{"id":38394,"date":"2026-05-06T09:55:39","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T14:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=38394"},"modified":"2026-05-07T09:54:05","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T14:54:05","slug":"3089-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=38394","title":{"rendered":"3089 days"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last Post: <a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=38384\">How Chief Justice Roberts used the 2000 Census to put his foot his door for Republican majorities at the expense of Democrats<\/a><br \/>\nNext Post: <a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=38401\">AI Claude gave me solid replies to two questions about the Civil War<\/a><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/55099597489_cd28819125_t.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/> <strong>Donate to, Support or learn about the last lincoln republican. Click here:<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/weltyforcongress.com\">Weltyforcongress.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The obscure number titling this post reflects a larger ambition, yet to be realized, far beyond challenging the pathetic Congressman Pete Stauber this year. I&#8217;m challenging Pete because he discredits the United States. He may very well be reelected to continue his treasonous alliance with our dimwit President. So, my workd to defend America must look to the future. In my case it is by looking to our past where we&#8217;ve hit rough patches before. That ambition was heralded by my first snow sculpture of the year<a href=\"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=37619\"> Washington Crossing the Delaware<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I was finishing the second of Rick Atkinson&#8217;s projected three book series on the American Revolution as I worked on that sculpture. I had already had a busy fall of history reading in anticipation of our 250th birthday our semi-sesquacentennial. I was outraged that Trump was planning to use the year to litter Washington DC with Trumpian ego-building while backstabbing honest history. One item in the book caught my attention. Atkinson&#8217;s claim that America&#8217;s revolution lasted 3089 days from the Declaration of Independence to the Peace Treaty&#8217;s signing.<\/p>\n<p>A later war had gotten me started learning French. Nine months before Claudia and I visited France so that I could visit the battlefield that led to my Grandfather&#8217;s Congressionala Medal of Honor I decided to try my hand at learning French with Duolingo. I had no idea how hard it would be to learn French. By the time I started the Atkinson books I had already begun to put the app on the back burner instead of pour two hours a day into it as I had at the beginning. I was and still in in search of alternative ways to become conversational in the language. The war my grandfather fought in and the Revolutionary war and the French Revolution were all connected by a long friendship with that nation and its peoples. For the past three months I&#8217;ve only been putting in a ten minutes a day on the ap for which I have a very long streak of unbroken laboring. My last break in using it came about 194 days after I started. That means since I resumed I&#8217;ve got a 2755 day streak going. For the past year I&#8217;ve been contemplating retiring from it but I thought it would be nice to hit a round 3000 days even though it no longer is much more than five minutes in the morning and five minutes at night task. But when I saw 3089  I thought that would be a better goal. Studying French on Duolingo as long as we fought the Brits to win our independence. That still leaves me with well over 300 days of Duolingo which puts us past the semi-quincentennial and into 2027 but setting goals even arbitrary goals can be worthwhile.<\/p>\n<p>BTW (By the way) even my French is slowing down. Reading fat history books has replaced some of my two hours of Duolingo work or the newer French work I replaced it with. <\/p>\n<p>I will get back to it but I&#8217;m really enjoying my history. I&#8217;m into a new book a much lauded book titled the Patriarch about JFK&#8217;s father who famously groomed his two oldest sons for the US presidency and succeeded in getting Jack elected to replace Eisenhower the subject of the last book I finished yesterday. <\/p>\n<p>The Truman to Eisenhower period covered my beginnings on Earth and the Two presidents closest to my Kansas origins. As I plowed through them with a break for the Displaced peoples of WWII I&#8217;ve been giving thought to where I would go next. I hadn&#8217;t planned on a Kennedy book although PBS news host raved about the book about his father which is why Claudia bought it from me a couple years ago. I&#8217;d considered a book on Goldwater but the two books I have on the guy who never made it to the White House weren&#8217;t the kind of treatments I wanted to read. <\/p>\n<p>I found the last section of Wilcoxon&#8217;s Eisenhower book both compelling and sobering as I saw Ike&#8217;s Presidency as just a little less nobel than I had anticipated. It turned out he was a realist in a way that left his legacy a little less susceptible to Hagiography and the author was too honest not to be blunt no matter how much he obviously admired Ike. For instance the Guatamala government Overthrow