On the day we found out that a Republican Congressman tweeted an image of Nazi soldiers to honor D-Day, we also learned that our faux President thinks — well, let us digress for a bit of history.
See this painting? It's one of five copies of a portrait that Gilbert Stuart did of George Washington. The most famous of these five hangs in the East Room of the White House this very day, and overall, it's one of the best-known images of the nation's first President.
The reason the White House is able to display its copy 222 years after it was painted is because First Lady Dolley Madison insisted on saving it before she fled the capital ahead of invasion.
"Our kind friend, Mr. Carroll, has come to hasten my departure," Mrs. Madison wrote to her sister that very night, "and is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. This process was found to be too tedious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken, and the canvass taken out it is done, and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen of New York for safekeeping."
The guys from New York spirited the painting away, Mrs. Madison safely evacuated, and the White House was burned. BY THE BRITISH.
We put that in shouty all-caps because it's been reported that our Dear Leader, Donald Drumpf, told Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last month that the tariffs he was slapping on the True North were in the interest of national security because "Didn't you guys burn down the White House?"
We have no idea how Justin responded, but we're assuming he set the fool in the Oval Office straight. Perhaps he also reminded Drumpf that in the War of 1812, it was the United States that invaded Canada — not the other way around? We cats HISS.
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