We thought we'd never do any worse than Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew.
Yet here we are.
Thanks, Republicans.
You've outdone even yourselves.
Showing posts with label President Richard Nixon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label President Richard Nixon. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 30, 2020
Monday, May 11, 2020
The Now Frightening United States of America
Exposing Nixon’s Vietnam Lies
Ronald Reagan upset me, made me mad.
George W. Bush was depressing--and made me mad.
Donald J Trump is, no exaggeration, frightening.
We're concerned, sure, but even those around him get and and are concerned.
I could go on.
Frightening. This President is honestly frightening. And in more than one way.
God help us. Again, God help us.
Saturday, April 11, 2020
Tuesday, January 14, 2020
On Our Nation, Donald Trump, the Damage He's Done and On Going Forward
I never thought we'd be or do worse than Richard Nixon.
I never thought we'd be or do worse than Ronald Reagan.
I never thought we'd be or do worse than George W Bush.
I was wrong. I was very wrong.
While now we need to defeat this Donald Trump come November, I wonder to the point of fear our ability to put this all behind us, all of Mr. Trump's words and actions and emotions, and to heal and become one nation again.
Tuesday, October 31, 2017
Just the Facts, Ma'am
That one guy also oversaw the saving of the US economy, after the 2008 financial near-collapse, among other improvements.
Huh.
Saturday, September 30, 2017
The Large--and Glaring--Problem of the Vietnam Documentary
Like so many Americans this past week, I've watched a good deal of Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick's documentary on PBS covering the Vietnam War.
I'll say right off the bat, it's good and it's important. It's important we Americans know more about this horrible saga. It's important we know more fully what took place and they do cover a lot of that and well.
That said, it seems it also needs to be made clear that this program also lets America off any moral hook and that it leaves out a great deal more information, information we sorely need to know. No one puts this information out there better on the series than Christopher Koch in his writing online this week in Medium.
The Tragic Failure of Ken Burns Vietnam
A bit from the article:
Burns and Novick tell us that the war was begun “in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and …” whatever the current threat. That’s probably true of most wars. However, as we used to teach our children, you have to be accountable for your actions. If you kill someone speeding the wrong way down a one way street you’ll get charged with manslaughter even if you’re rushing someone to the hospital.
It’s the lack of accountability, the failure to prosecute those who lied to get us into the war, who encouraged battlefield tactics that resulted in the massacre of women and children, who authorized the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets, who drenched Vietnam in chemical poisons that will cause birth defects and death for generation.
In order to maintain this central lie, Burns and Novick must establish a false balance between good and evil on both sides. Every time the United States is shown doing something bad, Burns and Novick show us how the Vietnamese also did bad things. In one absurd example, Coyote intones something like, “we called them ‘Dinks,’ ‘Gooks,’ ‘Mamasans;’ they called us ‘invaders’ and ‘imperialists.’” The GI terms are dehumanizing, but the Vietnamese terms are accurate. People who cross 3,000 miles of ocean to attack a country that has done them no harm, are accurately called ‘invaders.’ I suppose you could argue about the ‘imperialist’ charge.
Vietnamese soldiers killed some 58,000 Americans and wounded a couple of hundred thousand more. Buns and Novick put the number of Vietnamese we killed at 3 million, but most experts say it was more like 4 million and Vietnam says its 6 million, with more people continuing to die from unexploded ordinance and Agent Orange. We destroyed 60% of their villages, sprayed 21 million gallons of lethal poisons, imposed free fire zones (a euphemism for genocide) on 75% of South Vietnam. They attacked US military bases in their country and never killed an American on American soil. There are no equivalences here.
Finally, besides we Americans knowing our history and knowing what happened in Vietnam, the horrors and tragedies and even the lies, all the lies, that got us there and then kept us there, it's important to know it all and to put and keep it in perspective because of what it's since gotten us first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan, where we still are, to this day.
Without the peace movement, there is no moral center to this series. The lack of accountability is fatal. That an American general can watch from a helicopter the massacre at Mai Lai (as the films tells us) and suffer no consequences is sickening. If military courts had aggressively prosecuted violators of human rights, or even if we only had held detailed and accurate reconciliations where the truth came out, there would have been a chance that our reckless invasions of Iraq with its policy of torture and the invasion of Afghanistan would not have followed so easily. When people are held accountable for their actions, perpetrators of questionable violent acts think twice.
Last week on NPR an American general in Afghanistan announced that we are not trying to occupy territory in Afghanistan, we are simply trying to kill terrorists. Here, again, is the same rationale of the body count that led to disaster in Vietnam. We are reliving the Vietnam War because no one was ever really held responsible for its horrors.
We need to learn. We need to know. And then we need to apply the lessons of this nightmare, of this past, of our past, to the mistakes we're making now and that we continue to make.
I understand that they wanted to make this series both palatable and acceptable to most all, if not all Americans. They didn't want it to be "harsh." They didn't want it to be seen as "too hard" on our nation, too critical, too condemning, if not damning. It would have instantly been branded as "Leftist" and "against the troops" and so, then, against the nation. But by making it palatable, they whitewashed the history, our history. They whitewashed and prettified what happened and what we did over there.
