This morning I was confronted with a Twitter poll about which date was the worst in American history. The choices were: the Kennedy assassination, September 11th 2001, Pearl Harbor, and January 6th of this year.

Now, I won’t say any of these days was a particularly good one. Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were especially bad. But let’s keep some perspective here; on August 24, 1814, an invading army actually burned down both the White House and the Capitol after inflicting a pitiful defeat on American defenders at the Battle of Bladensburg — and even that, while a bad day for America, wasn’t our worst.

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