When it comes to sleaze, modern presidential elections don’t measure up
By Bob Barney
The mass hysteria that the media uses to gin up the masses is at it again. They portray Donald Trump as running the nastiest campaign ever. Back in 2012, Bernie Goldberg, under the headline “Obama’s Campaign One Of The Dirtiest Ever”, argued such a case. He is doing it again now with Donald Trump. The Plain Truth is the media are a part of the "establishment" and all of them have the same agenda as Hillary, The Republican Bigwigs and Wall Street... That is that they love the status quo, and will ruin (maybe kill) anyone that will try to break their monopoly down....
Elections of the past were far nastier and often much more obscene than anything going on today. Trump for example, probably couldn't win against Thomas Jefferson. In his bitter campaign against former friend John Adams, Jefferson said, "Adams was a "hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." Adams' Federalists carried things even further, asking voters, "Are you prepared to see your dwellings in flames... female chastity violated... children writhing on the pike? GREAT GOD OF COMPASSION AND JUSTICE, SHIELD MY COUNTRY FROM DESTRUCTION."
When Andrew Jackson ran against incumbant John Quincy Adams in 1828, it was not pretty. Adams' previous term had not been a very successful one, but he was prepared to sling a little mud anyway. He and his handlers said Jackson had the personality of a dictator, was too uneducated to be president (they claimed he spelled Europe 'Urope'), and hurled all sorts of horrible insults at his wife, Rachel. Rachel had been in an abusive marriage with a man who finally divorced her, but divorce was still quite the scandal at the time. The Federalists called her a "dirty black wench", a "convicted adulteress" and said she was prone to "open and notorious lewdness". On their end, Jackson's people said that Adams had sold his wife's maid as a concubine to the czar of Russia. Jackson won pretty handily.
Grover Cleveland was the Bill Clinton of his time? During his campaign, stories of his lecherousness were plentiful. One was verified, though - Cleveland, while still a bachelor, had fathered a child with a widow named Maria Halpin. He fully supported the child. So really, by today's standards, it probably wouldn't be that much of a scandal. No marriages ruined, no paternity tests, no child support issues. Nevertheless, the Republican party, who supported candidate James Blaine, took this and ran with it. They made up the chant, "Ma! Ma! Where's my pa?" and used it to taunt Cleveland.
In 1928, President Hoover claimed his opponent, Al Smith, a Catholic, had commissioned a secret tunnel 3,500 miles long, from the Holland Tunnel to the Vatican in Rome, and that the Pope would have say in all presidential matters should Smith be elected. It probably didn't help matters that Babe Ruth was a staunch Smith supporter. You think it would work in his favor, but the Babe would show up at events wearing only his undershirt with a mug of beer in one hand. If people opposed his viewpoint, Ruth would simply say, "The hell with you," and be done with them.
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