Historian Rick Perlstein, who is writing a sequel to his Before the Storm focusing on the Nixon years, passed this on:
Hunter S. Thompson, in the October 10, 1974 Rolling Stone: "But the
climate of those years was so grim that half the Washington press corps
spent more time worrying about having their telephones tapped than they
did about risking the wrath of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Colson by
poking at the weak semas of a Mafia-style administration that began
cannibalizing the whole government just as soon as it came into power.
Nixon's capos
were never subtle; they swaggered into Washington like a conquering
army, and the climate of fear they engendered apparently neutralized The New York Times
along with all the other pockets of potential resistance. Nixon had to
do everything but fall on his own sword before anybody in the
Washingotn socio-political establishment was willing to take him on."
Fear and Loathing; Campaign 2004
Richard Nixon looks like a flaming liberal today, compared to a golem like George Bush.
If Nixon were running for president today,
he would be seen as a "liberal" candidate, and he would probably win.
He was a crook and a bungler, but what the hell? Nixon was a barrel of
laughs compared to this gang of thugs from the Halliburton petroleum
organization who are running the White House today -- and who will be
running it this time next year, if we (the once-proud, once-loved and
widely respected "American people") don't rise up like wounded warriors
and whack those lying petroleum pimps out of the White House on
November 2nd.
"There are a hundred or more people wandering around Washington today
who have heard the 'real stuff,' as they put it - and despite their
professional caution when the obvious question arises, there is one
reaction they all feel free to agree on: that nobody who felt shocked,
depressed or angry after reading the edited White House transcripts
should ever be allowed to hear the actual tapes, except under heavy
sedation or locked in the trunk of a car. Only a terminal cynic, they
say, can listen for any length of time to the real stuff without
feeling a compulsion to do something like drive down to the White House
and throw a bag of live rats over the fence."
- Hunter S. Thompson, 04 July 1973
Hunter S. Thompson had a way with words.
All of the scurrilous things said about Nixon are true, but Bush is still far worse and much more dangerous.
Nixon would have never had the gall to get up and say have committed
felonies, I am the president, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Bush did that, and doesn't really care what the response is.
Bush cackled about the upcoming execution of Karla Fay Tucker as if
this death were an amusement for his delight. Nixon at least had
enough conscience and awareness to show some decorum.
Nixon may have run around the Constitution, but he did not overtly try
to destroy it. He did not attempt to change our form of government
into a dictatorship or theocracy. Nixon did admire Barbara Bush
though, "He never knew anyone who could hate so deeply or so well."
The media was not as quiescent as Thompson makes out, and it was certainly not as muzzled as today.
Vice
President Dick Cheney on Wednesday strongly defended a secret domestic
eavesdropping operation and said that had it been in place before the
September 11 attacks the Pentagon might have been spared.
If we'd been able to see that three airliners were making huge U-turns
on the morning of 9-11, we might have been able to save the Pentagon
and one of the towers of the WTC, but conveniently we missed that
little de-tail.
Which
begs the question: Just where has all the trillions of dollars we've
poured into that rathole called the defense budget for the last fifty
years gone? Do all we have to show for it is a destroyed office
complex, 3000 dead people, and Tang?
NSA eavesdropping began prior to 9/11. Cheney is such a liar!
See this article
from Slate: "A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain
call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the
president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who
asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports
that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation
in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of
individual calls and e-mails."
So, if the Slate article is
correct and NSA data-mining began prior to 9/11, it didn't prevent
9/11. We won't go into the fact that Bush ignored pre-9/11 warnings as
well.
More sillyness of Cheney's 9/11 statement is this:
If BushCo
totally ignored a PDB that was TITLED[!] "Bin Laden Determined to
Attack the USA", why in the holy hell does he think a shift supervisor
at NSA would get their attention by saying, "I think I may have found
something suspicious in one of the 500 + wire taps." ?
But
putting that aside, Cheney is right. Had we dumped our democracy and
200 years of history and adopted a Soviet-style communist police state
and jailed every Muslim in America (including US citizens) prior to
9/11 we might have been spared the attacks as well.
And your point would be that dictatorships are better than democracies?
Repeat this over and over to all of your wingnut associates: Why do Republicans hate America?
Won't it be great when Hillary Clinton has this kind of power?
