![]() ![]() To top it all off, the system back then made potential presidents and vice presidents run against each other, so when the dust settled, no one had any idea if they'd just elected Jefferson or his VP pick Aaron Burr as leader of the free world. Adams, in turn, had his party operatives spread rumors that Jefferson had unexpectedly died. Jefferson hired newspaperman/attack dog James Callender to smear Adams as a closet hermaphrodite. Both candidates conducted smear campaigns that bordered on the insane. More than anything, though, the election was a national embarrassment. Imagine the 2020 election rolling around and President Trump and Hillary Clinton just picking up where they left off. The 1786 election featured the same candidates fighting over the same policies, just with slightly less gray in their hair. This wasn't the first time these two rivals had faced each other at the ballot box. The election of 1800 pitted the incumbent president, Federalist John Adams, against Democratic-Republican firebrand Thomas Jefferson. When the press asked him about the incident, the kid declared it "showed that the rumors about the vice president are true-that he's an idiot." Way to stick the knife in, kid. Perhaps the worst part was that even 12-year-old Figueroa knew this. Stick an "e" onto the singular form, and you're mangling the English language. To be clear, you only spell potato "potatoe" when you're about to make a plural: potatoes. With the smile of a man blissfully unaware he's about to ruin his career, Quayle asked the sixth grader to go back to the and spell the word correctly, by adding a superfluous "E" to the end. 12-year-old William Figueroa was called to the board to spell "potato." In front of all the cameras, Figueroa dutifully wrote out P-O-T-A-T-O. ![]() Sounds like the sort of easy assignment even a doofus couldn't mess up, doesn't it? Not when that doofus was Quayle. Quayle was visiting an elementary school, where teachers let him chair a spelling bee for sixth grade students. It was 1992, the same year President Bush spewed all over the Japanese PM. For a while in the 1990s, young Japanese even had a whole new slang word for chundering: Bushusuru, meaning " to do a Bush." Not only did Bush's embarrassing attempt at bile-based diplomacy become comedic fodder in the US, it made headlines across Japan, too. Not that anyone cared what his excuse was. It turned out Bush had caught a nasty case of gastroenteritis, exacerbated by his decision to play a hard game of tennis immediately before the dinner. If anyone in Japan still thought the US was cool, that moment probably shattered their illusions forever. At a state dinner, Bush unexpectedly fainted, fell face-first into Miyazawa's crotch, and then vommed all over the poor guy's lap. If Democrats thought groveling before the Japanese leader was bad enough, what came next was even worse. Hostile press said he was kowtowing to Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa. Bush's goal in visiting Tokyo was to reach an agreement that would help shrink America's deficit. Japan was still in its Bubble Economy period and seemed like the richest, greatest nation on Earth. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |