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False Coin:

Don’t Take This From Ben Stein

A new front in the War On President’s Day! Cuddly Conservative Curmudgeon Ben Stein is trying to mobilize America’s unease at the vagueness of the holiday to somehow make a case against evolution. Let’s watch him go!

“Until the late 1980’s when the generic “President’s Day” became the official holiday that subsumed them, America used to celebrate the birthdays of both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

As a result, “Darwin Day” has now supplanted Lincoln’s Birthday in the popular imagination; both men were born on February 12, 1809.”

It falls to biologist P.Z. Myers to try an unravel this “dense array of concentrated stupid.”

“”President’s Day” did diminish awareness of Lincoln’s birthday and reduced the appreciation of a president in exchange for a 3-day weekend, but Darwin had nothing to do with that, and it did not replace Lincoln with Darwin in the popular imagination — ask most people what the significance of 12 February might be, and you’ll get a blank look.”

Joshua Rosenau joins the fun:

“The law moving that celebration to the third Monday in February was signed into law in 1971, during Richard Nixon’s presidency. Ben Stein was, of course, a staffer in that administration, and didn’t have to remain silent on the Lincoln snub for 37 years. He could have insisted that the day be known not as “Washington’s Birthday,” but as Lincoln’s and Washington’s Birthdays,” or some such construction (though that wouldn’t have gone over well with Nixon’s race-baiting Southern Strategy). He didn’t.”

Ultimately, of course, it all comes down to Beating the Reds, yesterday if need be.

“Pessimism is a malady to be overcome, not encouraged – and it is certainly not a quality (or a theory) to be celebrated. As history teaches us – inherently pessimistic scientific theories, like all decadent theories (socialism, communism) eventually give way to those that actually work.

The sixteenth President of the United States believed what our country’s founders believed and that The Declaration of Independence so clearly stated – that all men were endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Finely Marbled

The Abraham Lincoln Observer points us to the story of an Illinois resident whose unhealthy obsession is photographing every Lincoln statue he can find.

It’s Alive!

As President’s Day morphed into All Presidents, All The Time Day, its just gotten weirder and more unwieldy.

Republicans try to shoehorn Reagan in with fellow February Birthday Boys Washington and Lincoln, while complaining that one day really doesn’t do the lads justice. And lament the passing of glorious days of old when we heard of Lincoln learning to read by the light of a single lump of coal.

Meanwhile at the Carter Library they’ve gone beyond mere days to celebrate “President’s Month“!

For you all you Presidential who-went-where-when obsessives, The 48th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry/ Civil War Musings blog has a roundup on Presidential visits to the Antietam battlefield near Washington.

With the special bonus of extensively documenting future President McKinley’s participation in the battle, where he heroically shuffled coffee to the front lines under fire.

Loss Leader

Shut out from the Simpsons Movie premier [remember that spirited contest?],Springfield Illinois faces another identity dilemma.

The fancy new Lincoln Presidential Library gets all the glory, plus federal, state and local tax money. But long before the new boy got built, Springfield had a Lincoln Library, the city’s municipal Library.

Now the Springfield State Journal-Register is asking if the city library should give up on the name. In a classic whoever shows up reader poll, “Click your Pick“[near bottom of page] asks:

“Should the name of Springfield’s public library, Lincoln Library, be changed to differentiate it from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library?”

The Presidential Library has killed before. The University of Illinois at Springfield’s Abraham Lincoln Presidential Center for Governmental Studies was forced to drop the name.

The city Lincoln seems to have been erasing itself for some time, demolishing it’s classic library building for something resembling a bad regional HMO office.