How about some presidential quotes in anticipation of next month's President's Day?

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. -Franklin Roosevelt

I wonder, did FDR realize what a nightmarish concept he had just introduced? Recursive fear! Fear operating on infinite recursion! To fear fear is to fall into a loop from which there is no exit, a logical black hole where fear is the object of itself and it only increases, ever heightening towards infinite, unflagging terror.

For those of you who may not understand recursion, how about a brief example? Say you have a task titled "Clean the room" that has the following steps:

1. Pick up objects
2. Dust
3. If there is an adjoining uncleaned room, execute task "Clean the room".
4. Finish

Note my expertise in that subject matter is purely theoretical. Anyway, so step 3 is the big recursive bit...the task calls itself. So in that fashion, multiple processes would be running concurrently, and all the "child" sub-tasks (the other rooms) would have to complete before step 4 in the original task could be complete. Not the best illustration, but there you go.

Back to Presidential babblings!

My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. - John Kennedy

A classic, this one. Interesting how devolved we've become, when today politicians say just the opposite; ask what your government can do for you! Answer, everything! Health care, medicare, welfare, Robespierre (well, maybe not that last bit, but it rhymed). The Republicans are certainly not exempt from such pandering but the irony is richest with the Democrats, the party of the Kennedys. Kennedy excoriated the concept of government as a benevolent provider; the modern Leftists celebrate it. Oh, how I miss the days when the Democrats (at the very least) sounded anti-communist.

Last but not least:

There's an old saying in Tennessee (I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee) that says, fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me....you can't get fooled again. - George W. Bush

Let me couch this with the following. I like Dubya. I respect him for a lot of things and my only major criticism of him is his defection from the cause of small government conservatism, subsequently splintering the GOP. Regarding quotes like the above, I think it is endearing if anything. Fifty years ago, presidents didn't have to stand in front of television cameras for hours every week; they could give carefully worded statements to the press, and do occasional radio addresses that were probably well scripted. I don't believe Bush is dumb; I think most Americans share his measure of clumsiness in public speaking, if not exceed it. So for all the hipster 20-somethings swilling their MintMochaChoco-tinis and gassing away about how, like, dumb, you know, our president is, I think that's a case, if you'll pardon my usage of this classic colloquialism, of the Pot Calling the Kettle a Bleeping Worthless Piece of Rat Bleep, or however that goes.

So my advice is to enjoy the above quote at face value; not with a haughty and misguided pride in considering yourself smarter than the President (you probably are not), but with the simple joy of laughing like a deranged chimpanzee at such a mangling of an expression, knowing that there is a chance, were it you on stage, you might have mangled it even more (if you can imagine!).