Will The Whigs Rise On The Ashes Of The GOP-- Just As The Republicans Were Born As The Whigs Disintegrated?

Last weekend, after my attack on the honor of Millard Fillmore, I got a very long and very... interesting letter from the Whig Party. I was fascinated and asked why I couldn't post it here (which is what the Whig requested). What followed was an even longer explanation of why not and finally, an official guest post from the Whigs. In defense of the Whigs, above and beyond my appreciation for the Afghan Whigs, I should say that in the Revolutionary War "whigs" were considered the people who opposed aristocratic rule, supported the supremacy of the congress over the presidency and opposed all trade policy that smacked of anything like NAFTA or CAFTA. They opposed the secessionist Calhoun doctrines that were sweeping the South then (and now). And Abraham Lincoln got his start as a Whig. Are they making a come-back? Many mainstream Republicans, sickened by their own party's turn towards fascism and mindless obstructionism, have been flocking to the Whigs' banner. This is the letter I had permission to republish (by a secretive Whig Party official):

I’m writing to you as a Whig. I have been registered to vote in the Whig Party for many years. I am writing to complain about your defamatory allegations smearing the last Whig Party President, Millard Fillmore. On Saturday, May 2, 2009 you wrote on your Down with Tyranny blog that Millard Fillmore was “perhaps the worst President before George Bush.”

Millard Fillmore signed the Statehood Act so you could have a State of California to live in. Millard Fillmore dispatched Commodore Perry to Japan, so that you can have Japanese cars to ride around in. The United States ratified a guano treaty with Peru under Millard Fillmore.

There have been dozens of Presidents who each undertook far worse actions or inactions as President than anything Millard Fillmore did or didn’t do as President. Millard Fillmore did not launch any genocidal wars. In Fillmore’s era, both Jackson and Polk encouraged genocidal behavior. After Fillmore left the Presidency, our nation was stuck with President Franklin Pierce (“hero of many a well fought bottle”) and then President James Buchanan. Even court historians consider Pierce and Buchanan to each to have been much worse Presidents than Millard Fillmore.

Millard Fillmore was the last Whig Party President from 1850 to 1853. In 1856 Millard Fillmore was the Presidential candidate of both the Whig Party remnants and the once secret “Know-Nothings.” Millard Fillmore had not been nominated to run for President by the Whigs in 1852 primarily because the Whigs wanted to run a general for President. Generals had previously been the only types of candidates Whigs could successfully elect to the Presidency. The Whig Party fell apart more than the Democratic Party did before the 1852 election because the Whig Party candidate, General Winfield Scott, had proclaimed that he supported the Whig Party platform for the 1852 election when seemingly nobody else supported that Platform.

Millard Fillmore retired from the Presidency, toured Europe, and then accepted the “Know-Nothings” 1856 nomination of the “American Party” after the “Know-Nothings” had surfaced their political party under that name. Millard Fillmore wanted to run for President and the American Party and the Whig Party remnants wanted a well known person to be their 1856 Presidential candidate. Millard Fillmore was about as ardent in trying to be a “Know-Nothing” as Arlen Spector or Joe Lieberman are now as devoted in trying to be progressive Democrats.

Millard Fillmore took over the Presidency after Zachary Taylor died. Zachary Taylor was probably assassinated by arsenic poisoning, which was covered up by the use of a cover story that alleged that Zachary Taylor had died of an overdose of iced milk and cherries.

Zachary Taylor was a general who was famous for hating politics and politicians. Zachary Taylor had never voted in a Presidential election in his life. Zachary Taylor didn’t even know he was running for President for weeks after his nomination by the Whig Party convention, because Zachary Taylor had refused to pay the ten cents postage due on the letter first notifying him of his candidacy.

The Whigs had nominated Zachary Taylor for President because he was regarded as being a military hero. The only previous time the Whig Party had won a Presidential election in 1840 it was believed it was because they had run William Henry Harrison, who was also regarded as being a military hero, as their candidate.

