Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 126 - The Horrible Death of President James Garfield

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

Folks, it's bad. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/dirty-painful-death-president-james-garfield https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/09/19/garfield-assassination-white-house-doctors-lied/ https://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/health/25garf.html https://medium.com/@simoncarryer/damn-near-killed-him-30042c796e29 https://nypost.com/2016/09/22/the-inept-doctor-who-killed-president-garfield/

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now, back to the show. Hello and welcome to yet another lovely episode of this podcast, A Hell of a Way to Die slash Lines Led by Donkeys slash the Lawcast or whatever it is that shocks us. And with me today, as always, seemingly now, is Francis and Shox. What's up, guys? It's our Thursday night chat. Yeah. Why not record it and talk some shit? Yeah, we're just here.

We're being our best, Nick. I have some very strong opinions about whatever uniforms we're going to be discussing whatever period costume um i'm here to go whoa that's fucked up and then quote a movie so we're good you know it's it's good though you know for me as someone who's not in the military and covers military history but also uh that sometimes have allegories to what is happening today with the entire inner circle of our federal government catching fucking COVID, is my co-host can't always comment on those things legally. Not the way that he would want to, I would imagine.

Yeah, allegedly. Allegedly in Minecraft. Don't look for the first fucking amendment. Yeah, right. What about my rights Nick should just take a gun and shoot his command sorry go ahead fuck in

Minecraft in Minecraft well we've already committed some like conspiracy here so like let's go for fucking Rico and just kick the shit off this whole podcast is actually a rico front rico slander i i just hang a jar outside the patreon that says for the cause on it and uh that's all i have to do um so i thought uh we were originally going to do a

different episode today um and i think it's a very good one but then you know like I said the president caught COVID and might die so I thought what if we talked about the time a president actually died from horrible medical care in the most horrific way possible

and that's why we're talking about President James Garfield I just have to say like it is i i know people talk about like how terrible things are right now but like we live on like the precipice of humanity in in a way in which like if any of us got shot right like if you if one of us got shot like say you Like if you, if one of us got shot, like say you take a shoulder shot, you take a gut shot in the year 2020, you get into an ambulance and you're probably, if you have a good chance of surviving that,

because the doctors aren't going to do what all the things that Joe's about to describe to you. And Joe, what, what year, what year are we talking about here? We're talking the late 1800s. Okay.

So we're talking like 150 ish years ago 100 like people don't have living memory of that but we have comprehensive history of it like 150 years ago we can tell you everything that happened we got it all written down we got newspapers we got people we got all that stuff and that's when they did this weird stuff to people when they're just like i don't know he's sad put leeches on him and see what happens but i don't know francis if you call nine-on-one when i was a paramedic i might worry that you have ghosts in your blood i mean part of it just imagine joe joe showing up with like a turkey baster full of chicken broth is like he needs more food just jam it up his ass we'll be fine his humors are off the whole thing about this though is i feel like there's always that

like weird period of any technology that like you know like because i feel like the 1800s is the part where they they had some idea of what the fuck they were doing but like not like you know like they like you know anesthetics and like you know like amputation and like other stuff but they hadn't quite gotten there yet and i just think about other stuff like like the one that always strikes me is asbestos and i know that's like not medical care but like the fact that it was like you know the the you know the miracle material that like everyone is going to make fucking everything from in the future like you're gonna have fucking flying cars made out of asbestos and like you know 1975 and then libertarian dream baby and then it just

like turns out that like oh by the way like it actually like you know just like murders you slowly through your lungs like have fun or like uh was it a tritium that they used to like you know paint all the watch dials and everything with and then it turns out that uranium and stuff yeah and then it like turns out that like all the women in the factory just had their like jaws decay and developed like terrible forms of cancer so uh i guess really what i'm saying is all the people afraid of 5g are probably

right uh for my cell phone like our society is going to collapse we're going to find out in like 50 years that the reason all this insane shit is happening right now is because of 5G. And we're all going to look like assholes. I'm just always surprised by like how far advanced we are in some ways.

Like, you know, in the 1400s and even before that, you know, in the 1400s, Europeans were going across the oceans. going across the oceans but you know vikings and uh you know people all over were you know 500 years ago getting into these massive boats and and stocking up and learning to survive in different lands and like you know the but at the same time they thought that you might have a demon in your head and we need to like drill a hole in your skull to let the demon out oh yeah how are you a seafaring nation? How are you? How do you have naval wars and just like, what do you get shot? Like, oh shit, we'll get the ghosts out of his blood.

Well, I mean, you would just be like, oh yeah, it's the, uh, I'm the ship's cook and the dentist and the trauma surgeon and the barber surgeon, you know, and I'm just, uh, oh yeah, you, uh, you got a cannonball like, you know, i'm just uh oh yeah you uh you got a cannonball like you know right through your fucking stomach in the middle of like a battle

i just lay him out on the table and i'll uh wipe off my knife that i was just using to cut chicken and i'll see what we can do it's it's important we'll talk about this because we're going to go a little bit about the medical science of the day but like you know this is post-civil war this is damn near 19th you know the 1900s we invented machine guns before we got a handle on like should we wash our hands so like and so like i guess it's a segue into this what do what do you guys know about our glorious 20th president uh james garfield the guy who held office for about 200 days uh i i've always known him as a dude that got assassinated like kind of slowly um and yeah that's it just garfield like what did he do like he died real early and then

then at the other end like that's his that's his noted notable it's like he's just dead that's what that's what he did he died i actually think if more he's like he's known as like the last uh uh log cabin republican and not like the the the weird republic like gay republican um uh advocacy group which doesn't seem to understand their party hates them. But the fact that he grew up dirt poor and literally lived in a log cabin. Yeah. He's considered the last log cabin president. Not that that's important,

but it's interesting. He literally grew up from nothing, like dirt, dirt poor. Back when there was a goddamn American dream. Back when being dirt poor meant he literally lived on a dirt floor. He did get into politics. Back before they came and took it all away. By they, I mean billionaires. Go ahead.

Those goddamn communists took away my dirt floor. He's an interesting character because he just got into politics through sheer hard work and got elected into the House of Representatives. He's from Ohio. He was born in Ohio into the House of Representatives. And he's from Ohio.

He was born in Ohio in the early 1800s. Oh, he's one of them. I have to unfortunately hate him. But I'm sorry, Ohio. You're a trash state. But it's okay. We're all trash states, except Hawaii. We're cool.

Now, even though a lot of people here like to yeet me into the sea and they're fully within the right to do so, but it was a fucking colonizer again. Yeah. I hate to do it. You know, I think Armenians are some of the only people that can get away with this because like,

where the fuck else are we going to go, man? Nobody else wants us. It's a, he was, he's an interesting guy. He, he managed to like, and nobody else wants us. He's an interesting guy. He managed to actually do hard work to get elected into the House of Representatives, which back then, it was before civil service was a thing.

And the civil service reform is one of the few things that he got pushed through as president before he died. Also, was he a capital P progressive? Not quite yet. I remember that being like that kind of like their thing at least it was like around here like that was like the the wasp response to like all the irish in boston was to push through like uh civil service and a bunch of other stuff so that way like you know the those damn pappas

didn't take over the entire city too quickly well Well, his reasoning was to get rid of the old, because this is like solidly in the Gilded Age where it was pretty much based on like, you know, being a patron of somebody else, like, you know, the old boy system. And he thought if they instituted some actual tests and stuff, like you could get rid of that because he didn't come from anything.

So he was like why the fuck uh is you know so-and-so's second and third cousin just getting a deal you know because we've effectively created the aristocracy just without the titles um well with different titles uh but he ended up um ended up becoming a colonel in the civil war but you know back he was a state colonel so yeah he was a way in he was a state colonel so yeah he was a way in he was a national guardsman well that's the thing is he couldn't buy his way in because even though he's in the house of representatives he was still poor as hell well i just mean more like it was like it was you know he knew like you know 15 different guys in

the state government who like you know like oh you know who's a real good guy like uh you know this asshole over here like i don't know give him a fucking colonel ship and, oh, you know who's a real good guy? Like, you know, this asshole over here, like, I don't know, give him a fucking colonel ship and like, I don't know, let's see what he does on the battlefield. He pretty much just went to the governor and be like, I want to fight because he strongly opposed slavery. He thought it was disgusting, mostly in religious

grounds, but also personal grounds. He thought black people were people, which sounds crazy. Revolutionary for the day. Now I'm sad that he got Merck so early. He had no money, so he had to tell the governor, I'd really like to go fight against slavery and go shoot Confederates. He never had a single day of military training, ever. But he was immediately appointed colonel.

