May 10, 2008

IMPEACH BUSH

IMPEACH CHENEY

THE GHOST OF NIXON PRESENT

Richard Nixon was a paranoid and bitter man. People were always out to "get" him, so he was determined to "get" them back. He used his inherent mean streak effectively in his political career. He tarred a Senate opponent as a Communist sympathizer. As president, he used racism as a tactic to arouse the rage and get the votes of working class whites. A media coach named Roger Ailes worked for Nixon and went on to create the FOX Network, which has carried on Nixon's mean-spirited tactics, doing anything it takes to win elections. There is a new book about Nixon by Rick Perlstein called "Nixonland." This review by Evan Thomas is at www.newsweek.com:

Nixon understood. Full of bitterness about his hardscrabble youth, he knew how to exploit the bitterness of others. At Whittier, the small California college attended by Nixon, the smoothies and swells had formed a club called the Franklins. The campus Big Men were envied—but they were also resented, Nixon perceived. So he formed his own club, of strivers and nerds, called the Orthogonians. Nixon knew that there were many more natural Orthogonians than Franklins at Whittier—and before long he was elected student-body president.

Nixon was the ultimate striver. At law school they called him "Iron Butt," but he still got turned down by all the white-shoe law firms on Wall Street. As a politician, he told a friend, he would do anything, make any sacrifice, to get where he wanted to go. "Anything," he said. "Except see a shrink." Nixon's base was the "silent majority," the vast mass of white middle-class Americans who felt threatened by the tumult of the '60s. As the Democrats' New Deal coalition of rich and poor collapsed, he was able to "co-opt the liberals' populism, channeling it into middle-class rage at the sophisticates, the well-born, the 'best circles'—all those who looked down their noses at 'you and me' (a favorite phrase of Ronald Reagan's, who was both a student and a teacher of Richard Nixon)," writes Perlstein.