TS: Richard Nixon vs George W. Bush

Richard Mojo Nixon

Richard Nixon, easily. Despite his corruption, in terms of domestic policy he was left of Clinton, and he was actually willing to talk to his enemies sometimes, unlike W. Chomsky actually considers Nixon as the last liberal president, for what that's worth.

http://www.tommcmahon.net/images/e1972_ecmap_quiz.gif
vs.
http://web.knoxnews.com/silence/archives/jesusland.jpg

Jesusland vs.
http://www.naxos.com/sharedfiles/news/news490_files/Nixon_Kissinger_Mao.jpg

http://bastardlogic.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/mission-accomplished.jpg

Nixon easily wins this round. And that's before I discovered just how liberal Nixon's domestic policies were.

http://graphics.boston.com:80/resize/bonzai-fba/Globe_Photo/2008/06/20/1213999295_8539/539w.jpg vs. http://z.about.com/d/politicalhumor/1/0/w/d/rove_arrested.jpg

CREEP v. WHIG

Chomsky actually considers Nixon as the last liberal president, for what that's worth.

how the hell was nixon more liberal than carter?

nixon is certainly a far more fascinating person than bush.

garry wills made the "nixon = liberal" argument in his nixon book, which is well worth reading.

sadly, i imagine we could (and have) done a lot worse than Nixon. Watergate aside, i wonder if he would have been so vilified had he been pres at any other time in modern history. 60's fallout probably went a long way in cementing his bogeyman image. so yeah, bad dude obviously, but miles better than Bush II.

"vilified" suggests that Nixon was an impassive agent of his own immolation.

pat vs. laura
julie & tricia vs. the twins

nixon looks better in retrospect because he wasn't a right-winger, just an authoritarian. he didn't particularly care about domestic issues. remember, his hero was woodrow wilson -- he saw himself as a "peacemaker" whose only domestic tasks were to shut up the plebs so he could get on with the business of being a great leader.

remember, watergate was just the tip of the iceberg. what really ruined nixon was the tape transcripts. people were genuinely horrified to hear a president swearing and plotting like a mafia boss.

lemme try denigrated. or disgraced. xxpost

paranoid freakshow >> obtuse, lethal brat

I highly recommend Rick Perlstein's new Nixonland.

Taking Sides: Nixon vs. Kissinger

taking sides: lyndon baines johnson vs. richard milhous nixon

Dubya is an incompetant self-inflated dickhead. Nixon had a whiff of evil about him.

Presidents don't operate in vacuums, magically waving wands to get things done. Nixon was driven to a great extent by a Democratic Congress, and HW at least had to bow to their reality a few times. after two years of control, Clinton had to fight a Republican Congress for the rest of his tenure, while W got through most of six years of effective control (and more control than Reagan had). if all goes well this year, though, we'll have a Nixon-era Democratic Congress with a Democratic President.

91st Congress (69-71) - 57 dem senators, 234 dem reps
92nd Congress (71-73) - 54, 255
93rd Congress (73-75) - 55-7, 240-45
94th Congress (75-77) - 60-62, 291
95th Congress (77-79) - 61, 292
96th Congress (79-81) - 58, 277
97th Congress (81-83) - 46, 244
98th Congress (83-85) - 45, 272
99th Congress (85-87) - 47, 253
100th Congress (87-89) - 55, 258
101st Congress (89-91) - 55, 261
102nd Congress (91-93) - 56-7, 270
103rd Congress (93-95) - 57, 258
104th Congress (95-97) - 46-7, 204
105th Congress (97-99) - 45, 206
106th Congress (99-01) - 45, 211
107th Congress (01-03) - 50, 208-11
108th Congress (03-05) - 49, 205-7
109th Congress (05-07) - 44, 201-2
106th Congress (07-09) - 50-51, 231-6
107th Congress (09-11) - 55-6?, 241-5?

um, those should be the 110th and 111th Congresses at the end

he didn't particularly care about domestic issues

that's one way to look at it. another way is to say that in the face of a democratic congress, he didn't prioritize them and focused on the widest avenues for use of his political capital (or on end-running the whole political system)

also Roe v Wade wasn't decided until his short-lived second term, and gay rights weren't even on the agenda, and/but while the popular gun culture was just getting started, dick 'law and order' nixon certainly played a role

what i've heard and read of those tapes is disturbingly hateful though...

actually, the best case would be if the Democrats lost Congress and Obama became prez; but this scenario seems unlikely.

that's one way to look at it. another way is to say that in the face of a democratic congress, he didn't prioritize them and focused on the widest avenues for use of his political capital (or on end-running the whole political system)

i've read a lot about nixon, and i've never been able to figure out what his domestic ideology was, if he had one. his entire strategy at home seems to have been one big concerted effort to get the voters to shut up and leave him alone so he could get on with escalating the war (clearly, he won, since everyone somehow got the idea that nixon was "bad at home but brilliant in foreign affairs"), and his "law and order" campaign fits perfectly into that. (does anyone think that nixon, of all people, sincerely believed in law and order?)

how the hell was nixon more liberal than carter?

