George Washington

This post originally appeared on my other blog in September of 2008.  The whole Hanson vs Washington thing irk’s me so much I decided to repeat it.

Hello everyone! I haven’t posted in a while and I thought I’d bring you up to speed on how my reading through the Presidents of the US is going. Well, simply put it is going at glacial speed. Truth is, when I stop reading a book for a while I find it hard to pick it up again. Between the move, work, and other escapades going on in my life I put the book on good old George down for a while and haven’t picked it back up (despite having read two other books in the meantime). So the project is on a bit of a hiatus until I can get myself motivated again.

Meanwhile, when I first announced that I was going to read one biography of each of the Presidents I had more than a few noble souls try to tell me he wasn’t the 1st President. You see a while back someone who wasn’t a real historian, but did spend the night at a Holiday Inn, argued that we should count the 7 “presidents” under the Articles of Confederation as presidents before Washington. Now I don’t know what this individual had against George, but his argument is a little specious.

Without going back to civics class to pry apart the differences between a constitutional government and a confederation, let’s just stick with the easy understanding that one creates a collection of entities united for a common good (confederation) and one creates a new entity altogether (constitution). In addition, the Articles of Confederation didn’t create a position “President of the US” but merely a president of the Congress – someone to run the meetings. Now with all this in mind, can we please stop the silliness and let George be the first president??