Mount Rushmore vs. Mount Trashmore

Credits: (Wikipedia, 2014)

The Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore (Lakota Sioux name: Six Grandfathers). Sculpted by Danish-American Gutzon Borglum and his son, Lincoln Borglum, Mount Rushmore features 60-foot sculptures of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.

Mt. Rushmore depicts strong presidential leadership with its sculptures, but what about the reverse? I suggest a lesser known site to formally recognize inept presidential leadership. Mount Trashmore Park, also known simply as Mount Trashmore, is a city park located in Virginia Beach, Virginia and is an example of landfill reuse as its creation consisted of the conversion of an abandoned landfill into a park. Here are my initial candidates in descending order, the antithesis of the Mt. Rushmore four.

James Buchanan, Jr. - 15th President serving immediately prior to the American Civil War. His inability to identify a ground for peace or address the sharply divided pro-slavery and anti-slavery partisans with a unifying principle on the brink of the Civil War has led to his consistent ranking by historians as the worst presidential mistake ever made.

Warren Gamaliel Harding - 29th President. He’s famous for rewarding his friends and contributors, known as the Ohio Gang, with powerful positions. Multiple cases of corruption were exposed during his presidency and after his death, including the notorious Teapot Dome scandal, regarded in pre-Watergate times as the “greatest and most sensational scandal in the history of American politics”. He also had a secret entrance for bringing prostitutes into the White House. Some conspiracy theorists believe that he was poisoned by his wife because of his dalliances.

James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, Jr. - 39th President of the U. S. On the economic front he confronted persistent “stagflation”, a combination of high inflation, high unemployment and slow growth neither of which was reconciled. At the end of his presidency there were the Iran hostage crisis [I was in the Persian Gulf at the time], the 1979 energy crisis, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In response to the Soviet move he ended détente which escalated the Cold War. A real nice guy but totally inept in national governance. A plus is his involvement with Habitats for Humanity whereas a minus is his favoritism for Palestinians over Israel.

This is just a start .............