Was Garfield just doing this thing that we all did where it's just like, a single day of military training ever, but he was immediately appointed colonel. Was Garfield just doing this thing that we all did where it's just like, I got no money, but the army's hiring, so I guess I'll go be a colonel and draw some money. He's like, sweet, I get some sweet benefits here. I get some Tricare. I'm going to get a paycheck. I can go finally put some money down

on a brand new pickup truck. It'll be great. It's just a bone saw named Tricare. It's like, I think some of it was for political reasons, though he could have just as easily stayed his ass in office and nobody would have judged him for it. So, like, legitimately, he wanted to have an active part. We're not judging you for going to shoot Confederate, Scarfield. Please do.

That's definitely a positive. Right. That's cool. It's cool that, like, Pat Tillman, I'm going to stop playing football and go fight terrorism. Except, you know, it's Confederates. Yeah. And, you know, like, it's unfortunate because it means we're standing a general officer because he's eventually going to become a general. It means we're standing a general officer because he's eventually going to become a general.

Though, like I said, he had no military experience, though he made his argument with the governor that, like, well, I've read a lot of military books. I found the library. Oh, so he's a boomer. Yeah. I watched Victory at Sea 15 times, so I think I have a lot of opinions about whether or not gays should be in the military. It's like the entirety of 1800s America was just that one uncle of yours who's just like, yeah, I could probably do that. I'm fucking white, sure.

I'm white and male and nobody will tell me no. Yeah, I'm going to go. I'm going to be joined in the army. I'm going to lead a battle. I'm going to fucking win this war fuck off you know i think um it it's it's kind of interesting because a lot of military leaders didn't have military experience during the civil war um like and how did most of that turn out where's west point during all of this? Isn't West Point around? No, West Point's 100% a thing. On both sides.

Yeah, they did graduate the leaders on both sides. That's 100% true. But this is post-Civil War, so it's around. Well, no, this is Civil War. This is the Civil War still. So he's just trying to fast-track. He's trying to do green to gold or something. No, no training. Zero training.

This is super common, though. So he's doing the Tom Cotton, Seth Moulton thing where he's getting some combat experience so he can go boomerang back into political office. Who is that? Not really. He doesn't have a lot of political ambitions at this point other than the seat that he currently has.

Are we talking like state house yes he was he was in the ohio state house no sorry he was in the house of representatives at the time so like but he wasn't talking about running uh for congress nothing like that okay um yeah but yeah he was a very minor ohio representative and like so west point was the thing they pumped out hundreds of officers every year, but the sudden expansion of the federal army meant there was not nearly enough officers to go around. So like,

no ROTC to go through. No. And at the state level, they'd be like, fuck it. You can, if you have money, you have connections,

whatever, you'll become a Colonel, you'll become a general, stand up your own regiment. We don't give a fuck. Just go shoot rebels. Um, And that had mixed success, though, obviously we won. So it ended up working in the end. Because I mean, to be fair, most of these guys, if they failed, they would just be fired. They'd be sent home and somebody else would... I mean,

eventually they would learn how to fight. And that largely true garfield's a great example of that um i mean it's also kind of like you know the union had a more than a little bit of the kind of the russian theory of i don't know just like keep throwing dudes at them and eventually like i don't know maybe we'll wear them down or something or we'll get better at it maybe one of the dudes will actually be good at something yeah eventually they'll figure out someone who's good at generaling and to be fair he was pretty good he made general in a year and you know again

to be fair I'll stand him just a little bit more whomst among us has not been like yeah I'm not really qualified for this but I'm sure I can figure it out that's been my whole life this doesn't seem too hard I can figure it out and then boom you're a general that's like 70 of being a lawyer if i'm honest you know people like oh well uh you know do i do you think i have like a legal claim here it's like

well uh maybe and then you say like you know a bunch of words that make it sound like you know what's going on and then you actually go back to your office and do about like two hours worth of legal research on west law and then you know and then you can actually pretend to be an expert hell yeah that's kind of what i mean he did he found his way into combat wasn't in direct control he was subordinate to other generals and stuff and he got promoted and he got put on the staff of general william rosecrans who was a renowned fucking idiot um and he kind of defeated his own army at the battle of chickamonga because he could not give clear orders uh it like he told one side of his formation to do something completely different than the other and then the only so the only thing that law that made the

battle of chickamonga not a complete disaster for the union and even though it almost was was uh garfield uh garfield kind of like because he uh he ordered his units to pull back rosecrans did uh thinking that everybody else was also pulling back leaving about half of his army to die um and garfield was kind of had it like just kind of had a feeling in the pit of his stomach he's like i have a feeling there's still men fighting uh so just kind of had a feeling in the pit of his stomach. He's like, I have a feeling there's still men fighting. So he kind of rallied a relief force to go fight out the coming encirclement and get those men out. Otherwise, the Union would have lost a godly amount of people. And for that, Rose Kranz was fired,

and Garfield got promoted again to major general, though he resigned his commission because the guy that was replacing his boss is Grant. And he didn't like Grant, something that will come up again later. And to be fair, Grant didn't like him either. And he went back to the House of Representatives. But I mean, he went from colonel to major general in two years. And he went back to the House of Representatives. But I mean, he went from colonel to major general in two years. And in the same time frame, I went from specialist to corporal to specialist again. So who am I

to judge? Wait a minute, though. So he just in the middle of the war was just like, well, that's enough of that. I mean, because the war isn't over, right? It's absolutely not over. Yeah, grant still has

gettysburg to do so he's just like two years is like major general that's cool that's good from a shadow box time to go on back home this is like what the fuck he was actually good he was he was good at his job yeah you you you forget that like in the civil war there were a lot of absolutely bumbling leaders because it's just like you're connected and have money so you get to do this and all the dumb broke people who would have been us are just like you guys go get to get trench foot and

use broken muskets and shit so it's but it's just incredible that he's good at this and was just like no I don't want to do it anymore was uh we're like we're term of years contracts like things for like officers in the civil war no because i know that like well i just like because i remember like for enlisted it was you know like particularly the beginning of the war like people signed enlistment contracts that were like i don't know

like you know like 180 days long or whatever the fuck and so it was just you know and they had a problem with that because they would just have to muster dudes out after like, you know, a battle. Yeah, there's I'm not entirely sure the normal enlistment contract or draft order for enlisted people, but they can certainly not just like, you know, I'm good and then just leave. But one of the he's he was over it. He openly admitted he did not like combat like go fucking figure dude um but one of the reasons why he returned to government like because at first he's like you know i'll stay being a general whatever but he was worried that stained appointed generals like himself not federal generals uh would get shit assignments during and after the war and he thought um that

going back home and working in government would be better than like getting a station in like i don't know kentucky or something i tossed kentucky out there because the worst place i've ever been stationed and i should point out i've been stationed at fort hood so what's up fort knox you're terrible um it was really funny a small side note there's like a Civil War fort outside of Fort Knox and they try to dance around the issue

that the fort never saw combat during the Civil War because like that makes a really boring like museum piece I was like so what because I was 17 when I got there so like so what battle got fought here like none of them. Anyway, moving on.