Yes, definitely. Domestically, Carter's policies were really more compassionate-libertarian than liberal per se.

Anyway, was Nixon's administration really any more evil than Ronald Reagan's? Nixon was just worse at covering his scandals up and bullshitting his way out of trouble. He was a liar, but at least he was an honest liar, if you get what I'm saying.

Honest liar? Nixon? How old are you, son?

nixon insisted until the end of his life that he hadn't done anything wrong and refused to ever apologize for watergate despite writing an endless series of memoirs -- so much for being an "honest liar."

actually, the best case would be if the Democrats lost Congress and Obama became prez; but this scenario seems unlikely.

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Saturday, September 13, 2008 3:03 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

...

i know yr like a center-right sullivan-style dude but considering 6 of the last 8 yrs this is ridiculous

Nixon wrote so badly because the weight of lying constricted his prose.

My only hope for McCain if he's elected is that he'll pursue a Nixonian indifference to domestic policy.

i know yr like a center-right sullivan-style dude but considering 6 of the last 8 yrs this is ridiculous

I've lived enough years with "center-right" administrations on both sides to wish for an executive curbed by Congress (Clinton doesn't count).

Weighing the Nixon and Reagan adminstrations' records of lawlessness will produce a draw, methinks. Nixon's indifference to domestic policy centered power in the Oval Office, making it the center for national security issues; almost all his dirty tricks revolved around destroying perceived enemies to this foreign policy ambitions. Meanwhile Reagan's indifference to anything five minutes ago produced a loyal junta of fanatics who thought they were acting in his name.

* to HIS foreign policy ambitions.

a loyal junta of fanatics who thought they were acting in his name.

Or actually were, but were disowned for political and legal reasons.

that episode of Family Matters when Steve Urkel originally become Stefan Urquelle really sucked as it spun the already cliched and weak family sitcom into a downward spiral from which it never recovered.

The Reagan administration understood plausible deniability. Urkel was a cowboy.

and to think, it was the presidency that caused me to look to urkel in the first place.

xp

Theodore Drdaper's A Very Thin Line puts to rest the rumor that Reagan "couldn't recall" the events.

*Draper, of course.

they just adapted Frost/Nixon (the Broadway play) into a movie which is due out next year. Hoping it turns out good, although Frank Langella doesn't exactly look much like Nixon (his head is a lot fatter).

Of course containing the famous quote that when the President does something, it isn't illegal.

does anyone think that nixon, of all people, sincerely believed in law and order?

"the rule of law" ≠ "law and order," which symbolized the suppression of the black power, free speech and student movements (ie of blacks, non-'straights', jews and intellectuals) that were announcing to the world how much nixon was fucking up in vietnam. it's not that he didn't care about domestic policy, it's that he responded to the claims of new interest groups on the government with a policy of benign neglect, cheering when hardhats fought back against protesters. while he had much more of a free hand when it came to war powers, he couldn't much stand in the way of liberal initiatives of a strongly Democratic Congress pressured by such groups, but he created agencies in part to neutralize/contain those efforts, and proposed some liberal measures of his own as poison pills to tank liberal legislative initiatives. he also sought to undermine liberal efforts through the bully pulpit ("law and order") and covert operations. that he did not do more and was not explicitly racist in public was merely reflective of his jekyll-side attempt to be as buttoned-up and removed from the mess as the elites he resented and the internality of his resentments. 'silent majority' indeed.

his entire strategy at home seems to have been one big concerted effort to get the voters to shut up and leave him alone so he could get on with escalating the war

actually, he thought antiwar protesters were encouraging the north vietnamese. and while he prolonged the war in part due to uncertainty as to how a resolution would play politically, he ultimately wanted to end it and get on with larger foreign-policy initiatives that could in fact be described as deescalation.

My only hope for McCain if he's elected is that he'll pursue a Nixonian indifference to domestic policy.

smoke yr planet while you got it

Ok, admittedly I wasn't even alive during the Nixon administration (or half the Reagan administration for that matter). Calling him an "honest liar" was my own awkward way of saying that he was less dangerous simply because he was more obviously creepy -- whereas Reagan was like a cuddly, harmless-looking teddy bear filled with pure hate. Nixon was merely a Jeffrey Dahmer of a president; Reagan was like Chucky or something.

