No Comments! Be The First!
“Hussein” isn’t the only problematic middle name for a pol
Posted By katie allison granju
From Jack Neely in Metro Pulse today:
Even in the South, some Confederate leaders had surprising middle names. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, who was in charge of Knoxville early in the Civil War, bore both names of a Latino revolutionary hero who might have alarmed the gentry if he’d ever shown up here in person.
Picking on a Democrat’s idiosyncratic nomenclature is only fair, I suppose. I remember when Ronald Reagan was first elected, seeing his middle name was enough to convince some that he was the antichrist: count the numbers in his three names, and you get 666. People that I would never have suspected were mystical numerologists were reciting that all the time. “That can’t be coincidence,” they implored. “What other president bears the Sign of the Beast?” They had me there. But I don’t think it was state Democratic Party policy to remind Tennessee voters of that oddity.
Often, people offer middle names to placate an under-appreciated relative. Maybe when we name our kids, we should take more care, considering the possibility they might run for president.
Maybe our own Fred Dalton Thompson’s mysteriously abortive campaign was the victim of his middle name. Everybody knows the Daltons were a murderous outlaw gang.
Perhaps Republicans decided they didn’t like Mike Dale Huckabee because they suspected that deep down he was a little too much like Dale Evans. With Mitt Romney, the middle name was problematic enough, but the first name, Willard, is that of a psychopathic rat breeder in a horror movie.
Ill-fated Republican President James Garfield’s middle name was Abram, the pre-Covenant name of an important middle-eastern chieftain who, as it happens, was a direct ancestor of Hussein.
William Howard Taft shared a middle name with two of the future Three Stooges.
Mar 6th, 2008
