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Please. Please Make It Stop. I Beg You.

November 9th, 2008
By JAZZ SHAW, Assistant Editor

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I sincerely hope that this purported Topeka-Capital Journal article is a hoax… somebody’s very poor idea of a bad joke.

Planning under way for Obama holiday

Plans are being made to promote a national holiday for Barack Obama, who will become the nation’s 44th president when he takes the oath of office Jan. 20.

“Yes We Can” planning rallies will be at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every Tuesday at the downtown McDonald’s restaurant, 1100 Kansas Ave., until Jan. 13. The goals are to secure a national holiday in Obama’s honor, to organize celebrations around his inauguration and to celebrate the 200th birthday of President Abraham Lincoln, who was born on Feb. 12 1809.

Here’s the short version of my response to this. We already have a holiday for Barack Obama. It’s called PRESIDENTS DAY.

This idea approaches criminal stupidity, and no matter how much you may have supported Obama’s candidacy, you should oppose it also. It’s not that I don’t “get” the symbolic importance and historic nature of electing our first president who isn’t a Rich Old White Guy. (ROWG.) I get it. Honestly I do.

The point is, we already have too many damned Federal holidays as it is and I’m always on the lookout to see if we couldn’t combine and reduce a few more. There are all too many days now when I can’t get my mail delivered, have my trash picked up, and I find the neighborhood littered with screaming children who bloody well ought to be in school.

Also, no matter how historic you feel the election was, we have had any number of presidents who were wildly popular in their own time and established admirable legacies which last to this day. Shall we give them all their own separate holidays? Let’s let the Obama administration play out. Something like this, if it is to be considered at all, should properly done by future generations in a posthumous honor after history has had it’s chance to evaluate the full term of his service and his lasting effect on the nation.

And let’s face it… how embarrassed would you be if you did manage to establish this holiday immediately and six years from now Obama got swept up in something like Watergate? (I know… I know… it would never happen. We’ve said that about plenty of politicians. Look how Grant’s presidency turned out and he was a war hero.)

If this story is real - and let’s all hope that it turns out to be a joke - let’s all compose ourselves and step back from the brink, shall we? Thank you. That is all. You may now return to your normal browsing.



This entry was posted on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Holidays, Barack Obama, Society. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 7 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    rallies at a downtown mcdonalds for breakfast and dinner?

    sounds like either a bad promotion, or a very bad racist joke
    • ^
    • v
    I doubt the guy behind this is kidding. I also think he's nuts. The idea is just so ludicrous that it just shouldn't be taken seriously by anyone but some fools will.
    • ^
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    unclejoe40: rallies at a downtown mcdonalds for breakfast and dinner?

    Exactly. You'd think they'd at least find a Starbuck's or an Applebees or something. Also, I'm guessing that if you have more than 100 or so people in Topeka inclined to hug a tree, a line is almost certain to form. I'm just sayin'.
    • ^
    • v
    Well this is so silly.

    I think the leadership void in this country was so deep that a gifted leader like Obama is being deified-- which places a really unfairly high burden of expectations on his shoulders.
    • ^
    • v
    Jazz, what makes you think this is an Obama fan, it could also be a wingnut wackjob plant, just like Obama is a Mooslim.

    I wonder if this supposed story is a plant by a REAL wacked out wingnut. A Google search shows little results for Obama and Reagan being added to Mt. Rushmore. If the story is a Jim Cates plant, the Dutch lad and other at Memo will fall victim to this viral BS. Cates has an add at the Topeka paper, I doubt if he's part of AirAmerika. I wonder how many liberal newspaper exist in Topeka?
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    Yeah, we also have Washington's b'day as a holiday of some sort. Jazz, when you first said that we already had a holiday to celebrate this I thought you were going to say, "Martin Luther King's Day".

    This sounds like a McDonald's promotion....

    I'm all for honoring our nation's heros, but this is too early. While I don't mean to minimize the importance of his historic win but Obama should actually be a sterling president for a couple terms before we start naming a new holiday after him. Come to think about it, maybe the national holiday we already have to honor Obama's triumph isn't President's Day or MLK Day, but Fourth of July, since we are returning our country to a leader who will (I assume) uphold the US Constitution, since that is something Bush was serially unable to do, at least when it came to his own interests and the interest of his cronies.
    • ^
    • v
    I don't disagree that such a notion would be just....nuts...There are some details about this article which are a bit iffy from my vantage point as a "local"...

    ~ Kansas Ave, NW (which eventually becomes Kansas Ave. NE) starts in the Petworth neighborhood of DC and runs to the DC-MD border (it then becomes Kansas Ln.). Most people living around here would call that nowhere near Downtown DC.
    ~ There's no 1100 Kansas Ave. The building numberings on Kansas Ave. start somewhere in the 3600's-3700's and go upward going toward the state line, not downward.
    ~ There's no McDonald's location on Kansas Ave (NW or NE).

    Reading this, I lean more towards "hoax" than fact (though I wouldn't put it past a handful of people to try to do it).

    ~S~
 
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