We are recycling the Third Reich and Richard Nixon rolled into one

RAW SEXISM AND MISOGYNY are the first but far from only shocks in Becoming Katharine Graham, a documentary that traces a time when the Washington Post was led by a shy, awkward, female publisher who supported fearless journalism even when she was terrified.

[...]

And here we are, with another enemies list and a vindictive president already ticking off names: former FBI director James Comey arraigned Wednesday, sitting New York Attorney General Letitia James indicted Thursday. Who’s next? Sen. Adam Schiff? Former special counsel Jack Smith?

  The Bulwark

They're coming up. But as it turns out, John Bolton was next. I think they're first going for ones they think people won't care about. Smith and Schiff will likely call up a storm.

It is stunning to hear President Richard Nixon on the famous White House tapes describe Graham to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as “a terrible old bag”—and to not only reply “That’s right” when Ambassador Walter Annenberg called Graham “a miserable bitch,” but to then add, “And worse.”

It is chilling to hear Attorney General John Mitchell tell Nixon, as Graham weighed whether to publish the Pentagon Papers, that “if we ever convicted the Post or Katie Graham, she’d lose all of her television and radio licenses.” Graham got that message. And though those stations were propping up the Post financially back then, she published the classified documents anyway.

[...]

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr warned that “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” and ABC responded by suspending Kimmel. It came four months after the administration detained Emmy winner and legal U.S. resident Mario Guevara for immigration reporting it didn’t like. He was deported to El Salvador last Friday in a case the Committee to Protect Journalists calls unprecedented.

Stand up and be brave. We're not getting out of this like we did with Nixon. (I remember being gobsmacked when he won reelection, but it crumbled rather rapidly.) We don't have any Republicans in Congress who believe in Democracy or the rule of law this time around. The very Post that Graham steered through the treachery of the Nixonites has been bought by a soulless billionaire and turned to bend the knee to autocracy. So many corporations and even some universities have turned tail. And we have a captured Supreme Court, making it all the more difficult. It's not impossible to recover, but it's going to take longer, and we'll have a different country when we get there. Be a Katherine Graham - brave even when you're afraid. I guess that's the definition of courage.

King it is

In Hell, Nixon is demanding a do over.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 06:25 pm:

UPDATE 08:05 pm:  A clear explainer of what the ruling says and how it affects Jack Smith's case.

UPDATE 07/02/2024:

More questions about Judge Cannon's ruling

A legal reading of current law:

The power was granted to the judge by herself.  So if nobody challenges it, the power remains.

Yes.  Yes it is.

Precedent from the Nixon tapes case:

So, even though it will delay indictment of Trump, I believe the DOJ has an obligation to appeal Cannon's faulty ruling in order to re-assert and reconfirm the validity or not of prior presidents' claims against a current executive.  

"She" being the incompetent Trump judge (redundant, I know) Aileen Cannon.

And then, there's yet another angle for DOJ action now...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Earlier post here.

UPDATE 9/8:

Another Trump campaign ad in the spotlight

The Trump campaign took down a video late Thursday trumpeting NASA’s return to human spaceflight, after harsh criticism that it was politicizing the event and violating NASA advertising rules.

The video featured Trump watching last week’s launch from the Kennedy Space Center along with the slogan “Make Space Great Again” and historic footage from the Apollo era.

On Twitter, Karen Nyberg, a former astronaut and wife of Doug Hurley, who was carried to the International Space Station by the SpaceX launch, blasted the advertisement, saying she found “it disturbing that a video image of me and my son is being used in political propaganda without my knowledge or consent. That is wrong.”

  WaPo

So, not a Trump supporter?

But Internet posts are hard to delete forever; the ad surfaced on another YouTube page.

Of course. It will get around to all the MAGA base.

“Astronauts or employees who are currently employed by NASA cannot have their names, likenesses or other personality traits displayed in any advertisements or marketing material,” [NASA] rules say.

[...]

An online petition urging the campaign to remove the ad had more than 7,000 signatures by Friday. “NASA and the space industry as a whole have long tried to stay out of politics, and, until this Administration, that goal was at least partly attained,” the petition read.

