The Tim Thomas Flap

Sorry, there have been technical difficulties with the blog the last couple of days. I lost an interesting post on dog DNA which I'll try to repost later today.

Figure I should weigh in on Tim Thomas since everyone else has. Frankly, I don't know if I would have visited the George W. Bush White House if the OA Mock Trial Team ever won the National Championship. The good news is it would have been a moot question since I probably couldn't have passed the security check anyway. There's the team thing and the "respect the office" argument to consider. I understand the team thing-"there's no I in team, although there's definitely an I in Tim" was something I heard all week. That's the most compelling argument for visiting the White House even if Der Fuhrer is in office-don't embarrass the team. Anyway the Mock Trial Team would need a chaperon lest they steal the White House silver for souvenirs.

I always thought the "Respect the Office, if not the Man" argument was a crock. Heck, we're paying this guy's salary. If I don't like the person who I pay to paint my house, I fire him-I don't muse on the fact that he represents the latest in a line that stretches back to Michelangelo (Geez, Mike your girls all look like East German weight lifters). This isn't a partisan thing for me. I liked Ike. JFK not so much-would America have been better off if he had slipped Bill Clinton some advice on conducting extramarital affairs when kid Clinton visited the White House? No problem with Ford, Carter, and George H. W. Bush-easy to respect those three. I had students working in the first Clinton White House, but wouldn't have visited in the second term. Here's the rub I would have thought twice about visiting LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan, but in retrospect I would have been wrong. I've come to see LBJ and Nixon as tragic figures who would have liked to have done better-interesting to meet. Reagan in retrospect gets high marks in foreign policy and Tip O'Neil liked him. Respect the office because you don't know how the guy will turn out? Maybe.

I had a revelation yesterday. There is a fatal flaw in our Constitution. The President is both head of state and head of the government. The British do it better. The Queen is the head of state and gets to go to all the ribbon cutting and state funerals while the Prime Minister gets yelled at by all the opposition back benchers and soccer hooligans. I'm proposing a Constitutional Amendment to create a hereditary head of state (hey, it's not as stupid as some of the amendments I've heard lately). The position has to be hereditary otherwise partisan wrangling will cause the Tim Thomas problem all over again. The amendment would give the White House to the Head of State while the President would have to sleep on a cot in the Old Executive Office Building (Take that Willard). I have a short list of who should be the founder of our hereditary Head of State Dynasty. Justin Bieber is at the head of the list and just think he could sing the National Anthem at all those ribbon cuttings. Helen Mirren would be my second choice since she's already played the Queen, but I don't know about her kids (maybe she could adopt Bieber).

The Brits really did a good job splitting off the head of state. If they didn't have the Queen, they'd have all those empty palaces and no tourists to visit them. Another thing the British did that Americans should consider: they burned Washington. Get a torch Timmy.