What Were They Thinking? New & Revised: Really Bad Ideas Throughout History (2 of 3 free samples)

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What Were They Thinking? New & Revised: Really Bad Ideas Throughout History by Bruce Felton. Copyright 2003, 2007 by Bruce Felton
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THOUSANDS FLEE AS MUTANT CHEESE ATTACKS WHITE HOUSE

BAD IDEAS IN AMERICAN POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT

WACKOS ON THE BENCH.

Two U.S. presidents appointed madmen to the Supreme Court.

When John Jay retired as chief justice in 1795, President George Washington named jurist John Rutledge to fill the spot. Although Rutledge had been acting strangely since his wife's death three years before, Washington apparently considered a touch of dementia insufficient reason to keep a man off the highest court in the land.

Rutledge didn't take long to bite the hand that appointed him. When the Jay Treaty was signed, giving preferential treatment to the North, the South Carolina-born Rutledge railed publicly against Washington in such abusive and insulting language that even his supporters were shocked.

Rutledge managed to serve a full term as chief justice before the Senate got around to voting him out on grounds of "intermittent insanity." As if to vindicate their judgment, Rutledge immediately attempted to drown himself. On his death in 1800, one associate said, "His mind was frequently too much deranged as to be in a great measure deprived of his sense."

Pennsylvania attorney Henry Baldwin was appointed to the court by his crony, President Andrew Jackson, in 1829. A workaholic long before the word was coined, he would go weeks with little sleep or food, surviving on a steady diet of small black Mexican cigars. According to H. L. Carson in his History of the Supreme Court of the United States, Baldwin bickered incessantly with his fellow justices, loved playing malicious practical jokes, and "was occasionally violent and ungovernable in his conduct on the bench." A compulsive speculator, he went seriously into debt, growing paranoid and reclusive and alienating his closest associates. When he died in 1844, the few friends of his left had to take up a collection to bury him.

HONK IF YOU LOVE RADIATION SICKNESS, BIRTH DEFECTS, AND THE END OF CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT.

The Nevada state legislature authorized a new license plate in 2002 depicting a mushroom cloud from an atomic explosion. The design, awarded first prize in a competition sponsored by the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation, symbolized the 928 nuclear-weapons tests conducted in the Nevada desert from 1945 through 1992. "It was meant to honor former workers at the test site and the role it played in winning the Cold War," said a foundation spokesman.

But the fallout was not altogether positive. "I find it extremely tasteless," said Denise Nelson, director of Support and Education for Radiation Victims. "Even Germany had enough conscience to not put a gas chamber on their license plates."

Ultimately the plate proved something of a bomb itself: In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles rejected the concept, noting that "any reference on a license plate to weapons of mass destruction is inappropriate and would likely offend our citizens."
THOUSANDS FLEE AS MUTANT CHEESE ATTACKS WHITE HOUSE.

In 1835 an upstate New York dairy farmer named Thomas Meacham decided to show his support for President Andrew Jackson by sending him an immense wheel of cheese.

For more than a week, Meacham collected the milk produced by his 150 cows, turning it into 1,400 pounds of prime cheddar. He shaped it into a wheel 4 feet across and 2 feet thick, which he wrapped in muslin and girdled with a tricolor bunting featuring patriotic slogans and representations of each of the states.

The mammoth cholesterol bomb was carried to Washington on a flag-draped cart pulled by twenty-four horses. For the next two years, it aged quietly at room temperature in a White House vestibule. Then on February 22, 1837--ten days before Jackson was to depart the presidency--the cheese was brought out and served at a Washington's Birthday bash at the executive mansion.

Shops and businesses shut down for the day. Congressmen, cabinet members, ambassadors, and socialites showed up; so did thousands of ordinary citizens. "Mr. Van Buren was there to eat cheese," reported one Washington newspaper. "Mr. Webster was there to eat cheese; Mr. Woodbury, Colonel Benton, Mr. Dickerson--all were there to eat cheese . . . All you heard was cheese; all you smelled was cheese."

In fact there was cheese everywhere--staining the carpets, ground into the parquet floorboards, smeared on the walls, rubbed into the drapes. Guests left with crumbs of the stuff in their hair and in their pockets; it is said that the stink of overripe cheddar could be smelled for blocks. Inside the White House the odor didn't fade till well into the Van Buren Administration.

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"I didn't inhale."

--Presidential candidate Bill Clinton, on being asked if he smoked marijuana as a university student

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