Like, well, that's fucking lame. That's like, does anybody want to go visit the fucking coastal guns in Florida? No. So during this time, it was decided he should run for Congress. Like, Lincoln personally told him that he should return and run for Congress. Because reasons. I mean, shoring up Republicans who wanted to support the war. And people were stridently anti-slavery at that point was probably a big thing for him. Absolutely. I'm not going to go too hard into period politics because they're kind of crazy,

but they were considered radical Republicans at the time, which are people who are hardcore anti-slavery, very, very pro-Reconstruction. And Garfield was so pro-Reconstruction. We'll talk about that in a little bit. So Lincoln's like, I need this guy in Congress. And also at the time, Ohio had just been redistricted. So all of his friends lincoln includes like yo all you gotta do is run and you'll win so he tossed his hat into the arena and actually just refused to campaign like he's like i'm not gonna go campaign for this shit i'll hire you to do it for me and he hired his manager uh and that worked like as lazy as that fucking sounds it worked that's some strong house of

representatives energy right there if we're honest like that's like some real that's a real like you know giving us that jk3 would be proud i'm just saying look and and now james garfield is the inventor of the hype man you know like he's you know he's just like hey flavor flay just you know go around and and talk me up and just send send a dude out like i don't want to talk to these assholes just wearing a fucking supreme uh pop hat right he created he created the uh the first uh mc to to go out and he uh he did my favorite thing which is what mike t did. And that is he paid a guy $100,000 a day to just stand out in the crowd and yell, guerrilla warfare during press releases. And that's 100% something that actually happened. It's one of my favorite Mike Tyson stories. crocodile as well. But I don't know how he won. I didn't look too hard into the campaign,

but I assume his candidate must have ran the worst campaign in human history, outside of Hillary Clinton, because he lost to a guy who didn't even campaign for his own candidacy. But he didn't actually take seat in Congress. He was still in the House of Representatives because there was a huge gap. So during that in the House of Representatives because there was a huge gap. So during that time, like I said, he was a radical Republican, which when I say radical Republican today, that just means you're a Nazi. But in the 1800s, it meant that you wanted to literally punish the South for rising up to defend slavery and their slavers rebellion. Garfield thought plantations should be seized by the government and redistributed to black people.

Rad. Uh, and rebel leaders should be executed on site without, without trial. Also rad. He's like, how, how did,

how did the best president get fucking killed so quickly? It's a, a reason dumber than you could possibly expect. Um, and, uh, so quickly. It's a reason dumber than you could possibly expect. And so one of the things that he wanted to do was punish the South so hard that slavery and the concept of slavery would never rise up again. And he said that

if he was in Congress, he said Congress should be obliged to, quote, determine what legislation is necessary to secure equal justice to all loyal persons without regard to color. I'm sorry. I'm still stuck on like just punish them. Yeah.

I don't know why that got in my head, but I just I'm sorry. I had to throw that out there. He's going to dom the fuck out of the South. Yeah, just like absolutely just like spanking the shit out of the South. Like he was one of the most extreme people that would have been in Congress, which is awesome. He also

supported a change to conscription laws because he hated the conscription laws. At the time, if you say your draft number got pulled and you had money, you could pay what was known as a bounty and escape the draft. It would skip down to the next guy in line, which is really fucked up. And to be fair, Lincoln also supported getting rid of this.

He just needed support to do it, hence why getting him into Congress. And the reason why that was still a law, it was one of those ye olde things. But also, people in Congress literally didn't have a concept of money. They figured that the level of bounty was so low in their heads that almost anybody could afford to buy their way out. When in reality, less than 1% of people could do that. people could do that uh garfield noted that when he mustered his regiment which he had to do himself mostly out of former students uh which is kind of fucked up but he didn't draft people like he went to their houses and recruited them yeah um he noted that like out of 30 000 people 1 000 people paid their bounty yeah so like i mean he was pissed i can only imagine that like

i can only imagine the same situation reoccurring today like fucking you know like pelosi and everybody else like you know just reenacting arrest the development like i don't know michael like how much can it be how much can a bounty be like ten dollars like like yeah exactly like it would be the exact same shit today it's like schitt's creek when a guy thinks minimum wage is 45 dollars um but he would not stop ascending politics because you know we're talking about president here uh he would become president in even a weirder way possible than he became a congressman in 188080, Garfield had been reelected to his position with the help of his friend, John Sherman. Sherman had, not that Sherman, different Sherman, had presidential dreams and intended on running in the upcoming election. Garfield said,

okay, you helped me get elected. I'll help you get the Republican nomination for president. Now, at the time, the Republican party was rocked by internal infighting and factionalism, thankfully something that no longer happens and negatively impacts the well-being of an entire nation. Several of the men who wanted to run for the party's nominations were countered by men who were part of a different faction within the party, leading to nobody being able to secure the party's nomination with enough votes. Now, the factions are largely unimportant. For instance, Ulysses S. Grant was attempting to run for a third term, which was not illegal. Obviously, FDR became president three times, but Grant tried to do

it the first time. There's a chance that he maybe could have won, but there's some people who fucking hated him. So they had to go through multiple ballots to see who could get the required number of votes. They went through dozens of ballots between the two frontrunners, President Grant and a guy named Senator James Blaine. Neither one of them could get the required amount of votes. While there were some outliers like Sherman, who you remember the guy who Garfield was supporting, who were not getting even remotely enough votes. So the Sherman people quickly changed over to support Blaine. There's other movers and shakers supporting other people, but still nobody had a majority of votes. Now this time a random representative from pennsylvania casted a single

ballot for james garfield for no apparent reason other than he seemed to be sick of the entire process political shit posting i mean same dude yes um and like this is despite that one garfield was not running for president nor had he ever spoken openly about a desire to ever do so um this happened so this happened and then like nobody told him about it because like this happened a couple other times like fuck it i'll just throw a a ballot for this dude fuck i'll throw a ballot for this dude uh but this began to happen more. In one case, as the convention wore on, a dozen Wisconsin delegates switched their votes to Garfield. And when he heard about it, he was confused and protested.

He argued that people could not legally vote for him as he was not running, and they were voting for him against his consent. Like, why are you voting for me? Fuck fuck it let's vote for that guy oh just trolling someone by accidentally making them president yeah like it's important to point out that he didn't subscribe to really either one of the two major factions he was an outlier so like backroom politicking took over factions within the party were resistant to a third grant term for historical reasons. A lot of the reasons why people were historically against a third term as president is that George Washington only did two.

So therefore, every other president should only do two. Hence why FDR running and winning a third term, everybody's like, how dare he? And clutch their pearls or whatever. So like a lot of people were historically against that, breaking that taboo, while others were just like, no, fuck Grant, he'll lose. Like if he wins our nomination again, he's going to lose

because he wasn't the most popular president on earth. So it was like the two sides who hated each other, but hated grant more banded together to throw all of their votes behind garfield who remember was still not running for president

and did not want to be president and did not want to be president yeah he was telling people this now like if like it was like actually turned out to be like a split like democratic national convention who would they nominate who like absolutely didn't want to be fucking president anybody other than

Bernie Sanders if it's the DNZ no but like but like someone that both sides could agree on but also someone who themselves absolutely did not want to be president I don't know George W Bush at this point I imagine I imagine every every politician wants to be the president at this point i imagine i imagine every every politician wants to be the president at

this point yeah that's the thing like i can't imagine someone just like really doubling down and saying like no fuck you i'm not gonna run for president what the fuck do you want from me well in the 1880s they didn't have nuclear weapons that you could fucking rub your dick all over so yeah but no one actually like does anything with those like i mean if we nuked people in a greater you know we followed uh it's what's that perception it's the japanese enter the chat i was gonna say uh you know unless you want it we're gonna make uh was bappin fucking president so you can just glass russia like he wants to uh so like at this point garfield was like well if they're gonna vote for me there's clearly nothing I can do to tell them otherwise. So on the very next ballot, Garfield received three hundred and ninety nine votes.

