The Queen

[toonfandangl]

I am not a royalist and not particularly  interested in the Queen or the royal family.

But this is quit interesting if you like this sort of trivia  truly hard to comprehend.

This puts her age into perspective.....

[SandyB]

This  gracious lady  be  one of the last  true serving  members if the " firm " as they refer   to the royal family ...  the dear old queen Mum  in her last years more  unfettered by  protocol , feeling  she had done her dues ,  became more relaxed ... I do hope   Elizabeth does  the same ...  unfortiunately  its becoming  an outdated  part of the  modern scenario ...  and yes the young ones  not  risingup to the challenge  of being true royals ...  need say no more ...

[Bob Molloy]

Hi Frank,
              Thanks for your intriguing slide show of the Queen. It shows her with American presidents going all the way back to John Kennedy, including a few of the brain dead. I've often thought that royalty operates under great discipline, she must have felt like throwing up instead of having to smile at some of those mercenaries.
The photos also show just long she has been on the throne. a total of 57 years. If she survives another seven she will have broken Victoria's record who reigned for 63 years. Perhaps then she'll step down and hand over to Charles.   
I'm by no means a royalist but have often thought the monarchy is one of those funny old Brit institutions, like the House of Lords, that operates as a subtle brake on the more slash and burn politicians. It gives the Queen the right of veto in forming a government, a right which which is never exercised but tends to hold in check would-be mavericks.
And that doesn't mean she would favour a Tory government. In private the royals detest them. It's been said that if you scratch a royal you'll find a left-winger.
That doesn't apply to Philip whose politics are somewhere to the right of Ghengis Khan. But then he isn't royal, in fact is a Greek, having been elevated from commoner to prince when he married Elizabeth.

[toonfandangl]

Hello Bob........yes the brain dead presidents and there have been more in the 20th century than at any other time  George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel... The others!! The lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty  and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder... Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction... What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt... Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Incidentally Bob the last picture shows the young Queen with the then president Franklin D. Roosevelt in 53, I said in the first post that I was not interested in the royal family as such, but the lady has shown remarkable resilience throughout her life, and I suppose she could have said stuff it and did what her sister did.


Apologies to Sandy B..........James Buchanan.....I'm sure he is not related to you.

[SandyB]

Pretty damm sure  not ... me  mentally agile ....

[toonfandangl]

                         

[Bob Molloy]

Hi Frank,
              Yes, the revisionists have gone back for another look at Nixon and seem keen on rehabilitating him, but unfortunately the White House tapes keep coming back to haunt him.
Re FDR, he died in '45. That pic of the young Queen in '53 must have been taken with Smiling Death, Eisenhower, the man responsible for the postwar slave labour death camps for captured German soldiers.
If Liz had known about it she would have felt her skin crawl when he smiled.