[High Praise! to silaS marreD]
Weird little thought experiment over at Reddit:
In a mass knife fight to the death between every American President, who would win and why?
I’m picking Teddy Roosevelt. You know… Rough Riders and all.
UPDATE: I suspect Conan O’Brien would pick Teddy Roosevelt, too.
This one is easy, and it ain’t Teddy R. It’s George Washington.
Andrew Jackson. Could take a bullet and still win a duel, he can probably take a knife or two.
I’d have to consider Dubya. Dubya knows how to swing an axe as well as Lincoln. And we saw him dodge a flying shoe with ease. He was the most fit President ever while in office, former fighter pilot, too. That ain’t nothin’.
Old Hickory, FTW. he killed two men While In Office, and had so many pistol balls in him that his body was said to “rattle like a bag of marbles” when he walked.
First: Teddy Roosevelt was the original progressive…so his bleeding heart couldn’t help him.
Second: Most other presidents lived in the age of the gun, so their fighting skills with blades was limited…which means the winner would have been from the first crop, who actually learned how to sword fight, among other lost arts.
So my choice is George Washington. A soldier, a tactician, and a man who grew up in a time when a blade was still far more accurate than any gun, and so he trained with it. He would make Teddy look like an imbecile with a little stick.
By my arguments, the only presidents that could beat Washington would have served within the late 18th and first half of the 19th centuries, of which Washington was clearly the best.
Teddy Roosevelt was big on shooting animals with an entourage but a bit too portly to be agile with a blade.
I agree with Old Hickory and Dubya as contenders but the one who would win at all costs would be Harry “The buck stops here!” Truman who wasn’t
afraid to drop the big one when he had to.
A haberdasher by trade he ended the II World War in about a week when he put his mind to it.
He was slight of frame and with wire rim glasses looked a bit of a pushover but in a dark alley he would have sliced and diced his way to victory!
“Give ’em Hell Harry” was his calling card! …and whatever you do don’t make fun of his daughter’s piano playing…
Dubya would have brought a gun…..
Calvin Coolidge. It’s always the quiet ones.
President Taft at 350 lbs.
Wait. This isn’t about eating bacon?
George Washington. He was built like a NFL quarterback, was an outdoorsman from the age of 15, who could sneak through the woods silently. He fought Indians in hand-to-hand combat in his younger days during the French and Indian war. He was the only senior officer to survive the Indian massacre of General Braddock’s forces at the Battle of Monongahela. He was far tougher than Teddy Roosevelt and much better with knife and sword.
“Increment weather is not a factor.”! ++weather? No, no, –weather!
I’m going with George Washington, because a good portion of the rest would defend him with their lives.
Darn you bloggy autocorrect, I did intend TWO minus signs! My predecrement weather hath been transformed into negative weather! God help us all.
I’ve got to go with Pablo and say it would be George Washington on top. First off, I think that all (or nearly all) of the early presidents have a distinct advantage over those which came later, namely that they actually knew how to fight with knives. Washington was a tough and smart outdoorsman, having started doing surveying and cartography work at something like age 15. That means he’s NOTHING like today’s president, because George could survive in the wild and do math – AT THE SAME TIME!!!
Washington was also battle-hardened at an early age – he was 23 when he fought in the French & Indian War, which is where the whole “bulletproof” myth about him started. He wrote to his brother (after being the only officer on horseback to survive a certain battle):
Knife fight? Puh-leeeze!
My money’s on Washington.
Oh man, jeffersonfan beat me to most of my points! I take too darn long to write these things…
Hey Hunter….great minds think alike! 😉
Two words people…Millard Fillmore! Millard was one of the most underrated presidents ever to serve in that high office. Anyone who could appoint Daniel Webster to be Secretary of State (consider what we have now) and favor the Compromise of 1850, could easily defeat his foes in a knife fight. George Washington and Truman would have been putty in his knife welding hands! Who among us can deny the brilliance of the Wilmot Proviso, isn’t proof enough? I know…many of you will say, but zzyzx, didn’t he allow California to enter the union? Yes, sadly that’s true, but I ask you…who could have known then, what we know now? At any rate that’s no reason to poo-poo his obviously superior knife fighting abilities. I rest my case.
Billy Jeff, because even in the dark, he can feel your pain. He’d always find George Washington.
Cheers
Gotta side with ol’ Andy Jackson. Tough an’ ornery as they came.
Fought in several wars and started the slaughter of the American Indian.
A stone killer and hard case.
George Washington obviously. I saw him kill Napoleon in a sword fight on tv.
You are forgetting that Truman, as a haberdasher, always carried scissors (which are actually two blades) and I once saw him dispatch
a potential assassin wielding a machete using only pinking shears and a thimble!
Had he grown up in this era he would NOT have been a Democrat.
Andrew Jackson in a walk-over. He’d let Taft eat him, gnaw his way out, and use his gigantic corpse as an impregnable fortification. Then using Van Buren’s lifeless little body as a shield, and just to make the point, he’d scornfully throw his knife into the stands and use just a part of Clinton – a well-used part – as a club.
