Washington's Birthday is fine. Presidents' Day is not.
Today is a federal holiday, Washington's Birthday. Many states and localities---and plenty of citizens---now call it "Presidents' Day" and that's just about the dumbest possible holiday I can think of in a republic. That we arrived here via a bureaucratic muddle over Lincoln's birthday is dumb icing on an already stale cake. I'm generally not a fan of celebrating individuals with holidays---read my old rant here---but celebrating the entire lot of presidents is just lunacy. Read this excellent rant by Jonathan Bernstein too. A few presidency-related notes:
This Matt Yglesias piece on the shortcomings of presidentialism is both good and a little unfair to the Founders. The good point is that most people tend to think of the U.S. as an archetype republic because we rejected a monarchy and never had a literal royal executive. But the modern crown republics of western Europe are, in practice, much more republican in character than our system. We rejected royalty, but built a monarch-like figure into the system; the western Europeans kept the royal families but the systems drifted into republican legislative supremacy.
The unfair part is that our Founders were living in the 18th century, in a time/place/context where the entire idea of republican legislative supremacy was widely viewed as unstable, their history books littered with its failures. That they sought to recreate the English mixed system of the 18th century is not only not surprising, but also a shrewd move that created a truly incredible republic for its time, against the backdrop of just a (relatively) barbaric Europe. That is became dated less than a century later doesn't mean it was a mistake in 1787.
Related, I agree with Bernstein that Washington is the most "distant" president. He left office in 1797 and died in 1799, but more importantly he was the only U.S. president who was fully of the Early Republic. I've said this many times, but when you ask people to envision politics in the 1790s, most people incorrectly think of the antebellum age of Lincoln, with its universal white male suffrage, mass party system of platforms and conventions and parades, and a spoils system of patronage officeholding that rotated by administration. Washington lived in the older system, the one that dominated British and colonial politics, with patrician values, tightly constrained suffrage, and continuous officeholding by an elite gentlemen class that was not organized into party apparatuses. Jefferson and Adams presided over the beginning of the transition between systems, but Washington mostly remained in the old world, an American president who predates almost everything modern Americans associate with politics.
Gabe Fleisher has an excellent reading list of presidency-related books today.