Which President Should Be The Next To Get Their Face Chiseled On To Mount Rushmore?

Yesterday, October 31^st, 2011, marked the 70^th anniversary of the completion of Mount Rushmore, that wonderful tourist trap in South Dakota featuring the faces of four of America’s greatest presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln – carved in to the side of a mountain. It’s a wonderful sight to behold, but you might as well just look at some pictures of it instead of having to subject yourself to the torture of actually being in South Dakota.

With this anniversary comes the renewal of the long-lasting debate of whether or not we should add a new face to the monument. Some say leave it be, while others think we should honor Ronald Reagan, or Bill Clinton, or FDR. Everyone has their own opinion as to what president should be etched up there on what is basically the presidential Hall of Fame, and we do too. The thing is, we don’t want to see a great president up there. That idea is played out. We’re tired of honor people that did great things. We say, carve in the face of a president that really stunk-up the joint so the presidents already on Mount Rushmore look that much better by comparison.

This, of course, opens the discussion of which president is bad enough that he makes the four men on Mount Rushmore look even more super heroic than they already are in our modern eyes. If you ask most people today, they’ll say either George W. Bush or Barak Obama, depending on their personal political leaning, and they’ll say those names because they have no sense of history; no sense of who sucked the hardest through-out American history.

Let’s take a look back at some of our worst presidents and decide which deserves to have their face carved in to the side of a mountain, and how we may carve their face to make them look like jackasses while the other presidents look like gods.

John Adams

Sure, the guy got his own HBO mini-series, but he was an ass of the highest order. There are many reasons for his assitude, but there is one very big, very glaring act of assness that puts Adams in the Ass Hall of Fame: the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.

Let’s break down the two key words in that act, Alien and Sedition.

The Alien portion of the act allowed Adams to deport anyone that was from the same country that we are at war with. This was created in response to the so called Quasi-War between France and America, which lasted from 1798 to 1800. So anyone from France during this two year period could have legally been tossed out for no reason other than they were from a place we don’t like.

The Sedition part was an even bigger dick move. It made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious writing”. As you may have noticed, the wording is very vague, and the way Adams interpreted it was, “If you don’t like me, f*ck you.” Anyone that talked smack about Adams and his policies was to be arrested and detained until they went on trial before a judge – judges that always sided with Adams.

In retrospect we can be thankful that only twenty-five people were arrested for violating the Alien and Sedition Act, most of which were journalists. But the fact that even one person was arrested is absurd.

How To Make His Carving Look Dumb: The old Steve Martin arrow-through-the-head gag.

Andrew Jackson

He’s on the $20 bill, and he’s on there for no reason other than he was kind of a maniac badass. He was like John McClain if John McClain were a coon-skin cap-wearing lunatic with a musket. To Jackson, Dueling was as common as a morning dump. For this, he was one of our best presidents. For many other reasons, he was one of our worst.

Legislatively, Jackson was dickhead. Pretty much since we landed on American’s shores our fore fathers had been booting Native Americans out of their lands. So telling the “Nobel Savage” to burn in hell was a regular thing for us – Manifest Destiny, we called it. What Jackson did with the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was make the displacement of native peoples an official policy of the federal government.

The point of the act was to rid the southeastern portion of America of all Native American settlements. By 1837, only seven years after the passage of the Indian Removal Act, 46,000 Native Americans had been relocated so white Anglo-Saxons could claim 25 million acres of newly-emptied land as their home.

Jackson, what a dick.

How To Make His Carving Look Dumb: Use a very large Sharpie to draw a huge dick on his forehead. And to black-out one of his teeth. And give him a Hitler mustache.

Andrew Johnson

Andrew Johnson should have a statue erected in some public square somewhere in America and it should be perfectly legal to deface that statue in whatever manner any of us sees fit. The only thing that should be illegal to do to the statue is take it down, because that would ruin our fun of literally pissing on this man’s legacy, if pissing were our chosen means of expressing our anger towards him.

Johnson’s entire presidency can be succinctly summed up in a single quote of Johnson’s: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men.”

Johnson created the Jim Crow laws, which is where the ridiculous phrase “separate but equal” came from.

Johnson vehemently opposed the 14^th amendment. You know, the amendment that was designed to grant citizenship to and protect the civil liberties of recently freed slaves.

The worst part of all this was that Johnson was never voted in to office. He was Lincoln’s Vice President. So when Lincoln was assassinated, Johnson was sworn in and basically sought to undo everything Lincoln had fought and died for. Apparently, Lincoln was good at a lot of things, but picking a VP wasn’t one of them.

How To Make His Carving Look Dumb: Carve Johnson’s face in to Mount Rushmore, and then carve Barak Obama’s face right next to Johnson’s. But not to honor Obama; just to f*ck over Johnson.