to Spain to Turkey, while throughout Europe squadrons of the same under allied flags kept watch. A USAF F-15 Eagle, older still (they entered service in 1976) takes to the air. In the Cold War they kept watch further north, in Germany, in England, and even at Keflavik in Iceland. Every day they drilled, every day they patrolled, every day they were ready to go into battle on command, to stop the tyrannical scourge of Soviet communism or die trying.

We’d made a deal we wished we hadn’t had to with them, because the alternative was the genocidal tyranny of Nazism. We’d either looked the other way on, or not asked and not been told about, or accepted their lies about the worst things they’d done then like the Katyn Forest Massacre. However, we’d also seen them try to starve and freeze West Berlin out, and we’d seen them roll right over Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 when they dared to try to move toward greater freedom. We would be damned if we were going to let them bring that tyranny to the Rhine or past it. We’d heard from those who escaped what the conditions were like on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and we wanted no part of them.

We wanted no part of a system where there was one political party and only one. We wanted no part of a system where those who deviated from the party line either died or disappeared suddenly. We wanted no part of a system where faith was officially disapproved of and suppressed. We wanted no part of a system where the individual was just a cog in the government machine and had no hope of doing better. The system they offered was simply antithetical to what the Founding Fathers set up for this country, and we weren’t letting them bring it here. We’d fight to prevent it, and we’d die fighting rather than surrender to it. That’s why there were these patrols, that’s why the 41 for freedom were at sea at all times, but no one knew exactly where, and that’s why the 2nd Armored Division was always ready to go and the 82nd and 101st had battalions ready to fly out on minimal notice.

Now one of our political parties is likely to nominate a man who not only went behind the Iron Curtain, but did it willingly, for a honeymoon, when most of us head to someplace with a lot of sun and sand, or a lot of palazzos and palaces if the beach isn’t our thing. Not only did he go there, but he praised what he found there, in the place where those who dared speak out vanished and a refrigerator was a luxury item, saying it was a better system than we had here. Not only did he go there and praise what he found, but he did it while Ronald Reagan was finally arm-wrestling the Soviets to their final defeat, which would lead to their dissolution 3 years later. Not only all this, but he wants to bring that failed system here, on speed, and his followers say damned be anyone who stands in his way, because cities will burn otherwise.

I don’t know what’s more ironic (though not in an amusing way), that this system no longer exists in the nation where it originated (which also doesn’t exist anymore), or that the party that’s about to nominate this man is the same party that produced Thomas Jefferson, architect of the American brand of freedom, Andrew Jackson, who decisively stopped the first attempts to tear this nation apart, FDR, whom many still count as third in the great trinity of US presidents with Washington and Lincoln, and Harry Truman, who was the first president to stand up against this system that his party now wants to bring here. Continue reading →

Oh, This Will Be Fun! How Ignorant And Misleading Was David Frum’s Vicious Attack On President Trump’s Physical Condition? [PART 2] [CORRECTED!]

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

David Frum’s assertion that President Trump is one of the “least physically capable” Presidents only shows that his knowledge of the Presidents is an inch deep and about as wide….or, in the alternative, that he knows what he is saying is false but is counting on the public’s ignorance of history and CNN’s complicity in gratuitous Trump bashing to get away with it. Well, at least on Ethics Alarms he’s not going to get away with it.

Let’s look first at Trump’s predecessors after FDR. Recall that Frum’s  statement was that Trump is “the least physically capable president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in a wheelchair.”

  • George H.W. Bush, tough old bird that he was, dealt with more health issues as President than Trump. He suffered from bleeding ulcers, arthritis,  atrial fibrillation and the autoimmune disorder Graves’ disease.
  • John F. Kennedy was a sick man throughout his short term in office; he just had his staff and reporters cover it up.  His 1947 diagnosis of Addison’s disease, an incurable disorder of the adrenal gland, was kept secret until well after his death. JFK’s chronic back pain caused him to develop an addictions to painkillers, stimulants, and other medication; historians suspect that he made important decisions while “bombed out of his mind.”
  • Dwight D. Eisenhower had three major medical incidents during his two terms in office: a heart attack, a stroke, and Crohn’s disease. Saying Eisenhower was more “physically able” than Donald Trump is either gross ignorance on Frum’s part, or a lie. Of course, Stelter couldn’t correct him, because he’s an idiot, and wouldn’t correct any false attacks on President Trump anyway.

