For he and John Erlichman came up with the "War on Drugs" as a way to destroy groups of voters they opposed.
Trillions of dollars down that rathole. Massive police bureaucracies were created. Civil liberties have been sharply curtailed as the Supremes carved away at the 4th and 5th Amendments. Millions of people were arrested and incarcerated.
All to score political points.
But hey, even if we were to end the (Phony) War on Drugs, the devotees of the American Police State would figure out something else to go after. For their rice bowls have to be protected, which is all that the Drug War is about nowadays.
A blog by a "sucker" and a "loser" who served her country in the Navy.
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Thursday, March 24, 2016
Richard Nixon Was the Most Despicable Person in American Politics in the 2nd Half of the 20th Century
14 comments:
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This was a secret to absolutely nobody at the time. The desire to bash hippies is also behind the revocation of the Homestead Act in 1975 -- those hippies were going out into the desert and forming communes on BLM land under the Homestead Act, oh horrors!
ReplyDeleteRichard Nixon had his flaws but he was a foreign policy genius, especially regarding South and Central America. I'd also take ten years of Nixon over a week of B.O. in a heartbeat.
ReplyDeleteA foreign policy genius? Forcing South Vietnam to sign a treaty that left enemy troops inside their territory and no viable way to maintain their independence? Really? Carpet bombing of Cambodia and supporting Lon Nol's coup against Prince Sihanouk that directly led to the death of millions of Cambodians in Pol Pot's Killing Fields, that was the work of a foreign policy genius? Really? Nixon was a lot of things, but a foreign policy genius is not one of them.
ReplyDeleteAnd let's not forget the same little bit of treason that Reagan later engaged in.
ReplyDeleteThe fall of Vietnam and all that came with it was something that the Democrats and the anti-war, anti-American left own entirely. President Nixon did what he could with what he had after they took the money away. But then Dems always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Just look at Carter and Obama, especially B.O.'s premature ending of the actions in Iraq which knocked that country right back into anarchy when it was almost stable and self-governing. But hey--more important to pander to his leftist donors and voters, right?
ReplyDeleteAs for President Reagan...he freed more people worldwide from Communism than any other president could ever hope to. The world is a better place today because of that man, in spite of the Dem congress trying to hamstring him for eight years.
LBJ might have given Tricky Dick a run for his money. Pat Moynahan foretold what the Welfare State would mean to low income families and LBJ's people had him crucified.
ReplyDeleteDoing a bit of retconning there, aren't you, Murphy boy? Congress didn't cut off the money until *after* the "peace treaty" that Nixon forced the South Vietnamese to accept, a peace treaty which was tantamount to surrender, leaving North Vietnamese forces in place in critical places in the South from whence they could cut the South into ribbons with sufficient reinforcement and resupply. Nixon had run on the platform of "peace with honor". There was no honor there.
ReplyDeleteAs for President Reagan, he set into place the disastrous economic policies that have led to the collapse of working men's inflation-adjusted hourly wages, the enrichment of a small leech class at the top of the economic sphere which produces nothing but hot air and creates nothing but bullshit and bribes, and created the economic system of leveraged buyouts and outsourcing that has led to the collapse of our industrial might over the past thirty years. We made air conditioners and washing machines and irons and clothes back when Reagan was elected President. Today we make none of that. About the only thing we make now are cars. Mostly for Japanese and Korean companies. And that's about it. If it wasn't for the Chinese and Vietnamese and all those other Communist countries President Ronnie the Raygun supposedly "beat", we wouldn't even be able to clothe ourselves or have shoes to wear on our feet, nevermind the computer that you're reading this on, which was made in (guess where) COMMUNIST CHINA. Is this the "victory over Communism" that you had in mind? The Communists having control over critical parts of our life without which we would be nothing other than Mexico with nukes? Hell, *worse* than Mexico with nukes. The Mexicans at least still know how to make shoes and clothes for themselves.
Yay, victory! At which I can only quote Pyrrhus of Epirus, another such "victory" would surely ruin us...