NASA goes to great lengths to avoid endorsing any ideology or product, even going so far as to call the M&Ms astronauts gobble in space “candy-coated chocolates” out of fear of appearing to favor one brand of candy.

[...]

“Watching the ad, I was reminded of Richard Nixon at the time of Apollo 11,” said John Logsdon, a space historian and a professor emeritus at George Washington University. “He had nothing to do with Apollo 11; he just happened to be the president when it happened. But he wrapped himself in the event. And never once mentioned Kennedy.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The man who flipped on Nixon talks about yesterday's hearing

“There’s a conspiracy, we know from what’s come out of the executive sessions, generally, where this is going,” [Nixon White House counsel John] Dean said. “What struck me today in listening to these two witnesses is they already have more than they had against Richard Nixon to impeach him. Just on all accounts.”

  Mediaite

And it could happen again

On the other hand, Republicans generally had more integrity back then.  

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

On this day in history

In pictures


...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Saint Ronnie was a racist, too

Former President Ronald Reagan in a newly unearthed tape disparaged [UN delegates] from African countries during a phone call with then-President Richard Nixon while Reagan was governor of California.

Reagan called Nixon in October 1971 — the day after a landmark United Nations vote to recognize the People’s Republic of China — and referenced how the Tanzanian delegation was dancing in the General Assembly after the vote, according to an audio clip of the exchange posted by The Atlantic.

"Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan says.

“Yeah,” Nixon cuts in.

Reagan replies, laughing: "To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they're still uncomfortable wearing shoes!"

[...]

The clip was unearthed by Tim Naftali, the former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, who wrote in The Atlantic that the racist exchange was removed from the original tape when it was released in 2000 due to privacy concerns.

  The Hill

"Privacy concerns." Right.

In another audio clip, Nixon spoke with then-Secretary of State William Rogers and told him about his exchange with Reagan.

"As you can imagine," Nixon said to Rogers, "there's strong feeling that we just shouldn't, as [Reagan] said, he saw these ... cannibals on television last night, and he says, 'Christ, they weren't even wearing shoes, and here the United States is going to submit its fate to that,' and so forth and so on."

And what was Nixon's reply to Reagan?

If you didn't already understand that every Republican president in modern history has been a white supremacist, you've not been paying attention.  George W Bush, of all people, was probably the least racist, and that, it seems had more to do with his fascination with black women.  Don't quote me.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Impeach the motherfucker

Let's hear The Honorable Barbara Jordan argue for impeachment of Richard Nixon and take notes:

I'll provide one (at 13:10):  

Impeachment criteria, James Madison, from the Virginia ratification convention: 

If the president be connected in any suspicious manner with any person and there be grounds to believe that he will shelter him, he may be impeached.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Happy Anniversary Saturday Night Massacre

Forty-five years ago, on another Saturday, October 20...

Not the Trump administration

Indeed, Ford robbed the country of something it desperately needed.  A very large step up to the road on which we now find ourselves.  And if by some miracle, we get to a point where Trump resigns, there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that Pence would do the same.

Sooner or later

I will be eager to read Seymour Hersh's new book. In the meantime, here's an excerpt from an article reveiwing the book that I can't help but find reminding me of the missing Melania Trump...

Almost every person in Hersh’s memoir is a man—a sign of the time and the industry. But there’s an interesting moment that Hersh did not have to include. In 1974, he writes, Hersh heard that Nixon’s wife Pat was in hospital after being punched by her husband. It was not an isolated occasion. He did not report on the story, he told Nieman Foundation fellows in 1998, because it represented “a merging of private life and public life.” Nixon didn’t make policy decisions because of his bad marriage, went the argument. Hersh was “taken aback” by the response from women fellows, who pointed out that he had heard of a crime and not reported it. “All I could say,” Hersh writes, “is that at the time I did not—in my ignorance—view the incident as a crime.”

[...]

“I should have reported what I knew at the time or, if my doing so would have compromised a source, have made sure that someone else did.”

  New Republic

Nobody else considered it a crime in those days, either.

click here

Fox News is The Onion's competition

[Sean] Hannity, a vocal defender of President Trump, opened a segment on his radio show with criticism of what he perceives to be anti-Trump bias in the FBI and Justice Department probes into Russian meddling in the presidential election.