Ninety three more than Grant and over the three hundred and seventy nine needed to secure the nomination for the Republican candidate for president. Oh, that fucking that rock so hard. Garfield was not happy with this turn of events how how much do you say how much did people just hate grant back then enough really i mean he was he wasn't a bad president but he had a couple scandals um there was also yeah even back then people were were very much against like the breaking of civility rules. Even in the Gilded Age, we're like, you're running a third term, how could you? So that turned a lot of people against him.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Like, Garfield was so unhappy with this. One reporter noted that he, quote, looked pale as death and seemed to be half-consciously to receive the congratulations of his friends. his death and seemed to be half consciously to receive the congratulations of his friends. He later told his friends, quote, this honor comes to me

unsought. I have never had presidential fever, not even for a day, not even right now. Fuck you all! This accidental presidential... Just actively flipping everybody off. Just like two birds On a fucking podium It's like when your friends get the people to sing

Happy birthday whenever you go out to eat This accidental presidential Candidate went on to win the general election Seemingly becoming the first president to Become president against his will Thankfully that would Never happen to the Republican Party ever again

which honestly might end up being like means he's the only like non sociopath I've ever become president in this country he he seems relatively put together like even though he didn't want to be president he ended up becoming a decent one for at least the short time he was president

like for instance there was something called the star route scandal that popped up. Without going into the pins and needles and whatever of it, it's like various members of the government to include both the Democrat and Republican Party were buying and selling postal routes out West for a huge profit, something that was considered very illegal for them to do. Rather than do the normal thing and gloss over all this and get his own money, because remember,

this is the Gilded Age, he ordered a full investigation into the scandal, not even sparing the people in his own political party when it came to holding people accountable. But because he was a seemingly decent man, that meant, of course,

that something terrible was going to happen to him. You know, I am starting to... I've always held fast to a theory that the best person to be a president is a person who doesn't want to be president, and now I'm upset that Garfield

dies, and I don't get to either be correct or incorrect about that. Yeah, see, like a full four years of it, because I really do think that, you know, I agree with you. That the only person you could ever trust to be president is someone who absolutely doesn't fucking want to. Yeah. And I mean, I don't know what...

He was in office for less than a year. So it's impossible to say like maybe he'll do something awful later on. There's no telling. But it sounds like if you're gonna make if if there was a guy to become president against his will in the 1880s i guess james garfield is kind of your guy yeah i i think so um and like on july 2nd 1881 garfield is walking through the baltimore and potomac train station something that no longer stands from my understanding. And he was planning on leaving Washington D.C. for a family vacation in New Jersey.

I assume because he hated his family and wanted to subject them to New Jersey. Also, it's bonkers to me to picture a president calmly walking through a fucking train station just on his own. Just hanging out, getting a fucking hot dog, going to

Sbarro. Does presidential security exist now like does the secret service exist kind of sort of form of yeah it kind of exists because this is after lincoln got shot um right so security exists but not even to the like because garfield would even be the last president shot in the next couple of years. So presidents were lousy with bullets at this point. There's a steep learning curve. And it's like, we just got to stop getting... If we could get the presidents to stop getting shot, guys,

that's our goal here. Yeah, it's like, what's the odds this happens again? It was the Pinkertons, right? It was like that was the genesis of the Secret Service was the Pinkertons, right? That was the genesis of the Secret Service, was the Pinkertons. If I remember correctly. Garfield had some bodyguards, but not really. They didn't go with him everywhere because they didn't think that it was necessary. Yeah, it's unfortunate.

But while he was at the train station, a guy named Charles Gouteau appeared. Gouteau was a former Garfield supporter. He had worked and wrote for the Republican party, like writing like fluff pieces during the election. He's effectively, uh, I don't know. He,

he worked for the equivalent of like one America news, um, writing like just very, very pro Republican pieces, like making rhyming posters and stuff, very minor shit. But he came to the conclusion that he was personally responsible

for the election of Garfield as president. So he is, you know, Charlie Kirk, I guess? I don't know. No, he's Jack Pasebic. Yeah, he's piss boy Jack. Yeah. So hoping to bank on this totally devoid of reality idea that he had floating around in his head, he wrote countless letters to the White House after Garfield's election and to the party demanding to be appointed to a position within the government like some kind of consulate or something like that. But just to be clear, Garfield had no fucking idea who this guy was

either did anyone in his staff um though apparently he bothered um i believe it was garfield's chief of staff so often in the street over this that he did eventually get to know who he was just as the crazy guy who wouldn't stop yelling at um so yeah um but we've all been thinking yeah i mean who hasn't yelled at a member of government so often in the streets they've learned to know your name and face i mean that's actually like a goal that i have for the coming fiscal year everybody everybody should yeah in real life shit posting yeah every politician should have what that one person to like ah fuck or like a neighborhood, a whole city.

Like, um, but he was banking on this job. Like there was no idea of a doubt in his head. Right. Like he wasn't like, you know, I need to have a plan B or a plan C should Garfield told me to go fuck myself.

So like, he's like, no, I'm going to get this job. So he quickly ran out of money. He was broken living on the street. Um, something that he personally ran out of money. He was broke and living on the street, something that he personally blamed Garfield for. So that morning when Garfield was hoping to jump on a train and go hit the GTL on the Jersey shore, Guto was waiting for him. And Guto spent the last few

dollars that he had on a British Bulldog revolver solely because he liked the way it looked and he thought it looked cool in a museum because he knew that's where it would end up when he shot the president with it. I mean, we need more historically forward-thinking assassins.

I feel like that's the revolver that the NYPD posted that they obfuscated someone a couple days ago. I can't comment further on what Francis said because I think the Secret Service will bust through my window. Now you're in Hawaii. It's fine. It's the Secret Service, just they're wearing Aloha shirts.

That's just a Boogaloo boy. I think those are just Boogaloo boys, yeah. Not in Hawaii. I keep saying this. They're just shirts here like uh hawaiians won't stand for white people stealing one more thing from them uh so guto bust out of the crowd drew his pistol and shot garfield twice uh one bullet grazed his arm and the second hit him in the back, passed by his spine and burst through his first lumbar vertebrae and lodged in his abdomen.

Garfield collapsed, remaining conscious, but unable to stand, mostly because the bullet had just blasted through his back and screamed, my God, what is this? I wanted to make some kind of Garfield joke that's like, I really don't like Mondays but then I realized that like the president got shot in the spine so like maybe I don't know John Arbuckle was nearby

it's so sad too because this is the president of the United States and yet when you google Garfield it is all orange cats that love lasagna. You know, it's unfortunate because that Garfield was president of the United States for 201 days. So he was a longer time than James Garfield. And like when he got shot, Garfield thought he was going to die. So like when doctors arrived, he told them to like ah leave me alone i'm fucked like don't bother with me uh but but he wasn't he survived um immediately anyway and he came under the the care of dr willard bliss now i should point out i'm saying that name doctor because that was his first name name his name was dr willard bliss uh he he was a civil war surgeon so he actually was a doctor

like says full name was dr dr willard bliss um though being a doctor in the 1800s is like more of a vibe you know like it was like you learned from on the job training so so i just had to break in for a second and say that there was actually someone in my law school who was named i'm pretty sure if i remember correctly was named stanford law no fucking way and i did not go to stanford uh or a school that was close to that like in legal rankings so that must have been a real the fuck disappointment for his parents you gotta immediately change my name to Boston Community College

fucking Knights at Suffolk you know it doesn't have quite the same ring to it I don't know DeVry is a really nice last name got a very French sound to it. That's why my middle name is Universally Phoenix. Joe, I-Z-T-Tech, Kasabian.

The standard for the day, like we've talked about before, about what kind of medicine we're talking about. And it mostly involved like germ theory wasn't a thing yet, but it was bad. And I need to point out that Dr. Bliss was a bad doctor even for the day of bad doctors.

During the Civil War, when 99% of his jaw was hacking off limbs with a saw, he simply ran away from his own medical tent and fled the battle, leaving thousands of soldiers without medical care to be fair i'm not entirely sure if that's a negative for the soldiers who are wounded or not um and then like he he wrote home saying that like there was a savage battle i am unhurt because he left out the part where he's like because i ran away um uh it but

this is the 1800s. Word didn't travel far about him being a bad doctor. And he was eventually appointed to what other position could he possibly be appointed to but the head of a

Veterans Affairs hospital. Now, like, the VA didn't quite exist yet. So this is like a hospital for veterans. But it's a VA fucking hospital. Like, he was appointed personally by lincoln uh because people told him that he was a good doctor so like i guess back then when nobody could just like google your name and realize like that you're a huge idiot

um that just your reputation is all that matters uh And he had a good reputation that he spread mostly from himself. He could not shut up about how great he was as a doctor, even though literally anybody he worked with had the exact opposite to say. So this is just like the hype beast episode. Yeah, absolutely. We're hyping our way into the presidency. We're hyping our way into becoming a doctor. We got a hype man, and that's how we're getting through life.

