Richard M. Nixon
Our 37th President
Succumbed this day, August 8, 1974, because of his astonishing naiveté regarding tapes he believed to be his private property, to mortal wounds inflicted by a fiendish journalistic coup d’etat.
May he rest in peace, and may Posterity someday remember him with the kindness, fairness, generosity and gratitude he certainly deserved, but did not receive in this life.
The real naivete lies in believing that Barack Obama isn't doing EVERYTHING Nixon ever did. Enemies list? Ask the IRS to see it.
ReplyDeleteNo hard feelings.
ReplyDeleteThat's CLass! :)
:P
ReplyDeleteCa va sans dire, Thersites.
ReplyDeleteHistorian, Douglas Brinkley, -- one of "them" of course, -- an obvious Nixonphobe, -- admitted on C-Span this morning, even as he sedately trashed the former president with deceptively mild defamatory rhetoric, that the ONLY reason the media "got" Nixon was because he kept those tapes, which Kissinger wisely advised him to jettison. Nixon's mistaken belief that the infamous tapes were his private property and, therefore, could not be subpoenaed, was his undoing.
Personally, I thought Brinkley made a stunning admission when he stated flat out that the press was left wing and hated Nixon, because Nixon was a right winger, and were, therefore, definitely out to "get" Nixon. But Brinkley blamed NIXON for this, because Nixon failed to handle the bitter antagonism with the necessary degree of subtlety and finesse. In other words the former president was our maneuvered by an enemy whose virulence he grossly underestimated.
I am morally certain that virtually ALL people in key positions of leadership did -- and continue to do -- everything Nixon did -- and infinitely worse. Nixon was in many ways one of the most brilliant, best informed, truly patriotic presidents we've ever had, but despite his considerable erudition and toughness he was still a "country boy" at heart. He honestly believe that because he'd been elected president by one of the biggest landslides in history, he couldn't possibly be touched by his many enemies in the enemedia.
That assumption would have been perfectly true, -- but only he'd been a Democrat, of course.
Ergo, we have to say Nixon's presidency was destroyed by his rather incredible degree of naiveté.
I will continue o regard it as one of the great tragedies and most hideous injustices in our history to my dying day.
Yes, today is the 40th Anniversary of the Nixon Resignation, and it seems as it was only yesterday when this and so many other events that shaped America happened. the assassination of John Kennedy, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the Moon, the Korean War, Vietnam, the Oklahoma City Bombing, Hurricane Katrina, and the Death of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. But lets no forget the one that I consider one of the most famous, President Reagan's famous '"Herr Gorbachev, Tear down this Wall" speech!
ReplyDeleteYes, it was forty years ago today when Richard Nixon resigned the office of President, he was the first and only President to do so.
Nixon's knowledge of history and foreign affairs also gave him a sense of honor, dignity and morality. He resigned because of those qualities. Something that our current president lacks, and seems more interested in rewriting history than honoring it. No Nixon was not perfect, in fact he was far from it. but he was a politician who loved his country and wanted to do whatever was best for it.
And lets not EVER FORGET hat happened on September the 11th 2001! When Four MUSLIM Hijackers launched coordinated terrorist attacks and rammed Jetliners maned by a MUSLIM terrorist group known as al-Qaeda upon the United States in New York City and collapsed the World Trade Center and crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and followed by Present George W. Bush’s response by going to war with both Iraq and Afghanistan. And how so many if not ALL of the Lefties, Liberals, Democrats in America including in the Government called President all those names, such as Dumb, Stupid, a Cowboy etc. and etc. Well, I ask you, who’s the dumb one now? I’ll give you a hint, he’s our current White House resident.
Yes, American did have some really good and some Great President in the past, but that ended over five years ago, and yes, Nixon or Bush weren’t perfect but the both were American patriot’s who cared about our people and especially the military! Now we have had over five years under a Muslim sympathizer committed to destroying this Great country of ours!
Yes, Thersites, Richard Nixon really did have "class." Not the haughty, arrogant, false-hearted, snobbish, highly polished, quasi-Royal Ivy League image cultivated and exploited by the Kennedys, or the vain, glittering Hollywoodized variety that passes for "class" among the hoi polloi, but the genuine article.
ReplyDeleteBecause of the incessant "cultural conditioning" I rail against nearly every day, most of us are unable to recognize genuine high quality and the innate, unaffected dignity and quiet nobility that accompanies it. We can't see it anymore, and so we no longer respect or value it.
That's why we jettisoned Richard Nixon and now embrace the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton and King Barack and his blatantly self-indulgent consort.
