When I read Suzie Madrak’s post yesterday at Crooks and Liars titled Yes, Richard Nixon was a traitor, I was pissed all
“I’m a Liar!”
over again at “Tricky Dick” (and yes he was one). The post centers on the recently released Nixon papers that now confirm that prior to the 1968 election, a representative of Nixon did meet with the South Vietnamese to get them to not accept a proposed cease-fire that if agreed to would probably have led to Hubert Humphrey’s election. From the post…..
The new release of extended versions of Nixon’s papers now confirms this long-standing belief, usually dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” by Republican conservatives. Now it has been substantiated by none other than right-wing columnist George Will.
Nixon’s newly revealed records show for certain that in 1968, as a presidential candidate, he ordered Anna Chennault, his liaison to the South Vietnam government, to persuade them to refuse a cease-fire being brokered by President Lyndon Johnson.
Nixon’s interference with these negotiations violated President John Adams’s 1797 Logan Act, banning private citizens from intruding into official government negotiations with a foreign nation.
Published as the 40th Anniversary of Nixon’s resignation approaches, Will’s column confirms that Nixon feared public disclosure of his role in sabotaging the 1968 Vietnam peace talks. Will says Nixon established a “plumbers unit” to stop potential leaks of information that might damage him, including documentation he believed was held by the Brookings Institute, a liberal think tank. The Plumbers’ later break-in at the Democratic National Committee led to the Watergate scandal that brought Nixon down.
Nixon’s sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks was confirmed by transcripts of FBI wiretaps. On November 2, 1968, LBJ received an FBI report saying Chernnault told the South Vietnamese ambassador that “she had received a message from her boss: saying the Vietnamese should “hold on, we are gonna win. Read More
Ok so this only confirms what we knew all along, that Nixon was a lying son-of-a-bitch that only really cared about Richard Nixon, but this post set me off thinking about other two other elections where the Democrats and America got screwed. The first was 1980 when Reagan and his minions convinced the Iranians not to release the hostages until after the election, thereby, swinging the election in his favor and then 2000 when Al Gore won the election only to have it stolen from him and America by the Supreme Court.
So let’s think about what we got with Republican victories in these three elections. We got many more years and deaths in Vietnam and then Watergate and the American political system is really still recovering from both of those fiascoes!
Without a Reagan win, there would be no trickle down economics. There may still even be unions! After reading Subversives, and Reagan’s obsession with the both the radical left and communism, I believe that his attacks on unions were predicated on his fear and obsession with communism! A fear that anything the left proposes to level the playing field must be bad and evil. Well, see where that got us, to a country where 99% of America is struggling while the top 1% are doing fine and now corporations are free to buy elections because they are people!
Then there are the Bush years, without a Bush election there would be no Bush tax cuts which further widen the gap between rich and poor. Additionally, there would have been no war in Iraq, that coupled with those tax cuts left a balance budget Bush inherited from Clinton and Gore in shambles and left the country with a terrible budget deficit!
Now I’m not saying that everything would have been a bed of roses if the Democrats had won those elections but the chances are pretty good that the country would be a hell of a lot better off if they had!! There has been a concerted effort by the right since the late 70s to paint the liberal Democrats as evil and any one to the left of them as outright communists out to destroy the country! Well I’d say that the Republicans and Right have done a pretty good of that all by themselves. They have fostered hate and fear and now the nation is reaping what they have sown and we ALL are suffering the consequences!! Give me Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore any day over Nixon, Reagan and George W. Think about it!! I am getting down off of my soap box now!!