It's a hustle and grind lifestyle it reminds me a lot of there was this guy i cannot remember his fucking name somebody will probably be able to do it that uh made up mma championships for himself and like put him online in the early 2000s like just when ufc was becoming a thing just when mma was really born in the collective consciousness. And he was like blowing himself up online about how good he was and he actually talked himself into a professional bout and got

fucking annihilated within seconds. Like you have to admire the hustle, but you don't bite into your own grift. There's a point where the propaganda has to stop, even for own grift. Right. There's a point where the propaganda has to stop, even for yourself, man. Yeah.

Not if you're Dr. Willard Bliss, however. To be fair, he seemed good enough at logistics and paperwork because he ran his hospital well. But he was apparently thought of high enough that when Lincoln got shot in 1865, someone's like, I know a doctor doctor we have to go get Dr. Bliss so he ended up as part of the staff working on President Lincoln's gaping

head wound so he's got experience in holes in President that's right though if you read Bliss's accounts he was the head doctor for Lincoln but he actually didn't do anything the head doctor is a guy named, he was the head doctor for Lincoln, but he actually didn't do anything. The head doctor is a guy named Charles Leal.

Is that it? The head doctor? Oh, God damn it. I hate it. But Leal was a humble dude. And also, remember, Lincoln died, so there wasn't really anything to brag about. I mean, he was shot in the fucking head, so of course he was going to die.

Yeah, details. But Bliss wrote endlessly about how much work that he did on Lincoln. But, you know, spoiler alert, Lincoln did not survive. But Bliss just stood in the room, and when the media came calling, he was more than willing to talk about how great he was and how much work that he did on Lincoln.

So the Swedenman is something of a minor celebrity. Nobody digs inside presidential holes like I do. Nobody can do it. Nobody figures that brain quite like me, which he did do. We'll talk a little bit more about that later on, though. The old brain figuring. That's right. He had, like,

he was Gilded Age popular in certain circles. Like, people knew what his name was. So he used that newfound fame to do what else? Sell fake cancer cures! He's fucking Ben Shapiro's brain pills um and like it was like one of those like this will fix phlebotomy and and toxic blood cancer and things like it was like literally snake oil and morphine and like some cocaine it didn't it didn't have fucking shit in it uh it was literally water

like so much so that the american medical association at the time charged him with quackery um and like it it dented his reputation but like i said word doesn't travel so he was able to just like shrug it off. Yeah, it's not like there's an internet. You can just say, fuck it, and move a state away or just go start a new state and be like, look, I'm the best doctor in this state that I just invented. Yeah, exactly. So anybody in the know knew this guy was a bit of an idiot and a quack.

But most people didn't remember or care because he's just a fucking doctor. But one person did know about him and had nothing but good things to say about him. And that was when Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of President Lincoln, remembered him as the kind and talented doctor who worked on his father in his dying moments.

Robert Todd Lincoln also happened to be President Garfield's Secretary of War. So when somebody yelled out... Yep. Fuck. So when somebody yelled out, the president's been shot.

Lincoln was the only dude in the room who just happened to know a guy. He was like, I got a guy for this. Specifically just for this. I got a president gunshot wound guy.

Wasn't there a third one that he was around for? Yes, the one after this. Was that McKinley? Yeah, and after that, he refused any and all presidential summons. It's like the curse of the lion, but it's one of the Lincoln sons. The dude's the death note, but for presidents.

Also, can you imagine seeing that happen twice and thinking, you know who I want on my fucking White House staff? Someone dig up Robert Todd Lincoln and just chuck his skeleton into the front yard of Mar-a-Lago. So unfortunately for Garfield, Dr. Bliss ended up becoming his head physician. Now, Garfield, who was conscious this entire time, also knew of Dr. Bliss as the guy who worked in the Veterans Hospital. And also they knew each other from the war. And from what Garfield knew about medicine, which was nothing, he was a good doctor and a solid guy.

So when he heard Bliss was in charge of his care, he was relieved, thinking that a not-insane person would be tending to his wounds. Unfortunately, he would be very, very wrong. So Garfield was moved to the White House for treatment. Now, if you're thinking, that's not

a hospital room. How could you sanitize a White house bedroom Well cleanliness was not an accepted part of American medicine at the time Neither was sepsis prevention or germ theory So a doctor named Joseph Lister Had actually introduced the concept of washing your hands With something just as simple as water Before touching patients all the way back in the 1860s. But it was not widely adopted and people thought it was ridiculous and

was considered a pseudoscience by the AMA. And at the time, the AMA actually had a belief or had a policy that if you engage in any of these pseudoscientific beliefs or what they consider pseudoscientific beliefs, you no longer be certified by the AMA. So if you washed your hands as a point of practice, you would be decertified. Hell yeah. Now just remember that when I explain literally everything else that happens to

President Garfield. Now I should point out that Bliss was dirty pretty much all the time, even not when he was taking care of patients. Like people noted that his jacket was always filthy and stained. Uh, and this is like just how he waltzed into his treatment room. Like he was pig pen, but PhD or MD, sorry. Um, but what was normal for the day was anesthetic anesthetic had been around for quite some time now i mean granted it was something as simple as like chloroform or morphine or opium but bliss

didn't use that either okay he so throughout all of this i'm gonna say it countless times garfield feels everything he's not been given any anesthetic and he's been shot hours ago now so my dude's just like lying on the table in the like in the White House not in an actual hospital with dude with like mustard stains on his

fucking blazer like wandering in who's just like I don't know like let me feel around in there with my like you know i just finished jerking off 10 minutes ago like time to just like go digging around your gut wound and has like fucking rib sauce all over his hand sorry gotta wipe these off real quick like i mean what did he what did he learn from the the lincoln assassination as we know absolutely nothing well they jammed fingers into his brain it It's like, well, let's do the same thing.

See what happens. Yeah, and that is part of science at the time. So when Garfield was in the treatment room, Bliss jammed his unwashed fingers into the president's wound, trying to find the bullet. All while Garfield was still conscious and feeling everything. Now, a key principle behind this probing was to remove the bullet because it was thought at the time

that leaving buckshot or slug or whatever in a person's body led to problems ranging from, quote, morbid poisoning, which is a condition that does not exist, to nerve and organ damage just by virtue of it being inside of you. Well, let's learn this

because he watched the treatment of President Lincoln. It was shot in the fucking head and that did not matter. Now, of course, anyone who has been shot or has shrapnel or even something as simple as a splinter inside of them knows that having these things lodged in your body isn't actually important unless it's pressing against something important, say like an organ or your spine, and it's causing more damage. What's more important is the trauma that it causes on its path to do. I treated gunshot victims before in my ambulance.

I did not jam my goddamn hand into them looking for the bullet. Neither did the doctors once we got them to the hospital. That's not what you fucking do unless you watch movies, which I'm assuming is what Bliss did for his education, even though movies hadn't been invented yet. Just like a pictogram? It's Blackhawk down, but in a flip book. A flip book of someone digging through Lincoln's head with his fucking brains?

Brain fist. Oh, sweet. That was a solid metal name yeah hell yeah put that on the list after fucking corpse road um now uh so this whole time he's rapidly fingering this guy's back because remember that's where the hole is and he's trying to find the bullet, which he's never going to find because I don't know how big this dude's fingers are, but he was shot in the back, and the bullet ended up on the left side of his body in his abdomen.

So he never found it. He was never going to come close. So he believed that the only important thing was finding this bullet and removing it. However, Bliss would not find this bullet, and he just kept on fingering Garfield's back with his gross hands, which are only

getting grosser at this point. Just picturing him wiping off his hands to go eat but not vice versa. He's never washing his hands at any point. He's just cross-contamining the entire White House.

Garfield told the doctors that he didn't feel good and he was losing feeling in his legs and feet you know from being shot in the fucking vertebrae uh this surprised bliss because he didn't know what that could possibly mean it should be noted that people knew what your spine did at this point in time like they didn't completely like they didn't have map they didn't have like nerve maps or anything but it was roughly understood that like spinal injury would cause paralysis at various points like like the science isn't exact but like if you take a bullet in your spine, you know why you're paralyzed. Um, but he didn't really care. He ignored that and just went on to kept trying to find the bullet. Um, so this brings up something else, unlike what most people think or believe, uh, or see on TV, unless you're familiar with the concept, bullet entrance wounds are very, very small.

