Turn your holiday vibe into a public declaration this year. The Skelly Family 2010 Christmas Website puts a gauge on your holiday spirit and shows you how your own emotional state tracks with everyone else’s.

Are you the Grinch, or are you George Bailey running through town hollering like an idiot without a hat or winter coat on? Click Here, cast your ballot and find out. Immediate results!

We live in an uncivil age. Everywhere cross, discontented and peevish people. All the time angry, nasty, obnoxious stuff blasting us through the airwaves. What will become of us?

Time was when a Senator would never be heard uttering a bad word in public against a colleague. No more. The Senator from Arizona just snuck across the border for the express purpose of attacking not just the politics but the character of his counterpart from California. right on her own turf. “Will the gentleman yield for a personal attack?”

Courtly gentility? Nuh-uh! Common courtesy? Out the window. Respect for higher office? Only a quaint notion receding swiftly into the foggy mists of our political past.

If you’re President these days, people don’t just disagree with you. They question your loyalty. They question your patriotism. They ask to see your papers.

Several newspapers just ran a story in which a former Presidential contender characterized the administration’s recent, highly scrutinized social reform package as “a fraud on the working man.” An American Bar Association leader called it “the President’s attempt to Sovietize the country.” Some folks at the AMA dismissed it as a “compulsory socialistic tax.”

Only this wasn’t Obamacare. The year was 1935, the President was FDR and the program was Social Security. See, the truth is, we’ve been trashing our Presidents ever since we had Presidents. Bad mouthing our politicians is a tradition that goes back centuries in this country. You might say incivility directed at the body politic is as American as cherry pie.

George Washington was a universally revered icon of high-minded American political ideals. Until he was elected President. Then, almost overnight, came the rise of political parties, a development that Washington regarded with great disapproval and devoutly wished would go away. And then even The Father of our Country started getting scalded by partisan critics. One newspaper branded him a "scourge and misfortune.” Thomas Jefferson, a protege, publicly questioned his intelligence.

On leaving office at the end of his second term, Washington cautioned the nation about the destructive course of party politics.

“It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.” On this, his last abjuration, the American public was disinclined to take his word. It’s been off to the races, and the invective, ever since. What might he think now, at the prospect of $2 billion being spent “getting the message out” for a mid-term election?

John Adams fared worse than Washington. He was attacked relentlessly by his Democratic-Republican opponents, led by Jefferson, on one side and by members of his own Federalist party, led by Hamilton, on the other. Adams took to spending long stretches of time away from the capital, governing from afar.

Our second President was our first one-term President. He didn’t even hang around long enough to welcome his successor, Jefferson, to the White House, and he never returned to the capital city again.

Andrew Jackson was known as a hot-headed madman, and his wife a whore, although enemies who criticized our 15th President did so assuming some measure of personal risk. If old Hickory got wind of what they were saying, he was likely to hunt them down and personally beat the snot out of them.

Jackson, it seems, was guided in life by those same angels who directed the protagonist of the old Johnny Cash chestnut about a boy growing up with a girl’s name.

Some gal would giggle and I'd get red.
And some guy'd laugh and I'd bust his head.
I tell ya, life ain’t easy for a boy named Sue.

Speaking of songs, every year at the Preakness, second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown, the US Naval Academy Glee Club leads the crowd at Maryland’s Pimlico race course through a verse of the state song at the post parade.



“Maryland, My Maryland” is the Chesapeake Bay State’s response to “My Old Kentucky Home.” Only a few years back, they had to quick change from singing the first verse to the third.

To their horror, officials realized (a hundred years late) that "Maryland, My Maryland" was a secession hymn, denouncing a bloody riot in April 1861 when southern-sympathizing citizens of Baltimore clashed with Federal troops who were marching through town on their way to protect Washington, D.C. Through nine verses, the lyrics offer a scathing rebuke of Lincoln and, for that matter, the Union itself.

In the passage of time and the cooling of fevers, the folks at both Pimlico and Annapolis had clean forgot what the song was really about.

The despot's heel (that would be Lincoln’s) is on thy shore,
His torch is at thy temple door,
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland! My Maryland!

The third verse is still banging on the same theme, but it’s more general in nature and leaves Lincoln out of it. So now the tradition is more an inside joke than a slap in the face.

Imagine, The Man Who Saved the Union, who is generally regarded as the greatest of American Presidents, savaged in a popular song taught to school kids. A song that endures to this day as a state’s official ditty. Of course, Lincoln suffered far worse. In his political career, he endured criticism that was stingingly caustic, strikingly personal and never-ending. Bear in mind, the Civil War for the first few years looked a lot like Afghanistan.

"If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how—the very best I can; and I mean to keep doing so until the end. If the end brings me out all right, what's said against me won't amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference," he once remarked to an aide.

Former Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant was a drunk. And the only man in his cabinet too stupid to be a crook. Grover Cleveland fathered a bastard child and then abandoned the mother. Richard Nixon had to protest he was not a crook and then resign in disgrace when no one believed him.

Woodrow Wilson died exhausted, heartbroken and beaten-down by national rejection. His rather visionary dream for achieving a lasting world peace, which he worked ceaselessly to hammer out with both the victors and the vanquished of the First World War, was dismissed out of hand by a xenophobic Congress and a short-sighted populace.

Now, even in death, our 26th President, Phi Beta Kappa at Princeton, licensed practicing attorney, holder of a PhD in history and political science from Johns Hopkins—the man who successfully guided the nation through the first true global war, who created the Federal Reserve (and the income tax), invented the 8-hour workday, and signed into law the Federal Trade Commission, Clayton Antitrust, and Federal Farm Loan Acts—still gets his can kicked all over the place on a regular basis by Fox News personality Glenn Beck, a high-school graduate.



Know one President who invariably was spoken well of in his time? Warren G. Harding. Through his entire term, nary a harsh remark was made about the man said to have few enemies because he never took enough of a stand on anything to offend anyone. He even had a marvelously harmonious relationship with the newsmen of his day.

But most of all, he had the good sense to die after three years in office, before his peccadilloes (borne mostly of a polygamous libido, often exercised in the small closet of an anteroom off the oval office: sound familiar?) came to light. Along with the criminal trespasses of several key members of his administration.

Today Harding is generally (and perhaps unfairly) castigated as one of the worst Presidents in history, his name synonymous with corruption, cronyism and incompetence.

So cheer up, Osama bin Obama. As you go about your weary day, ducking and covering against the steady hail of books and brickbats falling all about your thin, beleaguered frame, it may be you’re getting paid a huge compliment.

Calling President John Adams "querulous, bald, blind, crippled and toothless" got Ben Franklin's grandson arrested under the Sedition Act of 1798.