Madison was so small I think he wouldn’t be noticed until there were only two left, and maybe the other left standing would be pretty beat up by then, and Madison would bite his ankles to bring him down.
The electorate
Lincoln… anyone that goes after vampires has got to be tough, so him, or whichever one ate the most bacon.
The answer is obviously “Abraham Lincoln”.
I mean, dude, the guy KILLS VAMPIRES!!!
another point in Andrew Jackson’s favor: he married a whore just so he could fight more duels. whenever someone would, rightly, point out the Mrs. was a whore, Andy would challenge them to a duel and kill them. in a knife fight with Billy Jeff he wouldn’t even break a sweat.
Barack Obama, because if any of the others win…racism!
Doesn’t anyone remember Bush ’41 was the head of the CIA? And that time he kicked Homer’s arse on the Simpsons? Dudes got talent.
Jackson, unless he was drunk, which was about all the painkiller they had in those days. Grant was tough, but out of shape by his presidency. Maybe Coolidge. They’d forget he was there until he stabbed the last guy in the back.
Yeah I’d go with Roosevelt too. Roosevelt was to hunting like Obama is to golf. He was America’s Putin.
I have to go with a dark horse candidate – Jimmy Carter. He would convince all the rest of them that he was not going to fight and them stab the last other president standing in the back.
Have to say that the three toughest presidents would be, in order, Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.
No mention has been made of Truman having been a captain, later a light colonel, of field artillery during WW I, having served on the battlefields of France. He is said to have verbally, then physically, berated soldiers under his command for cowardice during an operation to take out a German arty unit.
Teddy Roosevelt was an amateur taxidermist as a boy, preparing those various animals he shot. He was also a skilled swordsman, boxer, and student of judo. In one boxing match, he took a punch which detached his retina and kept on fighting. While campaigning on the Bull Moose ticket he was shot at by an assassin. With the bullet buried in his chest muscle, he went onstage and delivered a 90 minute speech before being driven to a hospital for medical treatment.
Washington, well…his courage and composure under pressure are well established, and without question.
All three were capable horsemen, so forget knives, you can do just as much fatal damage with your horse’s hoof put to the head of your opponent.
There’s always JFK, never carrying anything sharper than his wit or a cigar cutter, who could load all the others into a Greyhound bus filled with syphillitic call-girls from Vegas, courtesy of Pete Lawford, toss the keys to his brother Ted, and be back in the Oval Office with a Bushmills rocks in his paw, and Marilyn Monroe on his lap, before anyone knew something was amiss.
I like Ike!
Nixon, if he’s allowed to keep.the futurama robot.body
Washington, Jackson, and Grant were all highly experienced warriors, and who all carried and were proficient in the use of the sword… however, Washington was proficient in the use of every weapon in use in his time, he was a big, powerful man, and most importantly: he was very lucky, escaping death so many times as to be beyond count.
Jackson was a stone-cold killer, but his temper would have gotten him killed against Washington. No other president faced death in so many different ways on such a regular basis and so often came out unscathed to boot.
Being good is fine but being lucky (or blessed) is better.
The spouse says Andrew Jackson because he one of the few presidents who has killed anyone (1806 killed Charles Dickenson for slander because he accused Jackson of cheating on a horserace bet and then Dickenson insulted his wife) , raised in the time where they used knives and hatchets, fought duels (between 5-100), been shot (in the duel with Dickenson. Dickenson shot first, hit Jackson, broke two ribs and the bullet lodged 2 in from Jacksons heart. Jackson then aimed calmly and killed Dickenson out right.) He was called Ol Hickory in part because he carried a hickory cane and on occasion beat people with it including the assassin who tried to kill him.
Quote ” I have only two regrets: I didn’t shoot Henry Clay and I didn’t hang John C Calhoon.
Jackson is the Chuck Norris of presidents.
Cracked.com has an interesting list too.
2nd is Roosevelt. San Juan Hill, Rough Riders and all of that.
Gonna put my money on that President from Arkansas , I am sure Ole Hillary has chased that whore dog many times with a knife. He has the skills to run and bob and weave all the while trying to get the mistress from getting knifed.
As one comment at the other site put it, “Lincoln, because he had the reach.”
Or… Lincoln and Washington would team up, knock a few heads together to get the other presidents attention, make an example of anyone who didn’t get with the program, then lead the rest in a coordinated break-out and wreak unholy vengeance on whoever dared to try to force them into the death match in the first place.
“We’re the U.S. Presidents, Beeyawtch!”
Or Reagan, because he that Super Soldier treatment thing working for him.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reagan%27s_Raiders.jpg
missing word – had.
I was going to say Lincoln, who was a talented wrestler. But George Washington is also compelling. I’m discounting Andy Jackson. I saw his uniform at the Smithsonian, and I’d guess Wadington or Lincoln could have broken him in half given his slight build and waspish waist.
Jackson was small but he was wiry and mean the son of a gun was really mean.