Name all the presidents

Three or four weeks ago, while condemning the planned burning of the Qur’an in Florida to protest the so-called Ground Zero Mosque, Mississippi governor Henry Barbour said something a little troubling.

When asked his opinion on the reason why so many Americans incorrectly think that Obama is a Muslim, Barbour said “I don’t know why people think what they think.” Which would have been a decent answer, if he hadn’t gone on to describe Obama as “a president that we know less about than any other president in history.”

Later, when he was asked to clarify his assertion, he argued that there isn’t “much known about his, in college, or growing up … we don’t know any of the childhood things… Part of it is the fact that he’d only been in public office a brief period of time… I don’t say it as an insult as anything other than just an observation.”

“How could it happen,” comedian Bill Maher would later ask in response, “that one of the most thoroughly researched and vetted men in our history is suddenly transformed into a giant question mark?

“Let me show you some pictures of Barack Obama,” Maher added. “He smokes, he drinks beer, he eats hotdogs… and he checks out ass. Let me tell you, if he’s a Muslim he stinks at it.”

Indeed, Barbour’s been taking heat for his remarks from the sort of partisan jerks that I tend to agree with in spite of myself, like Maher and Crooks and Liars. And personally, knowing as little as I know about Barbour, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Sure, “Don’t burn the Qur’an because the whole point of our country is supposed to be that we’re above that sort of thing” ought to be much more of a “no brainer” than the politicians and pundits have suggested lately. But that doesn’t mean we can’t call Governor Barbour a guy who happened to say the wrong thing while trying to say the right thing.

But as for the timid, willfully ignorant, and often rampantly intolerant people out there who would gladly latch onto the notion that we know less about Barack Obama than any other president in history, let’s issue a simple challenge:

Name all the presidents.

I mean, delightful Osama puns aside, we all know Barack Obama’s name. So it stands to reason that unless a person can name the forty-three presidents who preceded him in office, they can’t claim to know less about him than any other president in history. Unless, of course, they somehow technically know more about a fellow like John Tyler, for example, even though they’re completely unaware that he was the tenth president.

In fact, that’s a fine example. Let’s challenge all of the birthers out there to tell us more about Tyler than they know about Barack Obama. For the sake of giving them a decent shot, I’d even be willing not to penalize them for each assertion about Obama that’s got no basis in fact whatsoever. Hey, no checking the Internet or paying your first-ever visit to the local library, you sneaky birthers!

Full disclosure? I personally can’t do it. In fact, I doubt I could even name all of my own country’s prime ministers, and we’ve only had twenty-two of those. But I’m not the one putting my own credibility on trial, am I?

By the way, even though I used the term “Ground Zero Mosque” above for the sake of simplicity, I think we should all do our part to try and phase it out, because it’s a deliberately misleading term. For all you analogy fans out there, “Ground Zero Mosque” is basically to “Park51″ as “pro-abortion” is to “pro-choice.”

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