Modern politics has been reduced to the level of People Magazine and The National Enquirer. Need we say more?
My understanding of class is hopelessly British, that must be why I don't see it.
ReplyDeleteWhat did you think of Nixon's economic policies?
The cloak of Gyges covers all Democrats. C'est la vie!
ReplyDeleteClass isn't inherited, jez. It's doing the "honourable thing" and not insisting upon your "rights"... be they "presidential" or merely "personal".
ReplyDeleteNixon "resigned" when dishonoured and publically exposed. Democrats (like Clinton) DON'T.
As for Nixon's economic policies, I think they were misguided. Price controls, abandoning the gold standard, are ALL things that "enable" subsequent bad behaviour by government/Treasury and our masters at the Fed.
ReplyDeleteps - I never liked the Keynsian "Cambridge" boys. Cycles of boom and bust don't require "smoothing", they necessarily pop "bubbles". And the current "housing" bubble will inevitably prove the death of both western (and Chinese) "corporate" capitalism.
:)
ReplyDeletePresident Richard Milhous Nixon, the right wing conservative president who gave us OSHA and oversaw the establishment of the EPA thus increasing the size and scope of the federal government made his own bed and ultimately was made to sleep in it by those who despised him.
ReplyDeletePersonally I find Nixon to have been unethical, paranoid, power hungry, and vindictive. Other than those character traits he was a great person and a mediocre to average president. Of course this is just my opinion, although from what I have gathered from conversations over the years a whole lot of people seem to be in relative agreement.
And don't forget that President Nixon was also in favor of a national health insurance plan. From his speech to the American people on February 6, 1974:
ReplyDelete"Three years ago, I proposed a major health insurance program to the Congress, seeking to guarantee adequate financing of health care on a nationwide basis. That proposal generated widespread discussion and useful debate. But no legislation reached my desk.
Today the need is even more pressing because of the higher costs of medical care. Efforts to control medical costs under the New Economic Policy have been Inept with encouraging success, sharply reducing the rate of inflation for health care. Nevertheless, the overall cost of health care has still risen by more than 20 percent in the last two and one-half years, so that more and more Americans face staggering bills when they receive medical help today."
The rest of the speech and his outlinE of how his national health insurance plan (later known as Romneycare and Obamacare) is HERE.
So in addition to what RN listed as Nixon's accomplishments, we must not forget that he proposed a national health insurance plan similar to what the A.C.A. is.
HORATIO
ReplyDeleteNow cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
Why does the drum come hither?
{March within.}
[Enter FORTINBRAS, the English Ambassadors, and others.]
PRINCE FORTINBRAS
Where is this sight?
HORATIO
What is it ye would see?
If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search.
PRINCE FORTINBRAS
This quarry cries on havoc. O proud death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell,
That thou so many princes at a shot
So bloodily hast struck?
FIRST AMBASSADOR
The sight is dismal;
And our affairs from England come too late:
The ears are senseless that should give us hearing,
To tell him his commandment is fulfi
That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead:
Where should we have our thanks?
HORATIO
Not from his mouth,
Had it the ability of life to thank you:
He never gave commandment for their death.
But since, so jump upon this bloody question,
You from the Polack wars, and you from England,
Are here arrived give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view;
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
How these things came about: so shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors' reads: all this can I
Truly deliver.
PRINCE FORTINBRAS
Let us haste to hear it,
And call the noblest to the audience.
For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune:
I have some rights of memory in this kingdom,
Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me.
HORATIO
Of that I shall have also cause to speak,
And from his mouth whose voice will draw on more;
But let this same be presently perform'd,
Even while men's minds are wild; lest more mischance
On plots and errors, happen.
PRINCE FORTINBRAS
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his passage,
The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies: such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.
[A dead march. Exeunt, bearing off the dead bodies; after which a peal of ordnance is shot off.]
Thank you, Miss Shaw, Les, and Thersites for reminding us that Mr, Nixon was in fact one of our more LIBERAL presidents, and doesn't that strike you as incredibly ironic considering the treatment he received at the hands of the enemedia?
ReplyDeleteBecause he was a vehement and highly successful anti-Comminist, despite his empathy and genuine concern for the working class, and much too liberal consequent economic and social policies, he was STILL the object of one of the most vicious vendettas in our checkered history. You'd think the Left would have recognized a friend with whom they could work most effectively, but no.
