How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country
Daniel O'Brien
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 038534757X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Make no mistake: Our founding fathers were more bandanas-and-muscles than powdered-wigs-and-tea.
As a prisoner of war, Andrew Jackson walked several miles barefoot across state lines while suffering from smallpox and a serious head wound received when he refused to polish the boots of the soldiers who had taken him captive. He was thirteen years old. A few decades later, he became the first popularly elected president and served the nation, pausing briefly only to beat a would-be assassin with a cane to within an inch of his life. Theodore Roosevelt had asthma, was blind in one eye, survived multiple gunshot wounds, had only one regret (that there were no wars to fight under his presidency), and was the first U.S. president to win the Medal of Honor, which he did after he died. Faced with the choice, George Washington actually preferred the sound of bullets whizzing by his head in battle over the sound of silence.
And now these men—these hallowed leaders of the free world—want to kick your ass.
Plenty of historians can tell you which president had the most effective economic strategies, and which president helped shape our current political parties, but can any of them tell you what to do if you encounter Chester A. Arthur in a bare-knuckled boxing fight? This book will teach you how to be better, stronger, faster, and more deadly than the most powerful (and craziest) men in history. You’re welcome.
throw toilet paper at a house. I attacked books with a similar amount of gusto and, no, I didn’t think there was anything weird about this (and, no, I didn’t get invited to a lot of parties). I consumed everything I could. Biographies, autobiographies. The journal of John Quincy Adams. The financial records of George Washington. The private letters of Warren G. Harding. Pictures of JFK in a swimsuit. All of it. I was trying to crack a code. I was looking for similarities between not just our
mayor, senator, and eventually the governor of Tennessee, but unfortunately for him, he didn’t fit in there, either. As a Southerner who supported the Union during the Civil War, Johnson was hated by all of Tennessee, even though his position was “Hey, I like having slaves too, but wouldn’t it be better if we weren’t all killing each other?” It might seem strange that someone so disliked would even get elected as governor, but because this is Johnson we’re talking about, you have to assume that
president, and that’s why today we have the Pacific Ocean. Taft wasn’t just hilariously fat, he was also hilariously fat. As a result of his considerable weight, Taft had a problem with gas and flatulence (considered by many to be the ghosts of food trying to escape). He would embarrass the rest of his staff by burping and farting too much in front of visiting foreign dignitaries, and if that’s not bad enough, shut up, you’re lying, that’s totally bad enough. Taft would eat so much that he’d
early, because all of that fight-fleeing, hair-braiding, and general pussifying in which Truman so regularly engaged stopped dead when he got older. It seems that decades of running from fights turned into a burning desire to get into fights when he was older, which might be why he signed up to fight in World War I back in 1917. Despite how bad he was at literally everything he’d ever tried, Truman advanced quickly in the military and, in 1918, was made captain of Battery D (also known as “Dizzy
prepare us for a life in government (“Get over yourself”). His only ambition was to spend the next semester getting us “mentally equipped enough to properly read the newspaper, but honestly I don’t even think most of you could handle that. Especially not you, in the pajama pants, in public, during the day, goddammit come on, are those women’s pants? You are a boy.” Out of every crotchety insult he delivered in his opening lecture (and every crotchety insult he would aim at me throughout the