I had already mentioned in my last Reader column, <a href=\"https:\/\/duluthreader.com\/articles\/2026\/04\/30\/134381-living-the-pura-vida\">Living the Pura Vida<\/a>, took place with Ike&#8217;s approval. I had not considered that when I took a swipe at the CIA for that outrage. <\/p>\n<p>None-the-less as a fellow Kansas and as a fellow Lincoln Republican I took exception to the last chapter&#8217;s depiction of John Kennedy&#8217;s ridiculing Eisenhower as he prepared to run for President. He called Ike and &#8220;asshole&#8221; around Kennedy&#8217;s buddies. That was a word used far less in the 1950&#8217;s by Americans than today. It was a real insult even in the privacy of JFK&#8217;s chums. It sounded like the kind of egotistical thing a millionaries spoiled son would say. That settled it. I&#8217;d read about Joseph P Kennedy and it would cover a period of time leading up to Truman&#8217;s which I had covered in the McCullough book. Joe Kennedy was FDR&#8217;s Secretary of the Securities Exchange Commission and I&#8217;d read a bit about its and his investigations of the 1929 Stock Market Crash as part of this year&#8217;s reading. <\/p>\n<p>Kennedy and his family lived in England as the war with Hitler&#8217;s germany loomed so the book served to describe the world my parents experienced as children. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve gotten into a new routine as I attack these books. Once again the reading is daily. I even managed to read the book about post war Europe half the days I spent in Costa Rica and even more on my flights there and back. Since my return I put in an hour before bed as a sleep aid to avoid reading from my cell phone and after I finish my early morning news coverage in the Times and Post. And I have gotten hooked on using my five AI&#8217;s to search out the questions the history books open up. For instance today I asked Claude about Rose Kennedy&#8217;s autobiography which was mentioned by author Nasaw in Chapter four. I wondered what historians made of it. Then I got thinking about Gloria Swanson one of Joseph Kennedy&#8217;s paramours. Here&#8217;s the question I asked the AI Claude:<\/p>\n<p><em>&#8220;I have always considered Sunset Boulevard with Gloria Swanson and William Holden to be one of the most interesting movies. That&#8217;s a Billy Wilder movie. He was a great director. I&#8217;m wondering what the Kennedy children, not their mother, made of Gloria Swanson, who was still very very active as they were growing up.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>You see I treat Claude and the other AI&#8217;s as people not simply search engines. Of course, they are only vast bits of info but they have an uncanny human quality. <\/p>\n<p>The answer was fascinating and led to other questions. Its explanation described Joe having the audacity to bring his lover Swanson and her husband to Hyannis Port to stay with his family while he moored a sail boat off the beach during a tryst with Swanson which was interrupted by 12 year old Jack who was so traumatized he leaped overboard to swim to shore. This prompted Joe to jump in after him to save his son.<\/p>\n<p>Its a pretty gossipy story and I asked Claude where it was sourced and Claude didn&#8217;t have an answer for that and apologized. The best it could say was that it may have been in Gloria Swanson&#8217;s tell all autobiography or perhaps Doris Kearns Goodwin&#8217;s popular book about the Kennedy&#8217;s. But then it pulled its punches a bit and said Kearns book had been criticized from copying information from other books without attribution. That was familiar to me because her laudable book on Lincoln was also criticized for the same reason. I remembered that she pulled the book back to fix that before it went into bookshelves. Its still a remarkable book and was the basis for Stephen Speilburgs movie Lincoln which is also a fantastic treatment of Abe at war.<\/p>\n<p>I have also used my AI&#8217;s to give me summaries and evaluations of books I might want to read. In short they are instantly gratfiying to a guy who has lots of questions as he goes through a book. I think I will finish this book before searching out the next. I have a couple other books on my shelves that have collected dust for years I think I will got to. There is one on the Era of Good Feelings that won a Pulitizer in the 1950&#8217;s and a McCullough book on Benjamin Franklin. I&#8217;m also interested in reading Atkinson&#8217;s trilogy on our war in Africa Italy and Europe which I think collected another Pulitizer.<\/p>\n<p>Someone has to remedy the ignorace coming from the Oval Office and wether I get elected to Congress or not I will heap a little history on Trump&#8217;s little dog Stauber while I&#8217;m at it while he threatens to soil the most precious and quickly disappearing treasure Minnesota has. Its clean fresh water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last Post: How Chief Justice Roberts used the 2000 Census to put his foot his door for Republican majorities at the expense of Democrats&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[95,90,133,168],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38394"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38394"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38404,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38394\/revisions\/38404"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}