Will Gets Presidential

Good President's Day morning, Stroock's Books reader(s).  Time for the annual Stroock's Books President's Day Spectacular.

The best presidents are Washington, Lincoln (sorry Johnnies), TR, FDR and Reagan. The worst presidents are Jackson, Buchanan, Wilson, Hoover, and Obama*. Polk is underrated. So is McKinley. Had JFK lived there's no reason to think he wouldn't have left Washington in disgrace like Johnson did. JFK got us into Vietnam and it was all the same people advising Johnson. Nixon did nothing wrong except beating the establishment. Trump is the best president of the 21st century by a mile. Oh, and Trump won. 

A note on bad presidents, we won't include Jimmy Carter on the list even though he was the most ex of ex-presidents, as PJ O'Rourke wrote. President Carter is a man in mourning and hospice. There's no rehabilitating his presidency, it sucked. But we can think of half a dozen good things he did. These include appointing Paul Volcker to the Fed and telling Brezhnev if he sent the tanks into Poland there would be severe diplomatic consequences. An interesting man (farmer, nuclear submariner) a good man. Should have been a preacher. 

We're not sure how we feel about George W. Bush anymore. When we began this blog nine years ago, we described ourselves as an unreconstructed Neocon and wanted Marco Rubio for the GOP nom. In 2015 we would have listed W's accomplishments thusly: handling 9/11, liberating Afghanistan, winning the Iraq war, 53 straight months of economic growth, handling the financial crisis and TARP which was 100 percent paid back. But W let us get sucked into Afghanistan when we should have blown it to bits and left. The Iraq war was a mistake. And maybe we should have let the banks fail. This paragraph kicks off presidential greatness rumination week at Stroock's Books. 

We cast our first vote in the New York Democrat primary for Paul Tsongas.** Thereafter we voted for Clinton, Dole, W, W, McCain, Trump, Trump. 

The Times of Israel says Benny Gantz has given Hamas till the beginning of Ramadan (March 10) to release the hostages or else. This makes Israel look like it's making a good faith effort to negotiate. 'We tried' Bibi can say when negotiations fail. Also, this blog suspects the Israelis will use this time to take out some remaining Hamas bastions in central Gaza. Or maybe it's a trick and the Israelis will hit Rafah tomorrow. You know what the imams say. 

What Will's Watching: John Wick. We've never seen John Wick but have always heard good things about it. What the hell is this crap?! We were profoundly moved by the film's first ten minutes or so. We even had that damn emotional reaction. Then the movie devolved into comic book action with Wick slaying a dozen assassins on his own. We became bored about halfway through and turned the telly off. 1/4

After all these years, good reviews of A Line through the Desert are nice to see:

Which brings us to 2004 and More. Twenty years ago we were writing ALTD. We'd work on the MS in the mornings at a Bedminster coffee shop called The Daily Grind, where management told us we were part of the ambience. We can't recall exactly which chapters we were working on in February 2004. But we do remember it was just about this time that we bought one of those trendy black leather jackets. And, and(!) we picked up a guitar for the first time. We wanted to rock. And so we rocked: 

The above clip fulfils this blog's Monday Metal content requirement. 

*Ineligible to hold office but elected anyway. 

**Other primary votes include McCain in 2000, McCain in 2008 (we gave money to Rudy in 2008), Paul in 2012 (it was over by the time New Jersey held the primary, so why not?), Trump (also over), and Trump.