Actually, You Have More In Common With King George III

On Monday, our current president celebrated Presidents' Day with a visit to Mount Vernon and a speech that drew parallels between George Washington's presidency and his own. "I feel right at home here. After all, this is the home of the first George W.," Bush quipped.

I've always felt sort of lukewarm about George Washington so this doesn't get me as fired up as when George Allen used to compare himself to my beloved Jefferson, but it bothers me when people who know better deliberately misrepresent the views of our Founding Fathers for political gain. To be fair to the current George W., he does have a few things in common with the first George W: they share a first name and they've both held the office of US president.

But there the similarities end. For starters, George Washington knew how to put a fucking sentence together. More importantly, he believed in democracy. When presented with the possibility of becoming king of the newly created US, Washington declined: "How irrevocable and tremendous! What a triumph for the advocates of despotism to find that we are incapable of governing ourselves, and that systems founded on the basis of equal liberty are merely ideal & fallacious!" Bush, on the other hand, refused to concede the controversial election of 2000 and isn't particularly troubled by the possibility of despotism: "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator."

Of course, some dictators are bad, and we're currently engaged in a war whose purpose was to remove an Evil Dictator from power. Bush, who has sent 3150 Americans to their deaths in the Iraq War, never served in the armed forces (unless you count the whole Texas Air National Guard thing, which I certainly don't). Washington experienced war firsthand as commander of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and later lamented, "My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth." He warned against involvement in foreign wars, and suggested that "overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty."

Overgrown military establishments, however, are Bush's bread and butter, and he's never really concerned himself with pesky little things like liberty or the will of the people. "I will not withdraw, even if Laura and Barney are the only ones supporting me," he's assured a critical populace.

While Bush came to power as a result of a lawsuit the Supreme Court decided in his favor, George Washington took office only reluctantly and even tried to refuse his presidential salary. Washington was a contemplative man who deeply valued the principles for which America stood and was concerned with the common good.

"Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience," the first George W. once urged -- a bit of advice he might today offer the current George W., whose celestial fire seems to have been all but extinguished by his delusions of grandeur.