Zachary Taylor was quoted as saying “I am a Whig, but not an ultra-Whig.”

Zachary Taylor was also quoted as saying “The idea that I should become President seems to me too visionary to require a serious answer. It has never entered my head, nor is it likely to enter the head of any sane person.”

Mrs. Zachary Taylor was quoted as saying “His nomination is a plot to deprive me of his society and to shorten his life by unnecessary care and responsibility.”

The term of office of the evil genocidal President James Polk from the Democratic Party officially ended at noon on Sunday, March 4, 1849. Zachary Taylor scheduled his inauguration for Monday, March 5, 1849, since he didn’t want to be inaugurated on the Sabbath day.

President Polk had kept the Senate in a day and a half long session trying to complete additional business from Friday evening until 7 AM on the Sunday morning when Polk’s term in office was ending. The Senate leader, Senator David Rice Atchison, then returned to his rooming house and told his landlady “Don’t wake me up for anything.” At noon on that Sunday, David Rice Atchison became President under terms of the Constitution, since because Zachary Taylor had not been inaugurated. After noon people started to show to tell Atchison he was President, but his landlady wouldn’t wake him up. Atchison was later quoted as stating that he had slept soundly through his entire term as President of the United States.

Zachary Taylor was inaugurated on Monday, March 5, 1849, because Zachary Taylor didn’t want to be inaugurated on the Sabbath day. Zachary Taylor died in the White House on July 9, 1850. Zachary Taylor and William Henry Harrison were the only two Presidents whose actual deaths occurred inside the White House, after being the only two Presidents to be elected by the Whig Party.

In 1991 Zachary Taylor’s body was disinterred so it could be checked for arsenic poisoning. Even though the historical evidence provided indications of acute arsenic poisoning, the 1991 exam only checked Zachary Taylor’s body for chronic arsenic poisoning. There were means of checking for acute arsenic poisoning, but the examination of Zachary Taylor’s body did not include those checks. Was that yet a further continuation of the cover up of the probable conspiracy which led to the assassination of Zachary Taylor?

William Henry Harrison was the first President to be elected by the Whig Party. Whigs believe that William Henry Harrison was America’s greatest President, because William Henry Harrison was the only President not to launch our nation into any sort of disaster through some action of Presidential ineptitude during his term in office.

William Henry Harrison had said nothing during the 1840 campaign, and relied on the Whig Party’s singing campaign to get elected as President. Our copy of the 1840 Log Cabin Song-Book that was published to support William Henry Harrison’s campaign has 50 song lyrics printed in a 68 page booklet. The original Whig Party existed prior to the invention of loudspeakers, radio, television, or internet. The only sort of mass communication Whigs could engage in consisted of political campaign “Sing-A-Longs.”

William Henry Harrison delivered an inaugural speech that reportedly lasted for an hour and three quarters. William Henry Harrison didn’t have loudspeakers, so he had to shout out his speech into a freezing windstorm. William Henry Harrison wasn’t wearing a hat or topcoat. Before William Henry Harrison delivered the inaugural speech he spent three hours sitting on his horse in the inaugural parade. William Henry Harrison caught a cold. That cold eventually turned to pneumonia, and William Henry Harrison died slightly less than one month after taking office. William Henry Harrison was the only President with no recorded fuckups as President.

William Henry Harrison took three actions as President. William Henry Harrison withdrew all pending nominations from consideration by the Senate. William Henry Harrison issued a call for Congress to conduct an extraordinary session to attempt to address the nation’s debt problems, which Congress did about two months after his death. The third action was the greatest attempt to avoid election corruption by any American President, so it’s been covered up for over one hundred years. William Henry Harrison ordered his Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, to send a circular letter to every federal government office so as to inform every federal employee that William Henry Harrison would regard it as “cause of removal” from office for any federal employee to either give or receive any campaign contributions.