...God, did I just write that? I need to get some sleep.

because he was more obviously creepy

I think it's hard for people of our generation (I'm 26) to get a solid bead on this - all the footage I've ever seen of Nixon is colored through knowing about all the shit he did, whereas for most of his presidency that stuff was well under wraps. So - obviously awkward and uncomfortable, and if you didn't like him he definitely would read as creepy...but to the vast majority that re-elected him in '72, he had to seem like a solid American statesman, ascending from humble roots to accomplish great things in a no-nonsense fashion...or something like that? Help me out here, ILX oldsters.

I guess this is the way Nixon was selling himself, anyway. Wow. Delightful teens in love frolicing down the street - you have Nixon to thank for your youth and energy!

nixon wins this because GWB has committed worse crimes, in my opinion. So did Reagan, probably. It seems like Nixon's biggest crime might have been making the US public jaded enough to not care.

uh, no

nixon did tons of evil, heinous shit

there is a swedish indie group called nixon which i am sure a lot of you appreciate. i would vote for nixon because he is history and w bush is the brute hard reality one will face tomorrow :((

"he is history" == safely dead and buried... true that.

The problem is that, as Marc Antony says in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the evil that men do lives after them. Nixon has a lot to answer for in his conduct of the war in SE Asia, where he killed a million Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, and for his crimes at home, where he subverted the rule of law on a daily basis.

All it took was G W Bush for Nixon's legacy to be reconsidered.

Ann Beattie attempts, well, something about Pat Nixon.

^^ pic is very very texas

btw Shakey, not only are you an ass for your ingratitude to Ike keeping us from speaking kraut, but....

"In 1945 ... , Secretary of War Stimson visited my headquarters in Germany, [and] informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.... During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and second because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.' The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude, almost angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick conclusions."

http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/history/pre-cold-war/hiroshima-nagasaki/opinion-eisenhower-bomb.htm

feel like one of eisenhower's bigger positives as president was specifically not nuking anybody, maybe even more than jfk altho he's more famous for it. famous for it after eight years of firm precedent of executive resistance to military+political+popular belligerence.

but then i guess it is one of every president's bigger positives! thanks RN

^^ pic is very very texas

― Aimless, Thursday, April 25, 2013 11:21 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He needs Lone Star socks, but yeah.

otoh hand as prez Ike was canny enough to never rule out the bomb "as an option," which everyone thought he'd be judicious about using because he was Ike.

oh well sure i mean the direction that took us to MAD was basically his direction. plus although honestly i don't know much specific about eisenhower's public persona throughout his terms my impression is he's Genial And Affable for eight years then at the end he's suddenly like haha no rly tho there might be tremendous moral and social risks hidden in the postwar system we have developed! gl off 2 golf

His persona was proto-Reagan, buttressed by 1943-1945.

i'm not so sure i'd be quick to praise ike for 'executive resistance to military+political+popular belligerence' -- as i mentioned he basically turned the CIA loose to wreak havoc in a bunch of other countries and ramped up the arms race (the u.s. had fewer than a thousand warheads when he came into office and had more than 30,000 by the time he left). not that i remotely put ike in the same category as a warmonger like bush (or truman for that matter), but he's as deeply implicated in the growth of the national security state as anyone.

no yeah completely, but the cia and "massive retaliation" were his covert/passive alternatives to overt/active military involvement in korea/taiwan/dienbienphu/prob even egypt idk. he believed in the Need For Strength and nsc-68 and the indispensability of the defense sector and everything and that's why the last-minute "but be careful!" is so funny, but he used his triumphant-general cachet to set a precedent of relative moderation when he could have done differently (altho not necc for very long in a recognizable world).

i mean tell that to the guatemalans sure.

I mean, we had TWO crises over future Trivial Pursuit answers Quemoy and Matsu.

this article's a bit on the long side for what it actually tells you but it's pretty eye-opening: http://hnn.us/articles/47326.html

In all that I've read and seen about Nixon, never knew this (from Summer of '68, a baseball book that goes beyond baseball):

"In his biography about the Packers' coach, David Maraniss detailed how Richard Nixon first considered Lombardi as his running mate. That infatuation lasted until the Republican candidate learned that Lombardi had been a strong supporter of Bobby Kennedy."

I've always been fascinated by the way Nixon makes his way into every presidential election--often by way of specific connections to candidates (i.e., trailing Romney's father at one point for the '68 nomination), sometimes as a point of comparison.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/09/01/hillary-clinton-new-email-released-state-department-column/71504450/

W. was so much more lovable and endearing than Nixon. He was the bagman. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rice, and Rove were the real super villains.