“Nixon never would have been forced to resign if you existed in your current state back in 1972, ’73, ’74,” Rivera told Hannity on his radio show.

"It’s too bad for Nixon, because nobody like you existed then. I say that because I believe that our prime responsibility now is to unshackle the 45th president of the United States.”

  The Hill

These people are off the rails.


P.S.  "In your current state"?

Who Can Stop the Madman - Part 2

There's a lot of talk these days of "The Madman Theory," the tactic dreamed up by Henry Kissinger on behalf of Richard Nixon by which an American president would scare adversaries to the negotiating table by doing something so savage and inhuman that those adversaries come to believe the president is likely to do anything. I'd like to make a couple of points on that.

First, it was nothing more than a convenient measure of how big a pair of sociopaths were the two people who thought it up. It resulted in the infamous Christmas bombing of North Vietnam in 1972, the largest bombing raid undertaken by the United States since World War II. And, having unleashed fire and fury on the villages and cities of North Vietnam, Kissinger and Nixon wound up agreeing to pretty much the same terms President Johnson might've gotten four years earlier, had the Nixon people not ratfcked the Paris Peace Talks.

Second, the Madman Theory only makes sense if the United States is not governed by an actual madman.

  Charles P Pierce

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It Always Comes Out - But Too Often Too Late

Lest anyone ever think that Richard Nixon was "not a crook"...he was. And he was an evil man. And, as it turns out, literally and legally treasonous.

Richard M. Nixon always denied it: to David Frost, to historians and to Lyndon B. Johnson, who had the strongest suspicions and the most cause for outrage at his successor’s rumored treachery. To them all, Nixon insisted that he had not sabotaged Johnson’s 1968 peace initiative to bring the war in Vietnam to an early conclusion. “My God. I would never do anything to encourage” South Vietnam “not to come to the table,” Nixon told Johnson, in a conversation captured on the White House taping system.

  NYT

Of course, I'm not sure there was ever anybody who trusted anything Dick Nixon said.

His lawyers fought throughout Nixon’s life to keep the records of the 1968 campaign private. The broad outline of “the Chennault affair” would dribble out over the years. But the lack of evidence of Nixon’s direct involvement gave pause to historians and afforded his loyalists a defense.

[...]

A newfound cache of notes left by H. R. Haldeman, his closest aide, shows that Nixon directed his campaign’s efforts to scuttle the peace talks, which he feared could give his opponent, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, an edge in the 1968 election.

[...]

[W]e must now weigh apparently criminal behavior that, given the human lives at stake and the decade of carnage that followed in Southeast Asia, may be more reprehensible than anything Nixon did in Watergate.

And sure. That doesn't help anyone who suffered that decade. And, it's pretty much par for the American course at least since the unparalleled horror of Harry Ass Truman dropping nuclear bombs on two Japanese cities when the Russians were already in negotiations with the Japanese to end the war.

Henry A. Kissinger, then an outside Republican adviser, had called, alerting Nixon that a deal was in the works: If Johnson would halt all bombing of North Vietnam, the Soviets pledged to have Hanoi engage in constructive talks to end a war that had already claimed 30,000 American lives.

Wherever there is evil in those several decades, you'll find the name of Henry Kissinger pops up, doesn't it?

But Nixon had a pipeline to Saigon, where the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, feared that Johnson would sell him out. If Thieu would stall the talks, Nixon could portray Johnson’s actions as a cheap political trick. The conduit was Anna Chennault.

[...]

“! Keep Anna Chennault working on” South Vietnam, Haldeman scrawled, recording Nixon’s orders. “Any other way to monkey wrench it? Anything RN can do.”

[...]

Nixon told Haldeman to have Rose Mary Woods, the candidate’s personal secretary, contact another nationalist Chinese figure — the businessman Louis Kung — and have him press Thieu as well. “Tell him hold firm,” Nixon said.

And more. Continue reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

In Case You Missed It

John Ehrlichman, who served as President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief, laid bare the sinister use of his boss’ controversial [law and order, anti-drug] policy in a 1994 interview with journalist Dan Baum that the writer revisited in a new article for Harper’s magazine.

“You want to know what this was really all about,” Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said in the interview after Baum asked him about Nixon’s harsh anti-drug policies.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying,” Ehrlichman continued.

