Oh come on! Every month there needs to be a holiday to capitalize on. How are stores to promote “buy one get one” sales on hot dogs, towels, car sales and cheap actor portrayals of historic figures without cheapening history? – PB/TK
Why Presidents Day is the worst American holiday- Bonnie Kristian February 20, 2017
The American presidency as currently conceived is nothing if not a study in excess. So when Donald Trump stepped into the Oval Office last month, he took on a position of remarkable and, in the modern world, unparalleled power.
That is not something to celebrate.
President Trump can subpoena journalists’ phone records and call it “national security.” He can prosecute whistleblowers to discourage dissent. He can access mass amounts of warrantless surveillance on ordinary Americans, including triple the telephonic metadata the NSA was able to search before the so-called reforms passed as a result of Edward Snowden‘s revelations. He can govern by executive fiat. He can unilaterally expand military intervention without congressional interference or any geographic boundaries. He can indefinitely detain people in Guantanamo Bay and other secret prisons. He can have a “kill list” of drone strike targets, that can include American citizens secretly assassinated without charge or trial. Some of them can even be teenagers neither suspected nor accused of any crime.
Trump can do all this and more — so, so much more — because the presidency he inherited from Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and their predecessors is, in the apt phrase of The Week’s Ryan Cooper, a turnkey tyranny. It is what led a British lawmaker to complain that comparisons of our presidency to a monarchy are increasingly unfair: “Real monarchs,” he said, tend to be “humbler, cheaper, and far more respectful of the way things are supposed to work.” And it is what caused Hillary Clinton, in an ironic tweet given her then-status as a presidential candidate, to worry about the damage Trump could do if he “had not just Twitter to go after critics and opponents, but also the IRS — or our military.”
Continue to theweek.com article: http://theweek.com/articles/670871/why-presidents-day-worst-american-holiday