Like normally it's exit wounds that are blown out and awful. Entrance wounds are normally very small, especially at close range. So Bliss came to the conclusion that the bullet wound was simply too small for him to find using his fingers. Oh no. Oh no. No, no. no it's not it's not he began to cut away at the wound making it larger and larger eventually shoving his entire

fucking hand into the president's back remember the wound is in his back so the president's laying on his stomach getting literally impaled by this dude's fist. Joe, I just want to be clear just to make sure we're using the correct terminology. So now as a paramedic, does this count as blowing out his back walls? I want to make sure I'm using the correct medical terminology

here. It's very important to me. Mr. Bliss, blow out these back walls um so he's feeling his guts in reverse um and i have to say like without seeing his on top reports i couldn't find them i only could find notes but he's causing literally just so much damage President Garfield's insights who is somehow still alive I can just picture him like being like no we need to open this up more he just like gets the revolver and starts blowing more holes

shoot a couple more bullets in there see if I can go find the first one yeah I need to like you know the only thing that can stop a bad bullet is a good bullet it'll follow the same path of travel it'll be fine like you. If we shoot him again, we'll know which way the bullet went. Yeah.

By the time Bliss was done cutting, he had opened a 20 inch long incision beginning at his ribs and extending all the way down to his groin. Yeah. We're just going to split this monkey open. Just like flayed him open like as a fucking deer.

And nobody's washing anything. This is on like a kitchen table in the fucking White House. So this wound eventually became a giant pus filled gash of human flesh. Like and it smelled rancid. Like people in the room were vomiting. flesh like and it smelled rancid like people in the room were vomiting so just pus and infection and like

a weeping wound on top of people vomiting everywhere as a matter of course vomiting into the wound this will help me find it celebrate back the skin celebrating Halloween by carving a fucking jack-o'-lantern in the president's stomach it's like two doctors one bullet celebrating Halloween by carving a fucking jack-o'-lantern in the president's stomach.

Two doctors, one bullet. Fuck. So, to the surprise of, I assume, everyone in the room at this point, Garfield began burning up with fever. Something that happens when people have fucking sepsis. Now, for people unaware, sepsis is a literal full body systemic infection that you get from everything i've just been talking about so the people around bliss not bliss himself became concerned by this you know the fever that's gonna kill him um and wanted to bring the president's temperature down

bliss ignored them thinking they had no idea what they were talking about i guess like thankfully they just like got some uh army corps of engineers to like build a weird fan that blew uh air over a block of ice but like you know if this is like a hot summer day which it was like it was summer in dc now so like it's gross and humid but like that wasn't the problem of why he was overheating he was overheating because he was dying from the inside out uh but like i guess points where points are considered or something um and this is when some weird shit happens but let's enlist the help of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. Look, I've

brought this up, because Alexander Graham Bell got brought in for a lot of things. Alexander Graham Bell was the only smart person in like three states that anybody could think of, and that's why. Yeah. He would get called in for all kinds of shit. This is like the real life version of like whenever

anyone posts like you know in the name of that man albert einstein like except you just bring in fucking like alex like i feel like it's like i feel like that's why we ended up with the character of like the smart dumb guy that we have that's like now like fucking uh like elon musk or someone like him because we have this like historical tradition of just being like, I don't know. He did like one smart thing once. So like, let's get him to consult on everything else.

Like, Hey, invented the telephone. Uh, I don't know. Uh, what do you feel about, how do you feel about stomach surgery?

Like how bad can you fuck it up? Yeah. Or they, or they would bring him in for, uh, for, for bridges. Like,

yeah, you can do, you can do engineering too. Right. Yeah. And like, let's, let's also not forget that he electrocuted an elephant to death.

That was Edison. That was Edison. That was Edison? Okay. Yeah, that was Edison using his opponent's electrical current. Like, look how dangerous it is. Yeah.

So I have to point out, Alexander Graham Bell is the only smart person in this entire story. He had come up with a device current and like look how dangerous it is yeah um but so i have to point out alexander granbell is the only smart person this entire story um he had come up with a device known as the induction balance pretty much what is metal detector um but he believed that he could locate the bullet within the president using electricity and magnetism he had a metal detector oh good oh good a magnet i'm sure that'll really help. What you want to do when you have someone who has shrapnel or

a bullet wound or something inside of their flesh is to put a really strong magnet right on the other side. Yeah, it's just Alexander Graham Bell going up to the president and just placing refrigerator magnets all over him until they stick. And he's like, I found it. But to be fair, the induction balins did work.

He had tested it on multiple Civil War veterans and located metal and shrapnel within their bodies. So even though it sounds kind of ridiculous, he's like, I'm going to use electricity to save your life. There was basis in reality. And he had done... If you were to measure it by like what we consider rigorous scientific studies today no it didn't pass but like for the late 1800s this shit was science in comparison to everything that bliss was doing this is fucking

cutting edge um so bliss was wary of letting anyone else care for the president for fear of them stealing his glory for being the guy who took care of the president so rather than let bell use his own invention bliss hijacked it fucked with it a few times and decided the newfound technology just simply didn't work um now there's a very good reason why this didn't work one he so he thought the bullet was lodged near the president's liver so he had no reason to believe that mind you he just thought it was uh so he only used the induction balance over that particular area like yep didn't find the bullet doesn't work also graham bell told him hey, you can't use this on a mattress because mattresses back then all have metal springs in them. It's going to fuck it up. You have to take

them off the mattress. He didn't do that either. So the induction balance didn't work. Now, probably the funniest thing about all of this is that the x-ray machine had been invented five years before and would have absolutely found the bullet um now x-ray machines were still rare and very expensive but there was one in washington dc um and the only reason they didn't take him to it is dr bliss thought it would be unsafe to move him now Now, after declaring moving him from that bedroom unsafe, he immediately jammed his hands back into his affected wounds. Well, yeah, I mean, you had to clean him out. I mean, you didn't want to, like, you know, just touch your hot dog without, you know, cleaning your hands by putting them in the president's stomach first. At this point, it's just him with a bucket bailing out pus and infection we're losing them

we're sinking it's actually following up it's how navy corpsmen were invented this was uh just coring out the president to use as a canoe now i i do have to say this again um like at this point garfield's burning up with fever but he's still conscious enough to feel most of this but his fever had gotten so bad he was starting to become confused um because his brain was frying from all the infection now that's what that's what happens when you have sepsis joe i want, I want to get a time hack here. How long at this point, we've got Edison and the metal detector,

how long has it been since the shooting? A couple months. Okay. No, it's been about a month at this point. So my man, you got a hand at Segarfield. He's got all this shit happening and he's still lingering. Any one of us would have just died. Oh yeah. Garfield's tougher than shit.

And everybody's noting, people who aren't Bliss, this whole time Bliss assumes he's still alive because of his medical treatment. Everybody else is like, God damn, this guy won't die. If they had done nothing, if literally they had just done nothing except like put a put like a because there's no exit wound right the bullet was in him

yeah so if they just like patched him up and just been like i don't know sit there for a couple of days and we'll bring you some food and if anything kind of moves weird we'll do something about it and he probably would have lived yeah at least he would have had a better chance. Most modern historians and doctors believe that if, and I mean, like I hate to like take modern stuff and throw it into, into history, but using science of the day, which remember hand-washing does exist.