Vice President John Tyler was playing marbles with one of his sons when he received news that President William Henry Harrison had died. A few months after John Tyler assumed the Presidency, in September 1841 the Whig Party staged an elaborate ceremony on Capitol Hill replete with drummers to literally drum John Tyler out of the Whig Party. Most of the cabinet members resigned. John Tyler was then known as the President without a Party.

John Tyler took many cabinet members and members of Congress on a river cruise on February 28, 1844 aboard the USS Princeton. The reason for the cruise was to witness the firing of the new “Peacemaker” naval gun. The gun blew up during preparations for firing a third shot, killing eight men. Included in the dead were Secretary of State Abel Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Gilmore, and Senator David Gardiner from New York.

John Tyler’s wife had died in 1842. Three months after the Princeton explosion, John Tyler went to New York and married David Gardiner’s daughter Julia, who was thirty years younger than John Tyler. John Tyler didn’t run for President in 1844 because he was unsuccessful in trying to find a political party that wanted him to run for President. About three weeks before John Tyler’s term in office ended, Julia Tyler threw a “splendid party” in the White House. Julia Tyler was repeatedly quoted as saying “They can’t say John Tyler is a President without a Party any more” during her “splendid party.”

The first documented assertion of the “State’s Secret” privilege occurred when the Democratic President James Polk refused to share with Congress information about secret activities that had occurred in John Tyler’s administration. The only cabinet member who had not resigned in September 1841 was Secretary of State Daniel Webster, who was trying to negotiate the Maine boundary dispute with the British Minister Ashburton. The Webster-Ashburton treaty was ratified in August 1842, after which Daniel Webster also resigned from John Tyler’s cabinet. (Daniel Webster had apparently secretly spent government funds to purchase advertising in “religious newspapers” supporting the Maine boundary negotiations. President Polk asserted the State’s Secrets privilege in denying the documents to Congress several years later.)

It is important to us as Whigs to assert that the “State’s Secrets” assertion was made by a Democrat regarding something done under the authority of a “President without a Party” as Tyler had been ejected from the Whig Party before the period of negotiations between Webster and Ashburton. Whigs should not be smeared with State’s Secrets allegations like the Democrats and Republicans deserve to be smeared.

Our revival of the Whig Party is our bicentennial joke that has been backfiring on us for over thirty years. For many years we Whigs considered ourselves to be a “secret” political party, since that was a way for us to align our joking conceptual art politics with Millard Fillmore. We made up our “top secret” political demands because we were sure that our political demands would never get publicized. That way we could have a secret political party. Whigs are the “Party of Honest Corruption and Willing Incompetence,” offering “A choice, not an echo” to the dishonest corruption and unwilling incompetence offered by both Republicans and Democrats. We frequently promised to try to honestly embezzle campaign contributions.

The short version of our “top secret” political demand is “Let’s have juries award broadcast licenses.” The longer version is “Broadcast licenses should be awarded by randomly selected juries, should be non-salable, non-renewable, and the winning applicant for each broadcast license has to perform “Re-Affirmative Action!” by serving for one month every year in a randomly selected jail or prison.” We were confident that specific Whig Party political message would never be effectively broadcast, so we could be a secret political party.

What kept our Whig Party political activities from being a complete joke was our dual purpose use of the Whigs as political insurance. Back in the 1970s several of our original supporters had friends who lived in a notorious anarchist collective. We feared inadvertently visiting that collective immediately prior to the launch of a police raid, which might result in our having to face with some sort of “conspiracy” criminal charges arising from our very presence.

Having learned from watching the Oakland 7 and Chicago 8 trials that the government could allege anything from a wide variety of behaviors as might be viewed as contributing to a conspiracy, we’d also learned that broader defenses are allowed to defend against conspiracy charges. We figured that if we had to face conspiracy charges, and if we had a political party with pre-existing literature (no matter how flaky the politics espoused by our political party were) we could try to use our political party to help mount a political defense to the conspiracy charges. Our bicentennial Whig Party platform was composed both for comedy and also in part to prepare for such a defense by trying to be really insulting to lawyers and Judges.

