Both Jesse "The Body" Ventura and Bob "The Comb-over" Smith demonstrated last week that despite their feisty independence and enervating candor, neither is in danger of being mistaken for Arthur "The Historian" Schlesinger.
Jesse, with his wheels cranking even slower than usual, tried to score rhetorical points for the Reform party while talking with Wolf Blitzer: "It's interesting that when Abraham Lincoln was elected president 150 years ago or more, there were three parties back then, and the Republican party was the new party on the block." Point taken, Jesse, except for one problem -- 150 years ago would have been 1849. Lincoln was elected in 1860.
As presidential candidate Bob Smith cast adrift from the Republican party last week, he, like Jesse, let fly with the Lincoln scholarship. "In 1866," Smith said on the Senate floor, "Abraham Lincoln said this -- it's a very famous quote: 'If I were to try to read, much less answer all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how -- the very best I can. And I'm going to keep right on doing so until the end." And Abe did it to the end, too. Except the end came in 1865, which would have made it somewhat difficult to talk about in 1866.