Day564 Thursday 03/15/12

ran 4.6 miles

Couldn’t pass this one up.  While addressing a Community College today in Largo, Maryland, President Barack Obama blamed President Rutherford B. Hayes, America’s nineteenth president, of possessing the mentality of one who believed Earth was flat.  Very insulting.

He went on to explain that the reason Hayes was not sculpted on Mount Rushmore was because when the telephone was invented his presidential predecessor lacked the vision to see the new technology’s potential and had dismissed it.  Our president was comparing his own disinterest in American oil combined with his fixation with alternative energy (regardless of how many layoffs, bankruptcies and tax dollars are compromised each week) to a completely false representation of Rutherford B. Hayes reaction to the invention of the telephone.

Our president wrongly claimed, neglecting a small amount of research an eight-year-old could have performed and would have been expected to perform for an elementary school assignment, that Hayes’ response to the invention of the telephone was “It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?”

Turns out, according to Nancy Kleinhenz of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, Hayes “was very technologically savvy” and he was the first president to utilize a telephone in the White House.  He was also the first president to type on a typewriter and to experiment with the phonograph, eventually recording his voice on Thomas Edison’s gramophone.

From ABCNews, according to Kleinhenz, a Rocky Point, R.I. newspaper article from June 29, 1877 described Hayes as “delighted” when he first experienced listening on the telephone, with “a gradually increasing smile wreathe(d) his lips and wonder shone in his eyes more and more.” Hayes “looked at (the phone) a moment in surprise and remarked, ‘That is wonderful.’”

Kleinhenz went on to explain that the myth about Hayes seeing no potential or wonderment in the invention of the telephone is completely false.

Our president appears to be at a complete loss for crafting realistic analogies and he has run out of people to blame.  He has resorted to falsely blaming a nineteenth century ex-president who obviously cannot defend himself.

You can't make your own history, Mr. President.

344.7 miles to go.

Here is what happened one year ago on Day199.