Scary thought of the day

Inauguration Day is exactly one year from today.  While Feathers and Flowers usually gives current news and politics a wide berth, this circus is hard to resist.

The campaign trail brings to mind that famous line from Yeat's poem, The Second Coming:

 "The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity."

Anyway, the country has somehow endured through 222 years of good, bad and ugly presidents.  But for those of us who have been around the political block a few times, the 2016 election season is beyond bizarre. It's going to be an interesting year, to say the least. 

Some tidbits about Inauguration Day from the Writer's Almanac:

The first inauguration, of George Washington, was held in New York City in 1789. It took Washington seven days to travel from Virginia to New York. The morning he left, he wrote in his journal: "About 10 o'clock I bade adieu to Mount Vernon, to private life, and to domestic felicity, and with a mind oppressed with more anxious and painful sensations than I have words to express."

The longest inaugural address was delivered by William Henry Harrison: 8,445 words. Harrison's speech took two hours, and he delivered it without a coat or hat on a very cold and wet day. When he died of pneumonia a month later, many blamed it on his long inaugural address.

Lincoln's second inauguration, in 1865, started out badly. Vice president Andrew Johnson woke up that morning hung over and ill with typhoid fever. He drank three tumblers of whiskey in quick succession and gave an incomprehensible, drunken speech that finally ended when the outgoing vice president forcibly tugged on Johnson's coattails.

Lincoln was horrified, as were his fellow politicians. Happily for Lincoln, the remainder of the inauguration was a success. The Union was winning the Civil War, and people celebrated in the streets while Lincoln was sworn in. Tens of thousands crowded onto the Capitol lawn to hear his speech, and the moment he began speaking, the sun burst through the clouds for the first time all day. The whole speech took just six or seven minutes, and is considered one of his finest.

It ended: "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."