A Warm Bucket of Dumb-Assery
John Nance Garner IV was the first of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Vice Presidents. He was an out-spoken old school democrat who disagreed with Roosevelt’s lurch to the far left in particular his fiscal irresponsibility and scheme to pack the Supreme Court with additional judges. The rift grew so bad in fact that Garner actually ran against Roosevelt in the 1940 democrat primary.
Garner went into the Roosevelt administration straight from being Speaker of the House of Representatives and thought he would yield significant influence.
After several disappointments and he realized his influence was greatly diminished and described the Vice Presidency thusly: “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”
I think it has returned to the said state of influence.
From NBC’s “Meet the Press“:
“No one realized how bad the economy was. The projections, in fact, turned out to be worse. But we took the mainstream model as to what we thought — and everyone else thought — the unemployment rate would be.”
“Everyone guessed wrong at the time the estimate was made about what the state of the economy was at the moment this was passed.”
When is the last time you heard something this amazingly stupid?
Most people have probably never heard of old Cactus Jack Garner. That’s because for many years the VP was little more than an emergency backup with no real duties. That is unless the President died and naturally his duties grew substantially.
That really didn’t change until Reagan came along. He tapped GW Bush who had been an Ambassador to China and head of the CIA and Reagan’s biggest perceived weakness (as with all Governors) was foreign policy. Bush brought too much to the table to waste and soon found himself to be one of the most engaged VP’s in history until that point.
Bush 41 didn’t follow Reagan’s example however by picking a solid conservative but neophyte Dan Quayle. Late night comedians loved him but not anyone else. Clinton picked Al Gore and cemented the position strongly back into the “warm bucket of piss” category.
Bush 43 revived the position in a huge way with Dick Cheney but then Obama picked Joe Biden.
So what did we end up with for the first time?
Now we have a man dumber than “a warm bucket of piss.”
Category: Politics
Probably a typo, but his middle name is Nance not Vince. Sorta know cause he was a great uncle of mine, or something like that. I have never gotten to the reason he was born in TX and the other siblings for the most part are from GA.
Back then and until the 60’s everybody was a Democrat but LBJ changed all of that for them. I remember my parents getting involved in the Goldwwater campaign. I was very young and just remember the yard signs and posters stacked up in the house.
COB6 Wrote: Thanks for the correction. Oddly enough most of my family is from Georgia and has claimed some relation to him. I’ll have to press the elders for the details. I said “old school Democrat” for a reason. My wife’s family is a long line of Texas lawyers all who supported LBJ but all are now Republicans.
Well, will agree that the current occupant fits the description and it is sad to see the office backslide yet again…