Going back before Franklin Roosevelt (who was beyond question the least physically able President in history when he won his final term in 1944, since he was dying of heart disease and worse, knew it; it had nothing to do with his whellchair) we have a veritable Presidential intensive care unit. Let’s skip over Harding, who suffered his whole life from anxiety and emotional problems, and who had undiagnosed heart problems that ultimately killed him, and go to the runner up champ of physically disabled Presidents, Woodrow Wilson. Afflicted with untreatable (then) hypertension, Wilson was plagued by chronic headaches and double vision until he had  a series of strokes. One affected his right hand, leaving him unable to write normally, then more serious strokes rendered Wilson blind in his left eye, paralyzed on his left side, and eventually unable to discharge his duties as President. This was hidden from the public and Congress, with his wife and his doctor handling most of Wilson’s presidential tasks.

President Taft, as we all know, was morbidly obese at well over 300 pounds, and as a result suffered from sleep apnea (he dozed off during meetings), high blood pressure, and heart disease. Teddy Roosevelt managed to exude health with his ostentatiously vigorous lifestyle, but he wasn’t healthy. TR battled clinical depression his whole life, and despite what you will often read, he never overcame his childhood asthma. He was also diagnosed with a heart murmur, and advised to live a sedate life.  He did not.

This may well have contributed to the fact that he was dead shortly after his 60th birthday.

In addition to being the second most obese President, Grover Cleveland suffered from many maladies while President, most notably cancer, necessitating a secret operation that replaced his upper palate with a rubber prosthetic. My favorite obscure President, Chester A. Arthur, was ill during his entire three years in office, and died shortly after. He had progressive kidney failure from Bright’s Disease.

Before Arthur, the previous physically-limited President was, surprisingly, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was another depressive, but his symptoms probably had a physical cause: likely permanent brain damage from being kicked in the head by a horse when he was young. Lincoln also had malaria flare-ups, and got smallpox during the Civil War. He may have suffered from mercury poisoning from pills that were frequently prescribed at the time.  Abe’s  photographs indicate drmatic weight loss and muscle wasting during the war, and some doctors believe he  was afflicted with multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2B (MEN2B) or Marfan syndrome, rare genetic disorders, although he lived longer than either of those conditions usually permit.

Two Presidents before Lincoln we had poor, broken Franklin Pierce in the White House, perhaps the most disabled of all.  He spent his entire, disastrous term in office in deep depression following the horrible death of his young son before his eyes in a train accident as his family headed to Washington after his election. Pierce’s wife Jane was never the same after teh accident, and Pierce’s alcoholism became intermittently debilitating.

Donald Trump, as you probably know, is a lifetime abstainer from alcohol.

Jumping past Presidents Taylor and William Henry Harrison, neither of whom were sufficiently physically able to last a single term before succumbing to illness  (Taylor less that a year and a half, Harrison about a month), we finally reach the all-time champion of unhealthy Presidents, Andrew Jackson.

When he finally won the Presidency at the age of 62 (after having been robbed of victory four years earlier), Old Hickory was plagued by the lingering wound from two of his less successful pistol duels. One bullet was lodged in his arm, where it festered and gave him chronic pain. ( This bullet was finally removed when Jackson was President) A second bullet, lodged in his chest near his lung and  heart, was considered inoperable. It caused serious pulmonary problems and caused Jackson to cough up blood periodically. The bullets also caused lead poisoning.

Jackson was seriously underweight, and there was a good reason for that: his digestive tract was permanently damaged. He suffered from recurring flare-ups of malaria, typhoid, typhus and dysentery, progressive heart failure, and some sources say he had tuberculosis as well. Like Lincoln, Jackson was poisoned by mercury pills given to him by his doctors.

I think I’ll stop with Andy, the President that Trump most identifies with, and justly so.  There is more than sufficient evidence that David Frum didn’t know what he was talking about, and that CNN allowed him to misinform its viewers by adding fake history to its usual fare of biased and fake news.