Posted by
netfotoj on Tuesday, July 08, 2008 5:19:57 PM
Rehabilitating Nixon
I remember Richard Nixon back in
'74
And the final scene at the White House door
And the staff
lined up to say good-bye
Tiny tear in his shifty little eye
He
said nobody knows me
Nobody understands
These little people
were good to me
Oh I'm gonna shake some hands
James Taylor—“Line 'Em Up”
In these weird
times that have seen the fall of Bill and Hillary and the rise of
chameleon Obama, I think the time is nigh if not already well past to
rehabilitate Richard M. Nixon.
Love him or hate
him, you never had to ask just where Nixon stood. Like Senator Jesse
Helms (whose timing was impeccable as ever by dying on July 4th)
Nixon was always a well-known quantity. In the end it was Nixon’s
paranoid style of politics that did him in, but as one wag said,
you’re not paranoid if everyone really is out to get you. And God
knows, if not everyone, certainly everyone in the media was genuinely
out to get Nixon.
Full-disclosure or
shall I say personal-confession time: I was not a Nixon fan. My first
opportunity to vote was in the 1968 presidential election and I
received my first ballot as an absentee aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer
on the way to Vietnam. Nixon and Humphrey!
I tore it in half
and tossed it overboard in disgust. I was still in the Democrat party
of my forebears as a callow youth at the time but Hubert Humphrey was
such a ridiculous candidate I couldn’t vote for him and I certainly
wasn’t about to vote for the evil Nixon.
I don’t recall
voting in the ’72 presidential election either. Nixon and McGovern
was just as ridiculous a choice. By then I was out of the Navy and
letting my hair grow long and getting high on grass as often as
possible, but I was a vet and definitely not anti-war.
And unless you’re
a kid or afflicted by CRS Disease (Can’t Remember Squat) as I
frequently am as I begin my sixth decade, you know what happened
next: Watergate.
Even the
Nixon-hating media called it a “third-rate burglary” when Nixon’s
dirty tricksters were caught breaking into the safe in Democrat
national headquarters in the Watergate Building in Washington just a
few weeks before Nixon’s landslide victory.
Just what
political secrets of the McGovern campaign were worth stealing? El
Squatto.
But as my daddy
used to say, a poor excuse is better than none at all and the media
took the third-rate burglary and ran with it, all the way to a
Pulitzer Prize for “Deep Throat.”
And of course,
they ran Nixon out of the White House in 1974. Sure he was guilty, if
not of direct involvement in the third-rate burglary, certainly of
trying to cover it up.
But here comes the
rehabilitation part. What did Nixon do when he knew the jig was up?
Hang on through a bitter and bloody fight in the House and Senate in
hopes to avoid being impeached by a razor-thin vote? No, he was no
Bill Clinton. He simply resigned.
And then he walked
out of the White House with his head held high and retired to San
Clemente. He even somewhat rehabilitated himself as an elder
statesman of the party before he finally went on to his reward,
whatever that might be somewhere in eternity.
Fast forward to
Bill Clinton and intern sex in, on or under the desk in the Oval
Office.
And the same media
that hounded Nixon from office was oh, so forgiving. “After all,
he’s one of us” was the unwritten message between the lines of
Monicagate coverage.
And sure ‘nuff,
a few soft-hearted or cowardly Republicans caved in during the
impeachment process to save Bill’s sorry hide from getting nailed
up to the wall. Now compare Nixon's dignified-if-hurried department to Bill and Hillary's leaving after two full terms in 2000. Looting and trashing the White House on their way out was not one of their finest hours, but all too typical of the gruesome twosome.
Fast forward again
to chameleon Obama, Mr. All-things-to-all-people. If you don’t like
what he stands for today, as they say about the weather in Missouri,
just wait a minute.
If for nothing
else, we should be grateful to Obama for finally bringing to an end
the media’s love affair with Bill and Hillary. Spurned by a fickle
lover for a pretty, new face.
But despite my
gratitude for Obama's one real accomplishment, I’m not grateful enough to vote for
this political nothing, who’s done nothing, stood for nothing and glibly
promises everybody everything.
Unfortunately, I
seem to be in a distinct minority of voters. Where there is no
vision, the people perish, Solomon said. And I fear far too many
voters have gone stone blind.