Foundering!

McNaughton’s Group   http://api.photoshop.com/home_e4b2cc204d524b3d823d04799a29b3dd/adobe-px-thumbnails/e065d085ea3e420992072ea49f8ed957/1024.jpg?md=1283986880000

Special thanks to the eagle eyes at Wonkette, who’ve spotted a big one.

Extraordinarily cheezeball artist Jon McNaughton has brought forth a gathering of greats, as the ghosts of presidents past hover around sullen, stand-offish looking Barack Obama, variously annoyed or aghast at his literal TRAMPLING ON THE CONSTITUTION!

McNaughton is the kind of crank who rambles along in incoherent Founderspeak for numbered paragraphs, passive aggressively concluding:

“The information is historical. If it is not familiar to you – Google it.

Cramming all these figures into the frame seems to have skewed McNaughton’s perspective.  Small but perfectly formed James Madison is so upset at Obama’s boot-heel to our liberties that he’s bent over pleading, but appears to be almost Obama’s height.   The Forgotten Man is a giant seated on a toy town bench. Such is the occasion that Franklin Roosevelt walks.

McNaughton’s painting doesn’t leave much to chance, featuring ominous clouds, flags at half staff, and an accompanying video lush with  piano chords of doom.

Barack Obama: Library Site Speculation Starts Here!

America’s Next Great Presidential Library? pullman-building.jpg

Chicago photographer/architecture writer Lee Bey has nominated a great South-Side Chicago location for the inevitable Barack Obama Presidential Library: the remaints of the Pullman railroad works.

Pullman was the scene of an epic 1894 battle pullman-shooting.jpg

for workers right to organize,  crushed by federal troops dispatched by Grover Cleveland.

pullman-engine-troops.gif

With the additional benefit of being near where Obama got his start as a community organizer.

Pullman was built as a model company town, but when the workers struck to oppose a wage cut a violent strike spread across the country as workers boycotted Pullman-built railroad cars.

Future Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs   debs.jpg rose to prominence as the strike leader  pullman-debs-you-railroad-men.jpg of the American Railway Union.   He was jailed after the strike, read Marx, and emerged a socialist.

What’s left of the works is owned by the state of Illinois.

Pullman In Happier Times pullman-wide.jpg

Grover Cleveland, our contemporary?

heisels-grovercleveland.jpg

What didn’t he foretell! Presidential homes as tent pole for real estate speculation, child bride marrying, descendants reduced to reenactors?

Upstate New York citizens are slowly awakening to the tourist gold which lies at their feet, and yet another “presidential library” is the pan through which Buffalo’s ore will be sifted, or something.

As you are no doubt aware, Grover Cleveland served America not only as our only non-continuously termed chief executive [and as one bounced from office while receiving the majority vote], but as Buffalo Mayor and New York Governor.

Buffalo sees the tour buses rolling in. Not only will the Cleveland “Library” promote presidentus interruptus, but the town can cash in on the McKinley assassination at last!

And none too soon. The home where McKinley died after his crazed anarchist encounter [is there any other kind?] was sadly destroyed.

A rather pathetic stone in a road strip marks the shooting site where the Temple of Music stood.

mark030a.jpg

Teddy Roosevelt has had the luck of having the Buffalo home where he took the oath preserved, so presidentists who also share a late Victorian furniture passion have somewhere to go.