Greatest Americans

AOL has all week been holding an election for the top American of all time.

The finalists are as follows...

Benjamin Franklin
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Abraham Lincoln
Ronald Reagan
George Washington

I honestly don't know how you can objectively choose between these great Americans...

Benjamin Franklin was a great inventor, a great statesman, and may have been principally responsible for the French intervention in the Revolutionary War...

Martin Luther King, Jr., of course is known as the one single American most responsible for directing attention to the plight of the Black Americans that were still not getting full Citizenship, or justice. I still have chills when I hear replays of his great speech, "I Have a Dream"...

Abraham Lincoln was the president during a time of great turmoil. While the industrial North was doing well, the Agricultural South, depending upon slavery, was not going to follow his lead, and of course didn't...He held the nation together, at a time that no one thought it was possible...

Ronald Reagan inherited his office, after the previous President, a nice man, but an ignorant one, had, much like the Truman administration, following the second world war, with the Navy decimated, the Air Force raped, and the Army cut to one third of it's previous strength.

He, during his term of office,managed to rebuild the Armed Forces to a level that could not only compete, but actually sank the Soviet Union...He of course, along with Congress, ran up a large national debt, which some folks still blame him for, without looking at the reasons therefor.

This man, in his own time, managed to turn the world around by the strength of his will, during a time that television and the media well surpast any media that existed during the previous persons lives...

George Washington...How can anyone choose above him, yet, was he a great statesman, or just a great General...

I confess, that faced with these great choices, why should we be force to choose...

I am thankful that we have had them all, in their chosen, or forced into roles...

I can't see where anyone can choose between these great men, certainly not me...