Brain fart. :smack:
Surprised if I disagree? If it wasn’t for the court order from Taney would it ever have gone to Congress? And what good would it do any President today to get a rubber stamp after the fact? OK – maybe Reagan could have pulled it off; but other than him?
Sorry - I’ve read all the stuff from the Lincoln apologists and I’m not buying.
I imagine a taser would take care of Old Hickory just fine.
It might, if he gave you a chance to use it. Unless you are a very unusual person, that dangerously insane little man had a far greater experience with personal violence than you do and an almost certainly greater willingness to use violence. He was a mean, crazy, little guy who seemed unafraid of death or injury.
Yes, one might even call him Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. 
I daresay Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism and possibly, L. Ron Hubbard, if he were still surviving.
Bing Crosby for child abuse.
He did go to jail even back then, multiple times, and in fact died in jail.
Any classical heroic age Greek hero, for a variety of reasons. For starters, their take on the acceptability of violence was dramatically different from most modern people’s.
Being royalty in the ancient world works for getting away with shit, too. See Alexander “oops, I seem to have killed my friend during a drunken argument, sorry about that” the Great.
Is it really so different today?
Cite: Ted Kennedy. “Hey, guys, I drunkenly drove my car into the water and drowned my girlfiend. My bad.” Not only didn’t he go to jail, he still had a long political career as a [del]professional seat warmer[/del] distinguished member of congress.
Also see: Any of the numerous Hollywood celebs who get away with stuff, up to & including murder, because apparently throwing someone famous into prison just cannot be done.
He got a lot of bad press at the time for that episode. Popular opinion was against him, even after it was explained that this was a common thing for hunters to do to test the “voice” of their hunting dogs. A good “yeller” was a prized animal to a hunter.
yes, I’m old. I remember this.
What about William of Orange? He arrived with an army, prepared to battle for the crown. The previous king fled without much of a fight, but I think it still counts. And he had no claim of his own to the throne, just an invitation from Parliament.
Caligula could get away with the deliberately caused famine as long as he fit it under the war on terror or the drug war, but I think even now we could get him impeached, tried, and convicted for the killing of senators and throwing sections of stadium crowds to be killed by wild animals.
Who knows how many of the stories about about Caligula are true, though, really? Although it’s probably fair to assume that he wasn’t the sanest puppy.
Of course, if you were a Roman Emperor, impeachment and non-violent removal from office wasn’t really an option. If your popularity rating tanked, you wouldn’t lose the next election, you’d have an encounter with a sharp object. Maybe that’s a thread idea: How many politicians today would end up stabbed if this was ancient Rome?
(Of course, it does depend on the time period. In Caligula’s time, you had to at least be a very shitty ruler to get knifed. For a while in the third century, though, emperor-stabbing became more like a national pastime. Makes you wonder why anyone still wanted the job. But anyway.)
I wonder how much say the rebel generals had in their troops proclaiming them rival emperors. In other words, did they ask them to hail them as emperor or was it spontaneous (it may have been a mixture of both)? Because once your own troops ask you to rebel, it’s not as if you might not be killed by the emperor anyway as a populist threat even if you decline.
No.
Why did anyone want anything to do with show business in Ancient Rome? I’ve seen references to unsuspecting performers and audience members alike being victimized and killed as part of the show. Seems like after the first couple of atrocities, nobody would want to perform or attend.
Wagner never threatened Mendelssohn with physical harm. He’d be more likely to get thrown in jail for associating with anarchists and participating in the 1848 European revolutions for eradicating monarchy.
And do let me know when your local opera group does a season devoted to the works of Meyerbeer. So I can avoid it.
If this was ancient Rome, every president since Kennedy (at least) would have gotten stabbed, and we’d be drafting people into the position by now.
Well, yeah, there’s that. The army absolutely had a big say in it. Take Decius overthrowing Philip. Apparently, Decius was sent out by Philip to talk the Danube army down from a rebellion. When he showed up, someone went “Decius for Emperor”. Decius replied: “Oh, you have to be shitting me”, whereupon the army responded: “Well, either you join our revolt as our new Emperor, or *we *will stab you right now.”
Then there’s the case of what happened after the murder of Aurelian, where it actually seems that the Romans got to the point were they *were *having a hard time finding someone suicidal enough to take the gig. Aurelian was an awesome Emperor, and everyone knew it, but he *still *got assassinated by his own troops, for some really stupid reasons (apparently, a corrupt official was afraid that he would be punished by the Emperor for something or other, and he tricked some army officers into thinking that Aurelian was about to have them killed). After that, no one actually wanted to take over, partly because it would be a good way to get suspected of being implicated in the murder, but partly, I suspect, because everyone was thinking, “Isn’t this getting a bit out of hand?” The army and the senate would usually be jumping over each other to proclaim emperors, but in this case they kept throwing the ball back and forth instead, and there wasn’t an Emperor for months.