(AP) WASHINGTON - The White House on Sunday disagreed with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s claim that the Iraq war was “the worst foreign policy mistake” in U.S. history.

One of the best things about being White House Press Secretary is my nearly unlimited access to the White House’s rich collection of letters, diaries, and historical documents. It gives me a perspective on history that people who haven’t worked here really can’t possibly have. Those volumes, there on the shelves, allow me to see into the world of Presidential history in a whole new way, and when the day comes that I finally get the chance to take those books down from the shelves and start reading them, well, I think it’s safe to say that I’ll know even more.

It’s what makes it so hard to talk to the press. They just don’t have the access and breadth of knowledge of past and present, and sometimes it’s hard to be patient when all I want to say is, “Trust me, if you had even a little bit of the knowledge that I could have at a moment’s notice, you’d see why your questions are so dumb.”

I don’t say that of course. But I’m always tempted.

So when I heard Harry Reid say that Iraq was the United States “worst foreign policy mistake…” well, I think ol’ Harry could use a quick dose of some of the realities that are very likely contained in those austere volumes that are literally within arms’ reach of my desk as I write this. You want mistakes, Reid? Here:

- In 1889, Benjamin Harrison mistook Bolivia for a club sandwich. Even Harrison himself wasn’t sure how this happened, or how he actually managed to butter the entire city of Santa Cruz in April of that year. He later attempted to make amends by establishing the first “Pan-American Congress,” but the damage had been done. Even today, Bolivians refer to awkward social situations as “Mantequillas de Harrison.”

- Everyone knows Calvin Coolidge as the man who presided over the risk-free economic boom of the late-20’s, but did you know that he also once declared war on the Galapagos Islands? It’s true, I think. An invasion force of 35,000 men quickly took the largest island from a few very confused iguanas.

- And how come nobody ever mentions FDR lending Hitler his record collection in 1936? Or Chester A. Arthur’s Indonesian “fart heard round the world?” Or “Zachary Taylor and the Chamber of Secrets?” Or the time Franklin Pierce had Madrid carpeted?

No, the fact is that none of these quite-possibly real events fit into the liberal media’s agenda, so you never hear about them. Which allows guys like Harry Reid to blab on about Iraq being the “worst” foreign policy mistake in history. As you’ve seen, it’s in seventh place at the very least, and that’s not even counting William Howard Taft’s Invasion on Albuquerque (”Well, it sounded foreign!”). Clearly, by these standards, the Iraq thing is… less bad.

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[With apologies to Chris, who does this, and does it better, on a daily basis.]