As for LBJ, don't get me started on LBJ. He was a great President in many ways, signing into law Medicare, Medicaid, the civil rights bills, and the bills to fund sending mankind to the Moon. He was also a fatally flawed President, fatally flawed in ways that led him to make one of the most disastrous foreign policy decisions in the history of this nation. He was fundamentally a craven, afraid of being called a coward or a Commie-lover, and he let that lead him into a war that he had no plan to win or even any definition of what it would mean to "win". We won every battle and lost the war, because we forgot one critical thing: you can't win if you don't define what winning even *is*. Otherwise it's like a game of tennis where you just play on and on and on until one side or the other drops dead of exhaustion. There is no victory in such a game, only endurance, and in the end the people who live in a place will endure long after anybody being supplied by a very expensive overseas supply chain. Just ask the British in 1783 where the greatest Empire that the world had ever known since the fall of the Roman Empire was forced to sue for peace, bankrupted by the cost of supporting over 100,000 soldiers on the other side of a very large ocean and facing the very real prospect of riots on its own soil if it tried to raise the tax money to replace the soldiers who had been forced to surrender at Yorktown...
ReplyDeleteThe drug war has always been a fraud, and I saw a couple of good friends get murdered over it. Will anyone listen to these revelations? Frankly, I doubt it.
ReplyDelete-Doug in Oakland
Awesome rant, Tux!
ReplyDelete"Reagan won the Cold War" is nonsensical. If it were true, then we sure as hell wasted a lot of money by maintaining large garrisons in western Europe, Korea, Japan and other places for the 30 years before St. Ronnie came into office.
ReplyDeleteMaybe somebody can explain how large reductions in the nuclear arsenal played into that, for that was Regan's idea. It was his idea to completely eliminate nuclear weapons, which in the context of the Cold War, where the Soviets were presumed to have superiorities in ground forces, would have been laughed at by the true Cold Warriors.
I think people who idolize Reagan really believe that his "tear down that wall" speech caused the Soviet Union collapse. In somewhat similar fashion, Trump supporters think his childish insults and slurs would intimidate Putin and other world leaders. Like Tux, I remember Reagan as destructive to the nation's welfare. But then, I sort of roll my eyes at people who talk about national security and defense without addressing the fact that we do NOT manufacture anything in this country. If you can't put boots on your army or shoes on your civilians, you might have a hard time winning a major war and especially if any conflict takes place on your own ground. Just my un-informed opinion.
ReplyDeleteJill
In the end what killed the Soviet Union was computers, not Ronnie Raygun. Their silly-ass economic system was creaky at best when dealing with fairly simple industrial-era artifacts. Once we entered the Information Age and everything became increasingly complex and required increasingly wide-flung networks of suppliers to build them, the creaky edifice that was the Soviet planned economy was entirely incapable of coping. The end result was that the Soviets became increasingly desperate and increasingly dependent on imports of fundamental information age artifacts such as computers, until in the end, as we all know, it collapsed on its own without any real help from us. Yes, military spending became an increasingly large part of their overall GDP as the Reagan era continued, but that was because their GDP was collapsing, not because their military spending was increasing. Most late-Soviet-era weapons systems were late and made in woefully small quantities as well as being a generation behind their US equivalent... but the same was true for *all* aspects of the Soviet economy. I've worked with many ex-Soviets here in the Silicon Valley, including some of their rocket scientists and others, and they're all uniform in their opinion of why the Soviet Union collapsed -- it collapsed because its system was simply too inflexible, inefficient, and corrupt to be workable in the post-industrial era.
ReplyDeleteHow can we discuss Nixon **without** mentioning his treasonous (that's no hyperbole) efforts to derail peace negotiations with Hanoi in **1968**?
ReplyDeleteIt's true that Nixon's underhanded meddling probably isn't solely responsible for the war's continuation. But I think that in terms of raw cynical duplicity it surpasses even the Southern Strategy and the War on (Some) Drugs -- which is really something, no? And all these from the same wretched bastard.
Squaring this record with the fantasy of Nixon as some kind of foreign policy "genius" is, ahem, a challenge.