Welcome to this Sunday’s Third Degree: Weekly Interrogations on matters public and private that force thinking and response. Today we target: Examples

  • Federal holiday tomorrow, not for President’s Day but ‘officially’ Washington’s birthday (284 years old on 22 February), should President Washington example, fact or fiction, cause contemporary contemplation?
  • Is it fact or fiction that Washington was the only performing President not to live in the White House?
  • Does the living and performing of Presidential duties necessarily entail lucidity? Oh?
  • Has Washington’s enduring fiction, successfully Hail Marrying a coin across the Potomac, been the model for government spending ever since…especially today?
  • Should the Potomac have filled up long ago?
  • Can Washington ever be accused of talking through his teeth?
  • False reporting? Fake news?
  • Besides, not his teeth and not of wood, but actually of bone and tooth from animal and man plus a bit of ivory, so, hooray for modern dentistry?
  • Should we pull teeth, no Novocain, of all the politicians (and media) who talk through their teeth and expect us to buy it?
  • Does 19% approval rating of government in general, less for media, cause a grinding of the teeth for most Americans? And the solution?
  • Would a rational President (to be) stand up in a crowded rowboat crossing an icy river on a winter’s night? Don’t diminish the photo op value?
  • Is a better question, who is the President, or wannabe, willing to stand up, like Washington, on behalf of the people, our economy and individual liberty?
  • Where are our elected representatives welcoming electoral challenge and assailing gerrymandering and volunteering for term limitations?
  • Who can make absence of such actions disqualifying in this year’s election cycle?
  • Does it all come back to the cherry tree? Be it justice or common defense, general welfare, much sought tranquility and the blessings of liberty, is it all about truth and repudiation of those who stampede with lies designed to control.
  • Did Washington, way back then, warn us and did his Veep, John Adams, next in line, and the first President to live in the White House affirm:
  • “To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do. Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. Virtue is not always amiable. Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.”
  • Is that a statement or a question or just example?
  • Does startling and verifiable fact begin with common sense? No matter the chorus, should fiction be rejected?
  • Can we, you and me, be the examples?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living. The actions and answers are yours.