How about it? Is the next President going to be stuck with an economic enviroment that doom’s him to one term? Are ex-candidates from both parties a bit relieved they didn’t get picked for the job?
It has nowhere to go but up in 4 years.
[quote]Sloth wrote:
How about it? Is the next President going to be stuck with an economic enviroment that doom’s him to one term? Are ex-candidates from both parties a bit relieved they didn’t get picked for the job?[/quote]
Unless he is doing spectacularly well and actually gets elected I don’t Mccain as having a prayer at 77 years old.
You are severely underestimating the kids coming up who worship the ground Obama walks on.
[quote]Beowolf wrote:
You are severely underestimating the kids coming up who worship the ground Obama walks on.[/quote]
Worshipping the ground a man walks on, and actually making the monumental effort to register and vote for him, are two distinctly different things.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Beowolf wrote:
You are severely underestimating the kids coming up who worship the ground Obama walks on.
Worshipping the ground a man walks on, and actually making the monumental effort to register and vote for him, are two distinctly different things.[/quote]
Not for nothin, but Obama being the Democratic candidate is actually reviving the Democratic party at the local level in New Jersey.
There are towns that were GOP dominated that have upstart Democrats registering and running for town council and mayor because of him.
You can’t underestimate that.
I wish Nixon were alive and running for President. That would be bad ass. He would have had this thing wrapped up already.
[quote]skaz05 wrote:
I wish Nixon were alive and running for President. That would be bad ass. He would have had this thing wrapped up already.[/quote]
He’d also be 95 years old.
[quote]skaz05 wrote:
I wish Nixon were alive and running for President. That would be bad ass. He would have had this thing wrapped up already.[/quote]
Proof of how quickly people forget the past…
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
skaz05 wrote:
I wish Nixon were alive and running for President. That would be bad ass. He would have had this thing wrapped up already.
He’d also be 95 years old.[/quote]
McCain could run as his VP and look young. They could even have Bob Dole as Secretary of State. They could bring back a totally archaic (that might actually be a good thing) approach to modern day issues.
With these 2 running a one term presidency would be a fantastic thing.
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
skaz05 wrote:
I wish Nixon were alive and running for President. That would be bad ass. He would have had this thing wrapped up already.
Proof of how quickly people forget the past…[/quote]
At the risk of derailing the thread, please elaborate how Nixon was truly so bad-- Watergate notwithstanding.
[quote]SteelyD wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
skaz05 wrote:
I wish Nixon were alive and running for President. That would be bad ass. He would have had this thing wrapped up already.
Proof of how quickly people forget the past…
At the risk of derailing the thread, please elaborate how Nixon was truly so bad-- Watergate notwithstanding.
[/quote]
LOL. Watergate notwithstanding? Oh, ok, I’ll just ignore that massive scandal that caused the only presidential resignation in the history of the country.
Besides that, the expansion of the Vietnam War, the war on the counterculture and the opponents of the Vietnam War, the blatant lies to the American Public… hell, Tricky Dick makes W look like a motherfucking choir boy.
Never has one man abused the power of the presidency so obscenely as Richard Nixon. When the man died, they shoulda burned’em.
Wait a sec, Nixon ended the Vietnam War-- which was in fact put into action by JFK and seriously escalated by Johnson.
re: Resignation-- Clinton, you know, the disgraced and impeached President, should have had so much class.
So that’s all you have against Nixon? Sounds like bias instead of real historic facts.
I’ll throw you a bone-- he signed one of the most significant pieces of environmental protection legislation in our time. Nixon, really? Yeah, that guy.
Watergate was small beans compared to the Dickery that goes on in both parties today.
[quote]SteelyD wrote:
Wait a sec, Nixon ended the Vietnam War-- which was in fact put into action by JFK and seriously escalated by Johnson.
[/quote]
And Eisnhower was the one who articulated both the containment theory and the domino theory.
The blood is on many hands for Vietnam, especially LBJ. I can’t deny that. But Nixon expanded the war into other countries, and then lied about it, before he ended it due to massive unpopularity.
Nope. Getting a blowjob in office does not, in any way, compare to Nixon’s crimes, or Watergate, or anything else.
[quote]
So that’s all you have against Nixon? Sounds like bias instead of real historic facts.
I’ll throw you a bone-- he signed one of the most significant pieces of environmental protection legislation in our time. Nixon, really? Yeah, that guy.
Watergate was small beans compared to the Dickery that goes on in both parties today.[/quote]
Nope. Any man that does all he can to silence opposition to a war, imprison the leaders of the anti-war groups, and then abuses the living fuck out of his powers as president to the point where he has to resign is someone who shoulda been shot then deported.