It is the LEFT, Les, that is and always has been excessively power hungry, and almost completely deficient when it comes to ethics. Mr. Nixon was anything but. He proved that in ceding the election to JFK in 1950 "for the good of the country" knowing full well that Dirty Daley with the help of Old Joe Kennedy's "generosity" STOLE that election for JFK who was elected illegitimately by the narrowest of wafer thin majorities. That is FACT not conjecture, and Richard Nixon could have done what the ignoble Al Gore did in 2000, i.e. challenged the results in court, and thrown the country into a tailspin.
Mr. Nixin ALWAYS put the interests of the United States first and foremost. His personal stake in the proceedings was a distant second., and as Theristes said, that IS noble.
"If President Nixon was so liberal," I can hear you asking, "then why did you want him in office?"
I was 27 when Nixon first won the presidency. This was a very different, much nicer, country back then, and I was a much more moderate individual -- and far less concerned with politics -- than I became subsequently.
I became radicalized overnight by the grotesquely unfair, shockingly vicious treatment Mr. Nixon was subjected to, so I -- and a great many others -- suddenly awoke to the profound corruption and vicious liberal bias in the media corruption. Surely my cinversion from moderate, peace loving Republican to radical libertarianism must be one of the smaller ironies to come out of the tragic episode sknown as Watergate."
And by the way, you are not "paranoid," when they really ARE out to get you. Paranoia is the IRRATIONAL belief you are the object of persecution when in fact your feelings are delusional and have no basis in fact.
Richard Nixon was a very serious, unusually sincere person -- especially for a politician. He didn't play silly games with his "image" in order to win votes, and form good or for ill he was notably lacking in "charisma" -- a foreign term that came into the language with the advent of Jack and Jackie Kennedy.
At any rate, I was THIRTY-THREE when Nixon resigned. The anger, pain and sorrow I felt at the time marked me for life. It has never left me.
This ugly episode left a deep scar on the nation which never has -- very likely never will -- heal. It was "WATERGATE" more than any other thing influence that brought about the bitter, almost irrational divisiveness defining our politics today.
Since then we lost our representative form of government and have lived under Government OF the MEDIA, BY the MEDIA and FOR the MEDIA -- or rather those shadowy, unprincipled, power mad moguls who own and operate it.
Thank yu too, Thersites, for doing a beautiful job of explaining what we mean by "class" to Jez.
ReplyDeleteI see, you mean "principled," I thought you meant something like "refined."
ReplyDeleteIf we only had a president like Richard Milhous Nixon today, the country would be a lot better off than we have today
ReplyDeleteThe Impeachment of Barack Abuse of Power, AG Eric Holder, AP Telephone Scandal,
ReplyDeleteObama, Benghazi-Gate, Chicago-Style Politics, collusion, Community Agitator, Conspiracy, Corruption, Cover-Up, Democrats, Divider in Chief,Obama is bordering on treason, Barack Obama must be impeached.
No, not like the hats of the women of Tanagra. He was one with refined "principles" and character worthy of a Quaker, and a something, perhaps, of a Sabbatarian, one not prone to idle "entertainments" and foolish pursuits, yet not a pacifist either. Truely, a man who could think for himself.
ReplyDelete...and you did a much better job at describing the meaning of class, with your example, than I could, FT.
"Obama is the president Nixon always wanted to be" -- Jonathan Turley
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, Obama has none of the class, intelligence or foreign and domestic policy mastery that Nixon had.
Turley's usually- well-hidden identity as a Democrat shows a mile in that quotation, Kurt. l-) However, your response to it was excellent.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, given your tender years, you have had no firsthand knowledge of Richard Nixon. The enemedia's hatchet job -- and nw Douglas Brinkley's new book The Nixon Tapes is all anyone is permitted or ever will be to know of him in latter years.
The Enemedia controls the Agenda du jour and therefore, the National Conversation with ruthless efficiency and consummate guile.
I was thinking about him. Not because of the anniversary but because of finally watching Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" (very fine film) and the announcement of Rick Perlstein's, The Invisible Bridge.
ReplyDeleteThe road from Nixon to Reagan becomes a little clearer to me all the time.
Perlstein does touch briefly on popular culture and reviews indicate he touches on the way it deconstructs many institutions.
I think that is part of the reason that "Heaven's Gate" was savaged.
The "New Hollywood" had gone far enough and it was time to get back to safe pablum, bring in Lucas and Spielberg.
We had to deflect the criticism and replace it with the insane "shining city on the hill" meme of American perfection and exceptionalism.
Well, here we are, still unable to discuss our problems like adults and shackled to useless myths.
By the way, if you can stream the Criterion release of "Heaven's Gate" it is a worthwhile take.