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick let us off easy. In not telling all that happened, they let us off easy. Consequently, we learn nothing. Tragically, we repeat the same mistakes, killing in other, different parts of the world.
Additional links:
Sunday, June 18, 2017
Do You Know the Source of Father's Day?
A woman, Sonora Smart Dodd came up with the idea of a Father's Day and celebrating fathers. It was in 1910 out in what was then the far, rather undeveloped West in Spokane, Washington.
She began the idea in 1910. The first national recognition of it was by President Woodrow Wilson but few other Presidents after him followed his lead. It wasn't actually made national and official until 1966 by Lyndon Johnson. It was made the third Sunday of June, following Mother's Day, of course. It wasn't, still, a permanent national day until 1972 with then President Richard Nixon.
Happy Father's Day to all the Dads out there. It's your day. Enjoy.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Imagine
Imagine if any one of these things happened in our US history.
--If Jack Kennedy hadn't been assassinated
--If LBJ didn't lie us into Vietnam and that war
--If Bobby Kennedy hadn't been assassinated
--If Richard Nixon hadn't been elected to the presidency
--If George W. Bush weren't successful in stealing the 2000 election
--If George w. Bush didn't lie us into the Iraq War
The ramifications of each would be huge.
Now, imagine if all the above occurred.
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Monday, May 25, 2015
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Saturday, August 9, 2014
A 40th Anniversary
40 years ago today we lost the no good, low down, dirty, lying, rotten scoundrel that was Richard Milhouse Nixon. I said it then, I think it now---thank goodness.
![[pic322.jpg]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqX8aViYDXIO9NvdtosPWOeo3ah7RlmjSi26QeHau_DGQ5yLk-G1XN6ER7hhxQ4uWbTt3GWluL3vyXFTASsbtslJlaf_gvJRHbaIiXvyxpPSStecmwb5URRFj6wiucH2p0FlbNI_7DxZM/s1600/pic322.jpg)
Besides lying to the American public, I think it will be shown one day that this low down scallawag kept us, kept the United States, kept our American soldiers in Vietnam beyond the election in 1972, to insure his re-election. No, I certainly can't prove it and no one has yet but it absolutely always looked as though that was the case to me and he surely showed, in lots of different ways, he was capable of it.
I don't believe in Hell but if I did, I should think there would be an especially hot corner of it for this man.
Friday, August 15, 2008
There's not much time left, you know
No, there's not much time left, between now and January 20, 2009, when this administration is no longer with us. It's too much time, though, we're finding out, because these people are really trying to dismantle the environmental and constitutional protections that are already in place.
What am I talking about, beyond my entry a few days ago, when I showed how they were trying to take apart the Endangered Species Act?
Yesterday it was announced that the FBI, via Attorney General Michael Mukasey, is planning on getting rid of rules that were put in place after the Republican Watergate nightmare. Yeah. They want to make it easier yet for the FBI to spy on us, the American public.
Once again, unbelievable. Truly unbelievable.
They've already taken down so many protections that used to be in the Constitution, to protect the American people from the government and now they want more.
Remember Nixon's "enemies list"? That's what these post-Watergate rules were created to protect the country from, for pity's sake. AND THEY WANT TO TAKE THOSE DOWN.
For a refresher course on Tricky Dick's list, it included many, prominent US citizens. Several of them were senators, big-name media people (like Dan Schorr, for God's sake), a governor, the mayor of New York at the time, Union leaders, celebrities--Carol Channing, of all people--business people, heads of corporations, and more. For a complete list, go to this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_list_of_Nixon_political_opponents.
It's a real hoot.
Ol' Dick (Cheney, this time) must be dying to go after what he--or they--see as "enemies of the White House", ya' think?
In so many ways and on so many different spheres, it seems that we, as a country, as a people, don't learn our lessons from our actions, or preemptively, from history.
(For more information and the original story, go here:
http://www.truthout.org/article/fbi-get-freer-rein-gather-domestic-information)
What am I talking about, beyond my entry a few days ago, when I showed how they were trying to take apart the Endangered Species Act?
Yesterday it was announced that the FBI, via Attorney General Michael Mukasey, is planning on getting rid of rules that were put in place after the Republican Watergate nightmare. Yeah. They want to make it easier yet for the FBI to spy on us, the American public.
Once again, unbelievable. Truly unbelievable.
They've already taken down so many protections that used to be in the Constitution, to protect the American people from the government and now they want more.
Remember Nixon's "enemies list"? That's what these post-Watergate rules were created to protect the country from, for pity's sake. AND THEY WANT TO TAKE THOSE DOWN.
For a refresher course on Tricky Dick's list, it included many, prominent US citizens. Several of them were senators, big-name media people (like Dan Schorr, for God's sake), a governor, the mayor of New York at the time, Union leaders, celebrities--Carol Channing, of all people--business people, heads of corporations, and more. For a complete list, go to this link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_list_of_Nixon_political_opponents.
It's a real hoot.
Ol' Dick (Cheney, this time) must be dying to go after what he--or they--see as "enemies of the White House", ya' think?
In so many ways and on so many different spheres, it seems that we, as a country, as a people, don't learn our lessons from our actions, or preemptively, from history.
(For more information and the original story, go here:
http://www.truthout.org/article/fbi-get-freer-rein-gather-domestic-information)
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