"The United States of America has the oldest government in the world."
That's sure not true. Iceland holds that distinction. Google News might have screwed up their layout, but Google is still helpful for fact checking before publishing.
That's not a matter of fact, that's a matter of semantics. Checking up on your fact, I find that the Althingi was founded in 930 but suspended in 1789 and Iceland was ruled by Denmark until 1918, so that doesn't sound very continuous.
England has had a (Cromwell aside) unbroken series of monarchs since 1066, does that count?
Still, the US should get some kind of old-government distinction since it's had absolutely uninterrupted constitutional democracy on all levels since Washington's time. (At least in the states that didn't secede.)
The author had to mention England explicitly in order to give an excuse for why it didn't count. (I would be interested to learn when this supposed "transition from monarchy to democracy" took place. 1215? 1689?)
Yes, that was the paragraph that lost me all respect for the article.
That's sure not true. Iceland holds that distinction. Google News might have screwed up their layout, but Google is still helpful for fact checking before publishing.