like every other time I take spiro my brain is like "more like Spiro Agnew, amirite" and I'm like "honey that is a joke from possibly ten years before you were born, it's not actually funny"

follow me for more trans and Nixon Administration humor

apparently Agnew and John C. Calhoun are the only two vice presidents to ever resign

and Calhoun is... well, a whole 'nother story

just the walkin' talkin' embodiment of South Carolina wanting to kill the world

"My only two regrets are that I didn't shoot Henry Clay and I didn't hang John C. Calhoun."

--Andrew Jackson

If you're a big enough bastard that the motherfucker who was Andrew Jackson regrets not hanging you, well...

also, Andrew Jackson shot a LOT of people

and one of my favorite stories is about how he loaded his coat with books as a flak jacket during a duel and then got shot first *on purpose* so he could take his time shooting the best marksman in Tennessee

I mean, "favorite"

Jackson is one of those figures who was so important for popular democracy and also such a flaming racist piece of shit that it's hard to exactly put him in a box

and I guess that's one of the benefits of people eventually getting old and dying, is that everybody gets put in the same box

but wow was he not going down without a fight

dude had multiple bullets lodged in him and was wasting away from lead poisoning and was president

for some reason our high school American history book listed the heights and weights of most historical figures and I remember seeing (6'0", 120lbs) and being kind of fascinated by what a wirey motherfucker Andrew Jackson was

anyway, Jackson was a shithead but I find him fascinating

especially like the 1824 election and how he lost to John Quincy Adams and none of it exactly made sense because we hadn't figured out the math on a two-party system yet and four dudes just ran for president

like back then I feel like we just didn't know the system was irreparably broken, people just did shit and hit the walls and realized "oh wow, this is broken!"

now we have published exploits on how broken the system is and people are studying them

like wallhacking democracy

there is no fucking reason for this to have become a thread but fuck it

anyway back to the Nixon Administration, did you know that Alexander Haig (his chief of staff) basically just told the Pentagon during Watergate that the president was drinking so much that they should ignore any nuclear strike he ordered if he did so?

Haig's another fascinating shithead

when Reagan got shot there was his whole "I'm in charge now" moment where people kind of thought it might have been a coup

weird to think about how Reagan is the first president I remember and how my entire life has been spiraling down the drain since the moment I was born because of his policies and the movement that got him elected

and how the USA really never grew up past the "hey, we won the Cold War! and basically did it by putting the tab on our credit card! WORLD ETERNAL CHAMPIONS!"

and I also the past few years have wondered if this was what it felt like to live in the last days of the USSR, when your empire was so very clearly collapsing

friends who grew up in the USSR have said that yes, it is the exact same feeling

this is the kind of meandering conversation we used to have at Sonka's over a few pitchers with Bob Clouse and @MickiMorahn and I miss those days

okay, guess I'll end this thread. anyway, word association is fun, and there are some interesting shitheads in history.

the end.