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

[...]

By 1973, about 300,000 people were being arrested every year under the law — the majority of whom were African-American.

[...]

The original 1994 interview with Ehrlichman was part of Baum’s research for his 1997 book, “Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure,” in which Baum laid bare decades of unsuccessful drug policy.

But the quotes never appeared in the book.

  NY Daily News

And It's Been Fine Tuned and Polished Up Since Then

For the People, By the People: Republic Lost

Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims. ... It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, and their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion. ~~ Thomas Jefferson

The deliberations of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were held in strict secrecy. Consequently, anxious citizens gathered outside Independence Hall when the proceedings ended in order to learn what had been produced behind closed doors. The answer was provided immediately. A Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

  Our Republic

To this day, many Americans misunderstand the separation of powers as simply a division of authority between three branches of government. In fact, it was intended as a protection not of institutional but of individual rights, by preventing any branch from assuming enough power to become tyrannical. No branch is supposed to have enough power to govern alone.

[...]

The shift of power to the presidency certainly did not start with President Barack Obama. To the contrary, this trend has been gaining ground for decades. But it has accelerated under Obama, who has succeeded to a degree that would have made Richard Nixon blush. Indeed, Obama may be the president Nixon always wanted to be.

[...]

Indeed, many of the unchecked powers claimed by Nixon became the basis for articles in his impeachment and led to his resignation on Aug. 9, 1974.

Four decades ago, Nixon was halted in his determined effort to create an imperial presidency with unilateral powers and privileges. But in 2013, Obama wields those very same powers openly and without serious opposition.

[The Constitutional framers] such as Madison would have been mortified by the scene from the most recent State of the Union address. Obama appeared before a joint session of Congress (and members of the Supreme Court) to announce that he intended to go it alone in achieving his policy goals, refusing to yield to the actions of Congress. One would have expected an outcry, or at least stony silence, from a branch that was being told it would be circumvented. Instead, there was rapturous applause that bordered on a collective expression of institutional self-loathing.

[...]

When Congress recently refused to pass the DREAM Act to change immigration laws to protect potentially millions of deportable individuals, [Obama] simply ordered the very same measures on his own authority. The same unilateral measures were ordered in health care, drug enforcement, online gambling and other areas. The failure of Congress to consent to executive demands was followed by the same measures being ordered on the basis of Obama’s inherent authority. Under this approach, Congress is being reduced to an almost decorative element in governance – free to approve but not to block presidential demands.

[...]

Even Congress’ power of the purse has become discretionary with the president. When Congress resisted demands of the president on health care, Obama simply shifted $454 million in funds from the purpose mandated by Congress to his own purpose. When he decided not to consult with Congress on the Libyan war, he simply spent roughly a billion dollars on a war neither declared nor funded by Congress.

[...]

Every citizen has been warned that the president may kill them on his own authority without a charge, let alone a conviction. We have a secret court that approves thousands of secret searches every year and a federal court system that increasingly allows the use of secret evidence. We have a new Obama-era law, the National Defense Authorization Act, that allows for the indefinite detention of people by the government and, while exempted from mandatory detention, allows for such detention of citizens. We still have a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, established by George W. Bush, just over our border to avoid the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. It allows the president to choose who gets a real trial, who gets a legally dubious military tribunal, or who gets no trial at all. While seeking to close the facility, Obama has continued to assert the right to send people to military tribunals on his sole authority – thereby stripping them of core legal protections.

[...]

The United States is now widely viewed as a hypocrite on the subject of human rights and civil liberties. This year, our nation fell to 46th in the world on press freedoms (behind the former Soviet republics of Lithuania and Latvia as well as Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Ghana, South Africa and El Salvador), according to a recent study by Reporters Without Borders. Another study this year counts the United States as an “enemy of Internet freedom” with countries such as Iran, China and North Korea.

[...]

It may be that it is not the presidency that has changed. We have changed. As a nation, we seem to have grown almost bored with rights like privacy and due process. We have been passive and pedestrian in watching the rise of an uber-presidency. We no longer view ourselves as directing our government, but as merely bystanders watching matters outside our control. Worse yet, we seem to have lost not just our identity but even our interest in governance.