It's just not widespread. So if you had a doctor who just washed his hands and just patched up the bullet hole there is a possibility he lived um though nobody really knows because like by the time he died and we'll talk about this at the end so much damage had been done to the inside of him nobody was really sure how much the bullet did right so like because they'd hauled him out to make him a fucking canoe and so they yeah like all of his like he's just like sitting there like with all his organs

next to him like in the fucking room at this point just in a pan and someone's occasionally pouring water over them I mean it doesn't like I would have been like I would have been like trying to like you know get my bodyguards gun at that point and just like putting a bullet in my head like you know versus having like you know Dr. What's is to like you know get my bodyguards gun at that point and just like putting a bullet in my head like you know versus having like you know Dr. What's

his nuts like you know dig his fucking like you know like fist my fucking spleen for like another day yeah but then you put you put a bullet in your own head and then you wake up with a finger inside of you you know getting brain fingered like god damn it can I please just die

at a long enough timeline we all get our fucking guts fingered like god damn it can I please just die at a long enough timeline we all get our fucking guts fingered by Dr. Bliss we all get brain fingered which is the name of my ska band hey everybody we're brain finger and this is our fucking trumpet lineup

everybody just fucking skate dancing around the President Garfield as he's getting his guts oh fuck I'm gonna make the intro Mighty Mighty Boss Tones now yes do it it's gonna take I don't even know how long

I really just want Nate to have to listen to a bunch of different Boss Tones songs it's gonna take over an hour for someone to figure out what this joke means when they listen to the intro. So by this point, the president was starting to slip. He was getting confused because his fever was so bad.

Hopefully some of his pain receptors had died at that point for his own sake. But with this came another problem. The president was no longer eating his appetite was becoming beginning to fail him after weeks of having his guts fisted by a doctor while his flesh was reduced to frothing pus um like at this point he had lost nearly a hundred pounds um and he was a big dude like he was in his mid 200 pounds pounds when he got shot. He was a solidly big boy.

Absolute dump truck ass on President Garfield. Dr. Bliss began to brainstorm ideas to get the wounded president to eat. Normally, I shouldn't have to say this, but I do because I have to explain why what's happening next is insane. To eat, you put food in your mouth, and the only way food is ingested is via your stomach.

Now, this all sounds obvious, but this was also known medical knowledge of the day. known medical knowledge of the day. It was established medical facts that you could only eat through your stomach. I know there's a low bar we're talking

about here and Dr. Bliss did not cross that bar. He decided to hit human anatomy and biology with the Uno reverse card and pump food directly up the president's asshole. Just butt-tugging cheeseburgers. I got some good news.

I have the exact recipe. Yes! Yes! Joe will be trying it now no you know what if the Patreon hits $10,000 a month I will butt chug this mixture

because at that point I don't have a job anymore so why not so this surprised everyone else to include like all the other doctors now this the science he was going on at the time a science that does not exist it was long since disproved um and it was the idea that if he pumped food directly into his lower intestine his lower intestine would then pull it into his stomach to be digested. That is not how the human body works.

Ah, the old reverse sphincter. Many people forget about that. And that is how we went ahead with what I assume is the first and only presidential butt feeding. I've been doing this show for almost three years. I did not think I was ever going to type that sentence. And that goes for the rest of this episode. So Garfield had, sorry, Dr. Bliss blended up meat, beef extract, and blood for some reason.

And forced it through a tube up the president's asshole via a small hand-operated pump. This is actually how Jordan Peterson is being kept alive right now. I just imagined all those... Oh, Michaela, please don't shove the tube up my ass anymore Just imagine all those old cartoons Where they've got the bellows from the From the fireplace The Boof and Bellows

Oh that's my ska band name Is the Boofing Bellows oh that's my scob band name is the boofing bellows uh so in case anybody was wondering what bliss's recipe for butt beef was i have it for you because he wrote an entire pamphlet about this quote beef extract directions infused a third pound of fresh beef, finely minced, in 14 ounces of cold, soft water to which apply a few drops of muriatic acid and a little salt. I assume for taste. After digesting for an hour or a quarter of an hour, strain it through a sieve and wash the residue with five ounces of cold water, pressing it to remove all soluble matter.

This is applied in two ounce doses for every four hours. So this is beef infused water. Okay. This is liquid beef it's the worst fango flavor on earth just because someone is fucking i'm losing it man oh we haven't gotten we haven't even gotten to discussing how it all comes back out man i'm getting there i'm getting there this is actually this is actually the recipe that's used to keep the royal family alive to this very day this is the peter theo method

uh just because somebody is eating via their asshole however it does not mean you can't have the fine taste of the aristocracy. So every couple of doses of butt food, the doctor would drop it. I shot up whiskey and some opium. I've always wondered what I've always wondered what Huel was. And now I think I know this whole thing is Huel. Now, for people who are unaware

of how the human body works, and Francis has already alluded to this, this does not feed people. And your body, now pressurized with meat and blood from a small hand-powered pump, being powered by a man named Doctor, will eventually eject whatever is

forced into your body. What goes up must come down. Now that's actually why he added the opium. It wasn't for the anesthetic purposes. It was the hope to relax the butt muscles. I mean, but opiates constipate you. Yeah, well he was hoping it would fire back into his

face. So like, if you've ever seen Jackass when Johnny Knoxville got a colonic and water immediately started shooting out of his ass when he was done so i guess what i'm saying is the president violently shed meat and blood across the white house room he was being treated in do we know what room this was like i would love for this to be the fucking like what became the oval office i that would be amazing. Every hot day it just kind of smells like raw beef and shit.

Ah, it's got the old Garfield aesthetic. There's a certain stain on the floor the first day that you're in office you just are told not to ask about. It's historical. We can't take it out. It's historical, but we don't like to talk about it now if you're thinking that dissuaded from dear dr dr bliss from continuing this treatment you would be wrong he did this over and over again in the screams of pain from the dying president and the unbridled

horror of his family did nothing to stop him. I'm surprised nobody has shot this doctor by now. No, I mean, he's assuming as he's violently butt vomiting out all of this beef, he's like, ah, he's keeping some of it. He looks

good. He's getting his pallor back. He's got blood you're thinking from just explosively just like shitting all over the fucking like all over the white house he'll shit out the bullet eventually like meanwhile like whatever poor fucking dude who shot him in the first place is probably just like look i didn't do anything nearly this fucking bad. Okay, so no shit. We'll talk about this guy's trial. He kind of brings that

up. So if this wasn't all bad enough, while he was butt-feeding the president, he decided to cut into him again in one last attempt to find the bullet, which failed. It is now September, several months after Garfield had been shot.

And somehow had he not died yet, but he's rapidly circling the drain due to all of this infection and butt feeding. Probably. I don't know. Bliss, however, kill me just over and over again every fucking day. For the love of God somebody shoot me again execute Charles Gouteau for not shooting me in the head

bliss however was optimistic telling the president that he was out of the woods and then release this information to the public saying that the president was on the mend. Thankfully, that would never happen again either.

This must have been a real shock to everyone involved when the president died 10 days later and Chester A. Arthur became president. Come on, big money, no way, me, no way, me, no way, me, no way. I imagine Chester A arthur's already been kind of running things for the last couple of uh couple of months he has and when he learned that the president died he was like oh finally it's over like he was like i can draw the big paycheck for this like garfield and arthur were like good friends and co-workers which is like at the time not always the case between president and vice president but like he was

upset to hear him die but also relieved that his suffering was over because like well you can only think about the last time that he went to go visit him was probably just like you know just like Garfield just like explosively shitting out of his fucking ass and like with like a fucking two foot long like fucking ass and like oh with like you know with like a

fucking two foot long like incision in his stomach like as you know his doctor doctor is like just fisting his fucking liver just vigorously yeah um and like if you're gonna go visit the president do it before lunch you do not want to have a working lunch with the president right now. I'll have what he's having. Like the president had actually held one government meeting during all of this. And it was like the first week. And I don't think Chester A. Arthur saw him a single time after that, because like that room had to smell like fucking death.

