Presidents (or President’s or Presidents’) Day approacheth

[Editor’s note. The opinions expressed in the following blogpost are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this radio station. --RWP]

If I were a radio station my call letters would be WBR.

Welcome Back, Readers.

The first radio station in Atlanta, WSB, was founded in 1922. Its call letters have always stood for “Welcome South, Brother” just as the call letters of radio station WBAP in Fort Worth, Texas (one of the very few radio stations west of the Mississippi River to begin with W instead of K -- don’t ask why, just go with the flow) , stand for “We Bring A Program”... but I digress. This post is not about radio stations.

It is about Presidents (or President’s or Presidents’) Day in the United States, not to be confused with Presidents’ Day in Botswana (yes, Virginia, there is a Presidents’ Day in Botswana) .

Smack dab in the middle of February (or it would be the middle of February if February had 30 or 31 days like every other decent, self-respecting month, but noooooooo) sits a single holiday in the United States where there used to be two. When I was a lad I served a term as office boy in an attorney’s firm there were two holidays in February here (well, three, counting St. Valentine’s Day, but I don’t have time to get into that now) . They were George Washington’s Birthday on February 22nd and Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 12th. George Washington was our first president and served from 1789 to 1797. Abraham Lincoln was our sixteenth president and served from 1861 to 1865. We have had 44 presidents altogether, actually 43 presidents who have served 44 presidencies, Grover Cleveland’s two presidencies (1885-1889 and 1893-1897) having been separated by the presidency of one Benjamin Harrison (1893-1897) .

All of this adulation concentrated on two admittedly august persons changed when President Lyndon Johnson (1963-1968) signed into law the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 that Congress passed to give federal workers a gaggle/bevy/plethora (pick one) of three-day weekends during the year from that time forward henceforth forever, beginning in 1971.

So poor George and Abe personally got the heave-ho in favor of honoring not just them but others as well on the third Monday of February. Ever since, no one has been really sure which presidents the holiday honors. All of them? Some of them? It isn’t cast in concrete.

You won’t read this exact account anywhere else in cyberspace. This is my own rendering of the situation.

As to the placement (or not) of an apostrophe, you won’t find a consensus on that issue either, but I’m sure our arrogant, narcissistic, megalomaniacal (I do not say Kenyan or Muslim) current occupant of the office, Barack Hussein Obama (2008- ) , thinks of it as President’s (singular) Day, his very own, because everything is always about him, him, him. This in spite of the fact that his place in history continues to plummet among the more conservative portion of the populace. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said a couple of months ago that President Obama is the worst president since Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) and perhaps in his lifetime. Senator Rubio is only 43 years old, so his shortsightedness can be forgiven. It has also been heard in public from certain quarters that President Obama is the worst president since Warren G. Harding (1921-1923) . The current winner in the How Bad Is He? contest is radio-talk-show host Sean Hannity, who said this week that President Obama is the worst president since James Buchanan (1857-1861) . That’s bad. That’s low. That’s even lower than Millard Fillmore (1850-1853) and William Henry Harrison (1841-1841) , the latter of whom happens to have been the grandson of the Benjamin Harrison mentioned above.

I really must try to stop using so many parentheses.

If only we were a monarchy, everything would be peachy, I’m sure. Some think we are fast becoming one.

This is radio station WARR (Well, Au Revoir, Readers) ending its broadcast day.