Thursday, January 11, 2007

Maybe an amendment to ban any Presidents from Texas for the next 100 years?

This was the first comment to a Will Bunch posting on Attytood examining the parallels between Bush's speech last night and Lyndon Johnson's State of the Union address exactly 40 years earlier. When Johnson spoke, the American death toll in Vietnam had reached 7,917. By the end of the war, 50,285 additional Americans would die. When Bush spoke, the American death toll in Iraq had reached 3,018. Does that mean with this escalation we can expect an additional 19,000 American deaths before the Iraq War ends?

Given our history, a constitutional amendment banning anyone born or residing in the state of Texas from serving as President seems a prudent act. We have had three Texas presidents, LBJ, Bush I, and Bush II. Each, in his own way, has been an unspeakable disaster.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

LBJ: A horrible man (read Robert Caro)
And horribly mistaken about Viet Nam.
BUT
- the civil rights act
- the Great Society programs
count for much in my book.

knighterrant said...

Credit where due. But, even the good of the Civil Rights Act is not worth the risk on another Texas president any time this century.

Three generations of idiots are enough.

Anonymous said...

I've often repeated my claim that Texas is the last state that we should use as a 'presidential proving ground'. The state is an ungovernable mess, combining a weak executive with a constitution so complex that the only way to get anything done in the state is to amend the damn document which they've done...over 300 times!

California (Reagan, Nixon) should be the next state from which we ban presidents.