Like carpet steamers hadn't been invented yet. Like Febreze is hundreds of years off. Nobody's even. Yeah. Nobody's even thought of like the shitty college guy thing of like putting a dryer sheet over a fan when you're smoking weed yet. They're just like pouring more opium over it. Just like hoping that somehow like anesthetizes it, makes it smell better. Now,

Bliss conducted an autopsy on the president and concluded that the president died of blood poisoning from the bullet. However, at this point, nobody fucking believed him anymore. A second one, a second autopsy not done by bliss showed that the president died from sepsis uh because yeah of course he died from fucking because of

all the sepsis that was on him he wouldn't have died if it wasn't for all this sepsis um who put all this sepsis here oh what the where did you put this end president garfield rises from his bed and it's just his skin full of writhing infection like something from fucking warhammer 40k it is like i am president for life now and actually he legally changed his name to donald john trump and he's just a walking sack of infection um now i had to get my shitty lib joke out of the way because we've been cheerleading his death for the last hour and a half. Now,

not only did he die from sepsis, but they found out that Bliss was going in so blind when he was fingering his wound and his drive to find the bullet, which he never found. He created a completely false wound track in multiple

different directions. At one point, he fingered his insides so hard, he ruptured his bladder. Which also probably helped with all the sepsis. And we already talked about why the Alexander Graham Bell's invention did not work

um but yeah uh at that point bell was pissed off because like when this happened um bliss is being very very very very public with everything so he's like alexander graham bell was useless to me his invention was pointless so like bell was like fuck that i'm gonna prove him wrong and like the his invention worked like all the time when used correctly um uh also after this bliss published an entire pamphlet on forcing food up people's asses as a medical treatment it was considered good and solid medicine until 1913 um though uh tests on it because like rectal hydration is a thing and so it like there there is ways that you can put vitamins like desperately need vitamins and fluids rectally on a patient but not food not not bone broth no no that's only if you do crossfit um so after this happened bliss like any other

good capitalist submitted his bill to the government to be paid for his treatment for the president um the government was not enthusiastic about the medical treatment given to the president um and by this point everybody's doing the gentlemanly thing and kind of like keeping it on the down low, like, well, we'll not drag you in public, but like bliss wanted an exorbitant amount of money for his treatment. Um, so the,

the, the government, I'm cheap, but motherfuckers like, yeah, I, I spent all my own pocket money in beef. Um,

do you have any idea how much beef I fit up? President Garfield ass. Um, do you have any idea how much beef i fit up president garfield's ass um so the government began to legally explore ways how to get away with not paying him at all um sounds about right yeah which like in this point i'm kind of on the side of um the fight with the government between government and and bliss went public and the government was very open with how terrible they thought the medical treatment was and Bliss's reputation was ruined. To save what remained of his professional reputation,

he published a book titled Excerpts from the Opinions of Distinguished Medical Men in This and Other Countries Justifying the Treatment of the Late President Garfield, a title that truly rolls off the tongue. This book was like the like the project veritas of its day because he simply looked up quotes from other magazines of people talking about him negatively and pulled out specific sentences that out of context looked like they were positive

and then he published it that's a hell of a move yeah i mean the man was just a poster and you have to respect that and like argue like his argument was like yeah the president died but he was always gonna die anyway so like whatever i did to him really didn't matter which is like a really weird argument to have um and then he died penniless and and a couple of years, like about a decade later. His assassin, though, Gouteau, went on trial in November of the same year. And on his way to court, he dictated his entire autobiography to a local journalist and ended with a personal ad for a quote, a nice Christian girl under the age of 30. He was in his 40s at the time um he was uh apparently so out of it that he didn't realize the american public hated him despite someone

attempting to murder him in prison and then again attempting to murder him on his way to trial um because like at the time murdering a president is very unpopular. And the same reason why the guy who killed JFK got murdered too. It was considered uncouth to shoot the most powerful man in the world for some reason. Now, this is one of the first times

in American history... I mean... Now, this is one of the first times in American history. Now, there's a fucking line. I mean, well. Now, shocks, our legal representative can maybe speak on this a little more, even though you're not a criminal defense attorney. But this is one of the first times in American history that someone's defense was not guilty by reason of insanity. someone's defense was not guilty by reason of insanity. And for one of many of the first times in American history, the court rejected it because justice sometimes just looks a lot like revenge. Like Kuto was very obviously not well,

like he danced and sang as he went to the gallows and requested an orchestra to play while he was executed. Unfortunately that was turned down because that would be metal as fuck. Well, I mean, was it... What was the name of the guy who shot... Oh, Hinckley. The guy who shot Reagan? Yeah, yeah.

Like, so, I mean, I can't speak... Did it for Judy... What the fuck was the actress's name? Jodie Foster. Jodie Foster, that's right. Yeah. Like, I can't speak uh you know the garfield but i could say like 100 years later about uh when hinkley shot reagan

you know part of the reason why he actually recently got released from the uh the asylum that he was put into afterwards yeah he gets supervised releases now yeah but but essentially like uh they actually changed the um like the legal rules of evidence around medical testimony related to the state of mind of a defendant after he got off, literally just to make sure that no one could ever escape the death penalty again by doing what he did. you know, escape the death penalty again by doing what he did, which all of which is to say that like, you know, you know, kind of changing the rules when it's the president,

who's the murder victim is like, you know, something that is a, at this point, like an American tradition with like a hundred year history. Yeah. Um, but yeah,

he was executed by hanging on June 30th, 1882. Uh, they wanted to execute him before the one year anniversary of when he shot the president and like when he was on trial he's one of his arguments was I didn't kill the president I only

shot him the doctors killed him that's like oh well done you actually pretty solid dunk and old Dr. Bliss there yeah so this episode Pretty solid dunk on old Dr. Bliss there. Yeah. So this episode stretched on a really long time because it's fucking outstanding.

But we do a thing on the show called Questions from the Legion. And our question from the Legion today is we almost universally cover awful things on this show. Like we just talked about the gruesome death of an American president, was boarded on torture. Last time we talked about a war crime. All of our episodes generally involve someone dying. So our question from the Legion today is,

what is something good that is happening in your life right now? Like give me a positive. So did anybody want to take that one i gotta think uh i mean i'm getting out of the army in in a month that's fun and i don't know like it's i got a wife and a kid so it's not like super depressing for me i guess to be left inside um shocks you got one oh fuck i don't fucking know last couple years have sucked even before this and like uh i gotta admit 2020 kind of kicked my ass i'd say you know my my new job that i have is pretty solid um you know i mean uh i you know i got i got to go with like sailing

a bunch of summer with my cousin and like you know his family and everything that was pretty good um you know you gotta you guys try to find like the little nice things where you can um because like laura knows a lot of shit's really fucking difficult and it's real hard to like stay positive right now i don't like fault anyone for it really which is like not really like a i guess not really like a uh um a positive point but more just you know it's fucking hard you know yeah it is uh shock's positive point is sometimes it's okay to let the darkness take over yeah well i mean you know and i'd like i think that's part of it though is you know like i think it's important to realize that like everyone's like fucking struggling everything fucking sucks right now and that uh you know not to like turn this into too much of like an after you know after uh school tv special

but uh you know it's like it's okay to admit that like shit really fucking sucks and if you know you need to like i mean i'll be honest with it i've been like investigating like you know like counselors and therapists and shit just because you know like even before this you know like i had uh you know some bad stuff go on with my family and you know had uh no other different reverses and it can be real fucking difficult to try and deal with all that shit and you shouldn't have to do it alone yeah and it's a lot harder to deal with when we're all locked inside and like i mean i'm on an island on the other side of the country from you guys so like i was never going to be able to like chill out with you anytime soon but like you know we could all see our friends and decompress or whatever and that's why like i guess my bright side is nothing to do

with anything in person because my fucking book outsold noam chomsky and that's rad as a motherfucker now everybody has to send Joe emails when they have dumb lefty questions. And you're going to get a terrible response. It's going to be just as bad as Numchonsky's responses. I might just send you a picture of my feet. This is going to be the currency after the world falls apart. Only feet pics.

Hell yeah. Finally, wiki feet will reign supreme. So as always, you guys, thanks for being on the show. If you listen to this show, you should be listening to Hell of a Way to Die already. But if you're not,

fucking listen to it. And thanks guys for stopping by again. Thank you for talking entirely too long with me about shoving food up another man's ass. You know, there's only so many times in your life you can thank another grown man for that, which is zero times. Um, but today we got one. Um, and, uh, until next time don't shove beef up your

ass don't do it and if anyone on the discord wants to know I do have a humorous story or two about butt chugging so if you have me at some point I'll tell you my funny stories about butt chugging

so yeah at shocks DM butt chugging so yeah at shocks dm butt chugging and we we will talk to you guys next week