I can’t even think up a suitable snarky title for this….

Today is Veterans Day in the United States. There is a solemn ceremony every year at Arlington National Cemetery, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where solemn respect is paid to those who died in war for the United States, even the ones who died anonymously. It’s all very solemn.

Unless you’re a narcissistic piece of shit like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who actually had to be admonished for his boorish behavior and for that of the people he was with. Apparently he was laughing and yukking it up like the stupid frat-boy he is. There are times when the complete lack of dignity in the current administration still manages to surprise even me.

But it’s worth taking a look back at what used to be seen as unacceptable “vulgar” behavior on the part of an American President and those in his circle. This is Edmund Morris, writer and biographer of Ronald Reagan, on Bill Clinton:

I remember a photograph from one of Clinton’s first visits to the Oval Office after his first election. He was wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt and was sprawling at his desk. He was drinking a large mug of root beer, and he had his large white thumb projecting through the handle around the tankard. The waves of vulgarity this picture gave off made me have the strong instinct that he was going to vulgarize the office of the presidency.

Reagan believed the office symbolized the dignity of the presidency. And [Clinton] to me was a man bringing in truck-driver values. We have had vulgar Presidents before, and they have not been bad Presidents. Andrew Jackson was just as vulgar as Bill Clinton. There’s something fleshly and uncontrolled, and defiantly vulgar, about Clinton, which I think has been characteristic of his presidency. I think the presidency has lost a large part of its dignity in his tenure.

I don’t know what Morris’s personal politics were, but I recall a bunch of rhetoric about how Clinton, and later Obama, somehow acted at times “beneath the dignity” of the Presidency…and then those same whiners turned around and gave us this guy. Amazing, it really is.

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