It was really irresponsible of him to run when he had polio.

Our history would be so much better if he had just told everybody he couldn't handle the duties of the Presidency due to illness, and told the Democrats to run J. Hamilton Lewis. After all, Lewis was so much more electable and had so much more chance of beating Hoover.

While it may be foolish to look to our political system for solutions to our problems, it is arguable that who is president at any given time matters. I used to be less certain about this. I had come to the view that any president was basically a spokes-model for the 1%, and hence the military industrial complex, Wall Street, the establishment, the oligarchy, etc.

As we celebrated this July the severing of ties to the royal house of Great Britain in 1776, the truth is that we have come full circle and have since 1945 been living under a far more dangerous and absolute system than anything King George III could have contemplated in his wildest dreams, what author Elaine Scarry calls, “the Thermonuclear Monarchy.”