Our plans were to keep our mouths shut during an arrest. We would have a lawyer tell the court at arraignment that we had been visiting the anarchists in order to debate politics with the Whig Party’s honorable opposition, the anarchists. We considered the Republicans and Democrats to be the dishonorable opposition to the Whig Party. We planned on demanding that the jury be told about our political outlooks and our beliefs that we were engaging in first amendment protected free speech activities. Our “plan” was to show the Judges and prosecution that we could cause them to blow through too much of their budget in trying to prosecute us. We hoped our plan might cause them to offer us a better deal than they might otherwise offer to us. We never actually had to test that legal survival theory.

We had a series of surreal adventures as Whig Party organizers during the bicentennial that made us resolve to stay as Whigs until somebody actually came up with a reasonable political party that we could believe in for our nation. Since nobody ever came up with anything that we considered to be a reasonable political party, we ended up staying registered to vote as Whigs. It is a distinctive measure of the surrealism afflicting our nation that we’re managing to convince ourselves that our joking comedy bicentennial Whig Party platform seems to be ending up offering our nation a better political platform than anything provided by the Republicans or Democrats.

The Whig Party has been both our "Shelf" Party and our "Stealth" Party for more than thirty years. We're a "Shelf" Party in that we have a political party sitting on the shelf for us to use whenever we feel like it, and a "Stealth" Party because we haven't tried for much publicity before now. We've been mostly content to be a "do nothing" political party that we've been keeping available for our use. We did get over 1000 bicyclists to "follow the Whig Party line" on a Critical Mass bicycle ride route which was aligned to cover portions of every street named after famous Whigs in northeast San Francisco to celebrate President John Tyler's 206th birthday on March 29, 1996.

You can read about some of our Whig Party politics at the February 9, 2009 entry (which was Whig President William Henry Harrison’s 236th birthday) at Radio Bolo, Alex Bennett's website. If you want a Whig Party leaflet, send a self addressed stamped envelope to the Whig Party, P. O. Box 4210, Berkeley, California 94704.

If you've gotten all the way to the bottom of this you have earned an opportunity to listen to 6 new Green Day songs from their upcoming album. Have a nice night!


UPDATE: Will Joe The Plumber Join The Whigs Now?

According to the new issue of Time Magazine, Joe the Plumber-- the target demo-- is also leaving the GOP!

[A]re the Republicans going extinct? And can the death march be stopped? The Washington critiques of the Republican Party as powerless, leaderless and rudderless — the new Donner party — are not very illuminating. Minority parties always look weak and inept in the penalty box. Sure, it can be comical to watch Republican National Committee (RNC) gaffe machine Michael Steele riff on his hip-hop vision for the party or Texas Governor Rick Perry carry on about secession or Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann explain how F.D.R.'s "Hoot-Smalley" Act caused the Depression (the Smoot-Hawley Act, a Republican tariff bill, was enacted before F.D.R.'s presidency), but haplessness does not equal hopelessness. And yes, the Republican brand could benefit from spokesmen less familiar and less reviled than Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich, but the party does have some fresher faces stepping out of the wings. (Read seven clues to understanding Dick Cheney.)... A hard-right agenda of slashing taxes for the investor class, protecting marriage from gays, blocking universal health insurance and extolling the glories of waterboarding produces terrific ratings for Rush Limbaugh, but it's not a majority agenda. The party's new, Hooverish focus on austerity on the brink of another depression does not seem to fit the national mood, and it's shamelessly hypocritical, given the party's recent history of massive deficit spending on pork, war and prescription drugs in good times, not to mention its continuing support for deficit-exploding tax cuts in bad times.

...Samuel Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, tells TIME he's so outraged by GOP overspending, he's quitting the party — and he's the bull's-eye of its target audience.

I doubt the Whigs would want him-- although I suspect they'll take anyone-- but in any case, this has got to be the best news the GOP has heard in eons.