{"id":10901,"date":"2008-01-22T21:19:21","date_gmt":"2008-01-23T02:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/01\/22\/10901.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:57:48","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:57:48","slug":"had-his-start-been-fifteen-min","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/01\/22\/had-his-start-been-fifteen-min\/","title":{"rendered":"Had his start been fifteen minutes longer, he would not have required a presidential pardon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In one of those too-good-to-be-true stories<\/a> about Our Only President that Jacob Weisberg seems to come up with, it seems that OOP likes to direct people's attention to a painting<\/a> by W.H.D. Koerner called A Charge to Keep<\/I>. He brought the painting with him from Texas and hung it in the Oval Office; he tells people about its inspiring story and its connection to the Methodist hymn of that name. His campaign autobiography is also called A Charge to Keep<\/a>. It’s an awful painting, but that’s not the gotcha here.
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The gotcha is that Mr. Koerner originally painted the thing as an illustration of a horse thief, and it originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post<\/I> accompanying “The Slipper Tongue” with the caption Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.<\/I>
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As was fairly common, the image was used again to illustrate a different story. This time, the caption read Bandits Move About From Town to Town, Pillaging Whatever They Can Find.<\/I>
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Third time is the charm, and evidently the third<\/I> time the image illustrated a story, it picked up the title A Charge to Keep<\/I>.
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Now, to be fair: It is not a sign of stupidity or ignorance or incompetence to believe the title and background story of a painting when that title and background story are, in fact, accurate if not the original title or background story. Nor is it appalling for a person to invest a work of art with meaning unconnected to the intention of its originator, or to draw inspiration from that new meaning.
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You know what’s appalling? Moving about from town to town, pillaging whatever they can find.
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger piles on, unfairly, but you know what? Life isn’t fair, I tell you what.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18235,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10901\/revisions\/18235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}