Planet of the Apes

Who knows what opinion polls mean, but this one at least was the product of presidential historians. According to CNN a panel of scholars organized by the University of Louisville's McConnell Center released a list of the top 10 American presidential blunders during a President's Day weekend conference called "Presidential Moments."

It’s astonishing to me that incidents like the Teapot Dome scandal didn’t make the list at all, but Clinton’s escapade did. Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate child did not, but Monica did.

Warren G. Harding and the Teapot Dome scandal are not to be found, but Bill Clinton’s transgression made number ten on the list which begins with James Buchanan’s failure to prevent the Civil war and includes Lyndon Johnson’s letting the Viet Nam war escalate. Clinton’s affair was far more important than these other failures, according to the McConnell panel.

If you wonder why I consider the human race itself to be such a colossal blunder, the very least worthy of survival of all the apes, the answer is to be found above. Of all the items in the list, Clinton’s tawdry episode caused no tragedy for anyone. To include it on the same page as events that caused 600,000 deaths in the civil war, or Woodrow Wilson's refusal to compromise on the Treaty of Versailles after World War I which may have contributed to tens of millions of deaths is so much more than astonishing that I have no word to describe it.

Of course these are experts, who make a living being experts and not necessarily by being objective, yet a CNN poll attached to the article shows that while 28% of respondents chose Buchanan’s failure to avert the Civil War as the more egregious, 24% chose – you guessed it – Bill Clinton and Monica.

I’m not at all proud to be human.