I don't recommend it to FT as it absolutely hammers the idea of "noblesse oblige" which must be dear to his heart.
Nearly everything you admire and advocate, Ducky, is brilliantly designed to bring us closer and closer to the Gates of Hell and the yawning Abyss where leaping fames, sulfurous fumes, noxious gases, and endless ever-increasing agony wait with ravenous, insatiable appetite to pounce on and devour the hapless, deluded, morbidly obsessed souls like you who subscribe to depraved notions of equity.
ReplyDelete@ Ducky: Well, here we are, still unable to discuss our problems like adults and shackled to useless myths.
ReplyDeleteThe leftwing statist myth of their version of "progress" is the most pernicious and corrosive of all
shackled to useless myths...
ReplyDelete...the insane "shining city on the hill" meme of American perfection and exceptionalism.
And a "useful myth" would be... ???
Oh wait, I know, the "New Soviet Man"!
gtfu, duckman!
“there should be no more pictures made with a negative view of American history.”
ReplyDeleteWilliam French Smith (St. Ronnie Raygun's AG referencing Heave's Gate)
-------
And the studios fell in line.
Nothing that would offend FT aristocratic hollowness.
And whining Teabags going on about "leftist Hollywood".
What progress, Silverfiddle? We are still dealing with the same issues. Since Reagan we've become a nation of chimps rubbing our poo in our hair. And the chimps with the largest clumps are the children in the Libertarian sandbox screaming "statist".
Nixon's biggest mistake, in my humble opinion, was trusting a back-stabbing weasel like Henry Kissinger. We all know what happened to Nixon but Kissinger is still around.
ReplyDeleteNixon resigned because of his love for American and the American people, In contrast, President Obama does not seem to like the American people or America.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the main cause of Nixon's resignation was journalistic coup d’etat.
ReplyDeleteOther factors played in as well -- one of those factors being Nixon's somehow unlikeable persona, particularly in front of a video camera. We all remember the Nixon-Kennedy debate. Nixon won with what he said, but the camera loved JFK.
Also, his political paranoia was too often on public display. Remember his statement "They won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore."
Nixon should have destroyed those tapes before they were subpoenaed. As an attorney, how could he not have known to do so?
Did RMN have a drinking problem?
ReplyDeleteDucky's right, so MANY pre-American movies came out in the eighties...
ReplyDelete*rolls eyes*
erratum - pro v. pre
ReplyDeleteA drinking problem? It's hard to say. I'm given to understand that he had to be careful because he had a very low tolerance for alcohol.
ReplyDelete________ Ducky's Dream Fulfilled _________
ReplyDeleteThe sun is setting in the east these days.
The north pole traveled southward long ago.
The penguins in the tropics now wear leis.
The roses in the tundra sweetly blow.
The tides receding come in nevermore.
The geese now migrate from the south to north.
The ocean vast is nothing now but shore.
The semen towards the egg will not come forth.
Negativity we worship now as god.
Perversity is wholesome; Virtue’s vile.
Normality’s regarded now as odd.
Whatever’s queer is welcomed with a smile.
Darkness has become our Guiding Light.
To stay alive we dare not fight the Blight.
~ FreeThinke
;P
ReplyDeleteCareful how you flip a two-sided coin. Half the time it comes up "tails".
ReplyDelete()*()
;)
A square, naive fellow named Nixon
ReplyDeleteWith high hats was not made to mix in.
His background was humble,
At cocktails he’d stumble,
So elitists thought he needed fixin.’
But he resisted each tempting vixen,
And bribes they hoped would get their pricks in.’
To his wife he was loyal,
Felt no urge to act Royal,
'Twas maliging that punctured his thick skin.’
This idea of the "new Soviet Man/Woman" is an interesting concept, sort of implying that Bolshevism/Soviet Communism was a broad-based and widely accepted ideology embraced by the people of Russia after the October Revolution of 1917.
ReplyDeleteStand back and look across the space of time to see that this is a myth created by those that would impose a most bloody and controlling tyranny upon the citizens of that country. That it was imposed upon Russia and its citizens of the day—and imposed by a treasonous elitist group from the west—including but not limited to England, America and Germany. Both Trotsky and Lenin had been exiled by Czarist Russia, Trotsky was in New York City toiling diligently in Manhattan, Lenin was biding his time in Germany or Switzerland. In timely fashion both Trotsky and Lenin were given passage from their countries of exile to return to Russia.