  Jonathan Turley

We have changed, but the presidency has, too.

Also, to be fair, perhaps Congress should be reduced to a decorative element. They don’t seem to be much good for anything else.

Remember This (Again): It's Always Worse Than You've Been Told

These documents are the final testimony that "looking forward and not backwards" is no way to run a democracy.

  Charlie Pierce

In the case of Watergate – the foiled Republican break-in at the Democratic National Committee in June 1972 and Richard Nixon’s botched cover-up leading to his resignation in August 1974 – the evidence is now clear that Nixon created the Watergate burglars out of his panic that the Democrats might possess a file on his sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

[...]

Shortly after Nixon took office in 1969, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover informed him of the existence of the file containing national security wiretaps documenting how Nixon’s emissaries had gone behind President Lyndon Johnson’s back to convince the South Vietnamese government to boycott the Paris Peace Talks, which were close to ending the Vietnam War in fall 1968.

The disruption of Johnson’s peace talks then enabled Nixon to hang on for a narrow victory over Democrat Hubert Humphrey.

  Alternet

How many people died so that Nixon could become president? And here's the kicker...Lyndon Johnson knew he did it and kept it a secret. He had the file.

And, remember the speculation and rumors that Reagan made a deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini to hold the American hostages until after the election so that Jimmy Carter would fail at getting them released? New evidence shows it's true.

Official Washington dismissed [the Reagan campaign's] “October Surprise” and other Iran-Contra-connected scandals, like Contra drug trafficking, as conspiracy theories.

As with Watergate and Nixon, Official Washington has refused to rethink its conclusions absolving President Ronald Reagan and his successor President George H.W. Bush of guilt in a range of crimes collected under the large umbrella of Iran-Contra.

[...]

The major newspapers have been equally unwilling to rethink the origins – and the significance – of the October Surprise/Iran-Contra scandal. It doesn’t matter how much new evidence accumulates. It remains much easier to continue the politically safe deification of “Gipper” Reagan and the fond remembrances of “Poppy” Bush.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Where Did It All Start?

Probably not with Richard Nixon, but boy did he bring it to full view. We the People don't know how to choose a leader.

I know the president doesn't want us to look back, but until it's a punishable crime, let's do it anyway.

If he were still alive [...] this would have been Richard Nixon's 100th birthday.

[...]

If there had been any justice served in 1974, this would be the 29th anniversary of Nixon's having finished his 10-year bid in the federal slam for obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

  Charlie Pierce

Somebody remind me again. When was the last time justice was served in the US government?

And, not for nothing, but last December 18th was the 40th anniversary of the "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi and Haiphong, in which United States warplanes dropped 20,000 tons of bombs and killed almost 2,000 Vietnamese people. And this is what was said about that by Henry Kissinger, who I think is possibly even less excusable a human being than Nixon: "We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions."

Do what you're good at. That's our national motto.

For me, I stand with what Lewis Lapham wrote on the occasion of Nixon's death:

When Richard Nixon resigned the office of the presidency twenty years ago this summer, I thought it possible that in his own peculiar and crooked way he might have done his countrymen an honest service. It wasn't the one that he had in mind, and honesty was never a trait for which he had much liking or use, but by so conspicuously attempting to suborn the Constitution and betray every known principle of representative government, he had allowed the American people to see what could become of their democracy in the hands of a thoroughly corrupt politician bent upon seizing the prize of absolute power. The civics lesson was conducted in plain sight over a period of eighteen months on network television and memorably illustrated by the singular ugliness of Nixon's character. The more obvious aspects of that character (its hypocrisy and self-pitying rage) had been made, as he so often said, "Perfectly clear" during his prior years in public office, but the congressional hearings preliminary to his certain impeachment showed that he was also vindictive, foulmouthed, and determined to replace the rule of law with corporate despotism. Nixon's distrust of any and all forms of free speech was consistent with his ambition to shape the government of the United States in his own resentful image, and when he left for the beach at San Clemente, as grudgingly as a dog giving up its bone, I remember watching his helicopter rise for the last time from the White House lawn and thinking that his fellow citizens wouldn't soon forget the constitutional moral of the tale.

The assumption was mistaken.

Soon and repeatedly.