W was a cockroach.

Nixon on Crossfire, including outtakes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MacmN1EtIPQ

Would love to see the whole episode.

i'm sort of fascinated by the number of books Nixon wrote post-presidency. some of them sound intriguingly weird but i'm sure they're all paranoid and dull slogs.
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/515nFIAwlEL._SX339_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

This book is so weird just for the captions. Stuff like:

"Like most men, I too hated the Vietnam War."

* Nixon studying yellow legal pad, pencil eraser in mouth *

"Here am I working on a speech. Writing even one line can take hours of concentration."

http://i.imgur.com/oLfZ9xw.jpg

"Hmmm. 'I've never been a babysitter...' No, that's no good. 'I've never been a bullshitter...' Too many syllables. 'I've never abandoned ship...' God, this could take hours."

haha

that clip above did contain any actual expletives :(

"shit it makes him [unintelligible] like a goddam animal"

(at around 1:15)

ah I couldn't quite make out that part about the Caro bio

funny cuz i feel like these days, post vols 3 and 4, caro's reputation is for being a bit of a softie re lbj, but when that first volume came out i think it seemed like a hatchet job to some? he really does come off textbook psycho in it. nixon otm there: "it makes him out to be a goddam animal. of course he was." (then lol comes over all marlene: "he was a man.")

Nixon as avid reader of NYROB, even citing Clifton Fadiman! Was he the last prez to do until maybe Obama?

so after learning that mtv vj kennedy has a show on fox news (lol) and reading in her wiki that she chanted "nixon now!" at the clintons at his first inauguration, i had to look into it and found this http://redalertpolitics.com/2013/08/08/mtv-vj-kennedy-recalls-being-an-alt-rock-republican/

When the Clintons went onstage she chanted, “Nixon now! Nixon now!” (There was apparently a lot of Nixon nostalgia in the ’90s.)

“John McLaughlin was looking and I knew another headset was bound to intercept if I didn’t act fast, and I had to prove to him he was not the only Lover of Nixon (or LON for short) in the room.”

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/85/8f/36/858f36226e6cfc4e148618401bc24d8c.jpg

he'd become The Elder Statesman – the image he'd sold to credulous publishers and Beltway types – by holding salons in '80s Manhattan, serving homemade Chinese food and martinis he mixed himself. Apparently he cut quite the figure.

Now, of course, he has proven himself very deft on Twitter.

Richard M. Nixon ‏@dick_nixon 4h4 hours ago
'68 brought people in. Trump locked the door and threw away the key. If you can't see the difference, the hell with you.

My lord, it sounds just like him. HOW UNCANNY. PITCH PERFECT.

Gonna start a Reagan twitter. Post things like "Boy, this guy? Nothing like 1980."

]people who remember the 90s, was this a real thing? i can't find anything about it and am now obsessed with the concept of 90s youth describing themselves as Lovers of Nixon

now listen y'all. I don't share this video with just anyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dvy8uFN31s

thank you.

Richard M. Nixon ‏@dick_nixon 11h11 hours ago
Bobby Kennedy was the coldest man I ever met.

Richard M. Nixon
‏@dick_nixon
I mean it. Bobby Kennedy should have burned witches.

no offense to alfred specifically, but i am seriously ready for an ILX plugin that filters out reposts of @dick_nixon tweets

but that's what the thread's for – the reposting of wisdom

Richard M. Nixon ‏@dick_nixon
These DNC wikileaks. This is why you employ plumbers.

Richard M. Nixon ‏@dick_nixon
Beyonce might sing about lemonade, but Arnold Palmer was the man with the real drink.

See? Anyone can do it!

I get the uneasy feeling that @dick_nixon might be a friend of ours, but I just hate to see anyone trying to sully up the good Nixon name.

All it took was G W Bush for Nixon's legacy to be reconsidered.

― the return of (burt_stanton), Saturday, September 13, 2008

I bet we all know how to update this, as fucked as it is.

https://twitter.com/DennisThePerrin/status/837659000581808128

I can't wait to see Trump's finger painting.

http://www.avclub.com/article/george-w-bush-takes-credit-snls-strategery-not-war-251447

@adamjohnsonNYC
39 of the 39 people indicted by the ICC for war crimes are African meanwhile Blair is writing NYT op-eds & Bush is taking selfies w/ Ellen.

Sometimes it's hard to believe Dubya was President. Is there a German word for knowing and remembering something but it not feeling real?

buschtraum