April 16, 2012
Wreckless Presidents
Considering the sheer volume of travel Presidents of the United States undertake, and the bizarre and unstable places they sometimes visit, and the vast sea of negligence through which they (and the rest of us) routinely wade, I find it simply astonishing that in all of American history, not a single American president has ever been killed in office by accident.
Nearly 10% of American presidents (four) have died in office due to illness; the same number have been murdered in office. But none has died in a plane crash, a helicopter crash, a car crash, a train crash; none has fallen off a high platform or precipice; none has drowned; none has accidentally ingested poison; none has died of hitting his head against something hard and solid, like a bathtub or a protruding steel pipe; none has been crushed by a collapsing building nor blown to bits by an underground hydrogen bubble; none has impaled himself on a rhinoceros horn nor strangled to death in a grand piano; none has been mauled to death by a wild animal (no Monica Lewinsky jokes, please! And even Jimmy Carter survived the seaborne rabbit attack); none has frozen to death, burned to death, starved to death, drunk himself to death, or decompressed to death; heck, we've never even had a POTUS stamp his foot so hard, the ground cracked open and swallowed him up like Rumplestiltskin.
Isn't that run of excellent luck more than a little bizarre?
Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 16, 2012, at the time of 1:02 AM
Comments
The following hissed in response by: MikeR
Harold Holt, the prime minister of Australia, drowned in 1967.
But just as a matter of probabilities, what are the stats on accident deaths anyhow? We have a couple of hundred man-years of presidents in office, equivalent of two or three lifetimes. What are the chances of anyone dying of accident in the course of his or her lifetime?
The above hissed in response by: MikeR ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://biglizards.net/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 16, 2012 5:41 AM
The following hissed in response by: Paul
Well, we almost lost one to a renegade pretzel
The above hissed in response by: Paul at April 16, 2012 2:01 PM
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