Anyone remember when they had a real President?

Came across this today, and it's one of my favorite US presidential quotes:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the
clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --Dwight Eisenhower
1953 speech

Note that this was in 1953, the beginning of Ike's term as president. Clinton, much as I miss him, never went this far to the left in eight years of his presidency. Of course, only in the United States would mere sanity be defined as "left wing".

To top it all off, in mid-November Newsweek reported that Clinton advised the Kerry camp to support the various anti-gay ammendments making their way through state referenda through the US. Kerry, to his eternal credit and glory, hung up on Clinton and said something to the effect of "We will never, ever do that."

This is perhaps the saddest thing about the impending inauguration of our new Caligula - by any measure, Kerry wasn't just a better candidate, he was a better man. But like so many late empires, the Americans no longer seem able to tolerate goodness in their leaders. Maybe I should go brush up on my Greek and Roman histories.

As an aside, one of my other favourite quotes from a former US president comes from Thomas Jefferson, who confidently predicted in 1812 that:

"The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching, and will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, and the final expulsion of England from the American continent." [emphasis mine]

Umm.... not so much, Mr. President. How does the line go? Do you like apples? How 'bout them apples? Or, to put it more plainly, who's your daddy, Tommy?