Of course most Russians who were against the rule of the czar were disillusioned enough to believe that executing the Czar and his family would lead to a Utopian socialist paradise of Bolshevism promised by Trotsky and Lenin. Unfortunately they were sold a bill of goods and paid a severely high price over the decades from 1917 up to the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And there are, of course, the retrograde repressive progressives, those still choking on the toxic fumes of Marxism, that would attempt to sell another bill of goods that all good in the world comes by having your lips securely locked on Karl Marx's toxic anal hemorrhoid.
Every nation is based upon a founding mythology that is meant to hide/obscure the defects in its founding. Without the mythology, no one would follow the bloodthirsty degenerates who overthrew the previous regime.
ReplyDeleteOnly one as naive as the duck still believes in the concept of "immaculate conception"
...or that you can stage a bloody revolution and subsequently BRAG of the atrocities commited with pride (ala The Act of Killing) and still expect to live in a relatively fair and civil society.
ReplyDeleteThe Act of Killing is about “killers who have won, and the sort of society they have built”. After their victory, their terrible acts were not relegated to the status of the “dirty secret”; on the contrary, Anwar and his friends boast openly about the details of their massacres (the way to strangle a victim with a wire, the way to cut a throat, how to rape a woman pleasurably . . .).
ReplyDeleteBy all means, ducky, lets dispense with secrecy and live openly with the atrocities previously committed and present ala state sanctioned torture).
It's so much more "honest"
*rolls eyes*
As for me, I'll just go on pretending with my "useless mythologies" that the rape and deliberate murder of my enemies is ALWAYS wrong and something to be ashamed of, and not something to be openly "justified"
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteCanardo loves sparking division
His quips make a ragged incision
All he does is belittle,
Cares not one jot or tittle
For amity –– only derision!
Of his practice of Critical Theory
I am sure we have all become leery.
Incessant attacks
Put a load on our backs
That frays tempers and renders us weary
. And yet, our queer gadfly called Ducky,
Who seems not to know he is lucky
To live in The States,
Our good luck he berates
In manner that reeks of horse puckey!
These people make this tired, poor, often mawkish piece of kitsch sound quite respectable.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc4NFmutvu8
That's because it's a beautifully crafted, straightforward arrangement sung with respect for the good intentions of the text, and has, therefore, all the earmarks of sincerity.
The American Dream was not a myth. My immigrant grandparents and their children lived it, and proved it true -- before the Master Baiters, the Provocateurs, the Professional Prevaricators, the Monstrous Manipulators and the crypto-Marxists got their hooks into the culture.
_________ A Dream Lies Dead _________
A dream lies dead here. May you softly go
Before this place, and turn away your eyes,
Nor seek to know the look of that which dies
Importuning Life for life. Walk not in woe,
But, for a little, let your step be slow.
And, of your mercy, be not sweetly wise
With words of hope and Spring and tenderer skies.
A dream lies dead; and this all mourners know:
Whenever one drifted petal leaves the tree ––
Though white of bloom as it had been before
And proudly waitful of fecundity ––
One little loveliness can be no more;
And so must Beauty bow her imperfect head
Because a dream has joined the wistful dead!
~ Dorothy Parker (1893 - 1967)
The duck is not entirely wrong. Our government in America no longer works for individuals (small business'/ entrepeneurs), instead it caters to corporate interests. We need an American president who will return us to a laissez-faire table-leveling role for government, one not obsessed by determining social outcomes for particular groups, but a prosperous one for the vast majority where we all own the gardens we labour in and don't just till the gardens of the elites (ala Gates/ Buffett/ Koch/ Soros).
ReplyDeleteThis is why, upon a closer look, it becomes clear that what Hugo Chavez has begun doing in Venezuela differs markedly from the standard liberal form of inclusion: Chavez is not including the excluded in a pre-existing liberal-democratic framework; he is, on the contrary, taking the "excluded" dwellers of favelas as his base and then reorganising political space and political forms of organisation so that the latter will "fit" the excluded. Pedantic and abstract as it may appear, this difference - between "bourgeois democracy" and "dictatorship of the proletariat" - is crucial. - Slavoj Zizek, "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce" (2009)
What Chavez did wrong was to try and lock in a "loser-based" economy, rather than a "winner-based" one. An economy that strengthens the middle class instead of creating one all-encompassing proletarian class lead by an ultra-powerful vanguard.
An "equal-opportunity" centric society as opposed to an "outcome-levelling" based one.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree more with your last two posts, Thersites, but then you must have known that all along, eight?
ReplyDelete;)
ReplyDeleteRemember
ReplyDeletethe
tree
Remember
the
hedge
then
never
forget
him
who
wrote
on
the
edge
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