Well, that's one way to keep the numbers down...

As I often mention, I get far too much enjoyment out of trolling the message boards on extreme right-wing 'news' sites and pointing out factual and logical errors in their various ramblings*

* I know, fish in a barrel.  But still.

Today's notable entry involved a long and barely coherent diatribe about how Obama was clearly a Fascist, Socialist, Communist Dictator* because he'd issued more executive orders than any other President in history, which obviously shows that he was a tyrant.

*In the right wing, fox-news viewing world all of these terms are completely interchangeable and can be loosely defined as 'Words that we don't know what they mean'.

 In the real world, for those who are curious, he's actually issued 168 of them, putting him somewhere in the middle of the spectrum as far as Presidents go.  George H. W., for the sake of comparison, issued 166, although that was just in one term so it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison.  F.D.R apparently issued over 3,000 of them, but he did have a depression and a World War to deal with, so I'm willing to concede that they may have been justified.  Further research required.

I should come clean and admit that I didn't know any of this off the top of my head, I did a thorough and exhaustive review of the issue involving a three second Google search and a quick glance at the first website that came up.  Which still puts me ahead of the commentators at OneNewsNow, I might add.

Further review of the list, because I'm curious about this sort of thing, led me to the discovery that the record for least number of Executive Orders, coming in at a firm '0' is held by William Henry Harrison, our nations 9th President.

Before giving him any resounding accolades for this however, we should remember that William Henry also holds the records for two other things - Longest Inaugural address and shortest term in office.  The two things are related.

What happened was this; William Henry Harrison was, prior to Reagan* the oldest President elected to office.  His opposition played on this, and William Henry was eager to not appear in any way elderly or decrepit.  So in the parade to his inaugural address he refused to wear a jacket and rode on horseback, in order to look younger and sprier.  Unfortunately, it was freezing cold and sleeting on that particular day.  He followed this by giving an inaugural address just shy of two hours long, also in the freezing sleet.

*381 Executive orders, for the record 

He followed this by collapsing with pneumonia almost immediately upon taking office and dying after spending a mere 32 days as President, roughly 30 of them in a coma.  

So, yes.  He is a shining example of not riding roughshod over the will of congress by using executive orders.

He is also a poster boy for wearing a coat and having a speech editor.

The moral of the story - sure, it's possible to break a record.  But it's not always your best plan.