They don’t get more unAmerican than that, and it ruins any good thing he did.
For instance- I agreed with W on the illegal aliens, and I gave him props for trying to offer them amnesty, or whatever his plan was. I liked the way he was heading. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think he was absolutely horrific in every other way. The issues don’t compare in magnitude.
[quote]pushharder wrote:
FightinIrish26 wrote:
…Besides that, the expansion of the Vietnam War…
History clearly states that Nixon deescalated the war through gradual but significant troop withdrawals and intensive peace talks. In fact, he hastened the war’s end and the subsequent torture and mayhem perpetrated by the North by leaving South Vietnam high and dry.
Say what you will about Nixon but do not say he expanded the Vietnam War. He did not have the support of the Congress and the People to do so.
[/quote]
Then what do you call this?
[i]
Nixon’s secret plan, it turned out, was borrowing from a strategic move from Lyndon Johnson’s last year in office. The new president continued a process called “Vietnamization”, an awful term that implied that Vietnamese were not fighting and dying in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
This strategy brought American troops home while increasing the air war over the DRV and relying more on the ARVN for ground attacks. The Nixon years also saw the expansion of the war into neighboring Laos and Cambodia,
violating the international rights of these countries in secret campaigns, as the White House tried desperately to rout out Communist sanctuaries and supply routes.
The intense bombing campaigns and intervention in Cambodia in late April 1970 sparked intense campus protests all across America. At Kent State in Ohio, four students were killed by National Guardsmen who were called out to preserve order on campus after days of anti-Nixon protest.
Shock waves crossed the nation as students at Jackson State in Mississippi were also shot and killed for political reasons, prompting one mother to cry, “They are killing our babies in Vietnam and in our own backyard.”
The expanded air war did not deter the Communist Party, however, and it continued to make hard demands in Paris. Nixon’s Vietnamization plan temporarily quieted domestic critics, but his continued reliance on an expanded air war to provide cover for an American retreat angered U.S. citizens.
By the early fall 1972, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and DRV representatives Xuan Thuy and Le Duc Tho had hammered out a preliminary peace draft. Washington and Hanoi assumed that its southern allies would naturally accept any agreement drawn up in Paris, but this was not to pass.
The leaders in Saigon, especially President Nguyen van Thieu and Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, rejected the Kissinger-Tho peace draft, demanding that no concessions be made.
The conflict intensified in December 1972, when the Nixon administration unleashed a series of deadly bombing raids against targets in the DRV’s largest cities, Hanoi and Haiphong.
These attacks, now known as the Christmas bombings, brought immediate condemnation from the international community and forced the Nixon administration to reconsider its tactics and negotiation strategy.[/i]
http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/index.html
[i]
On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon doubled back on his promise to end the war in Vietnam by expanding the visible conflict and invading Cambodia, a neutral country.
The American people, visibly tired of the ongoing conflict, reacted against the expansion of the war. Still unaware of the massive secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia, the anti-war movement reacted strongly to this new expansion. College campuses across the country were at the forefront of these actions.[/i]
I’m not making this shit up. He was trying desperately to “win” the war, not pulling out like he had said.
[quote]
On another note, I do believe Congress has allowed it’s constitutional authority to be usurped by both the executive and judicial branches in the last 75 years.[/quote]
It has. It is bad to give one man so much power like we do. The presidential race is getting to be too much like a race to King for eight years instead of just leading the executive branch.
Dangerous. Very dangerous indeed. Exactly what America was trying to avoid…
I’d take 50 years of Nixon over one minute of Obama. Nixon was caught between a rock and a hard place and chose the greater of 2 evils. What he did was wrong, but no worse than the flat out bold faced lying I’ve seen from Dodd, Reid, Frank, Pelosi and Obama the last couple days.
They are covering up for themselves. Nixon was at least showing loyalty to people who risked career and prison for him as wrong as they were too.
In the end Nixon and crew got caught. Anybody who thinks no laws were broken before or since in the name of winning a campaign is dreaming.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
I’d take 50 years of Nixon over one minute of Obama. Nixon was caught between a rock and a hard place and chose the greater of 2 evils. What he did was wrong, but no worse than the flat out bold faced lying I’ve seen from Dodd, Reid, Frank, Pelosi and Obama the last couple days.
They are covering up for themselves. Nixon was at least showing loyalty to people who risked career and prison for him as wrong as they were too.
In the end Nixon and crew got caught. Anybody who thinks no laws were broken before or since in the name of winning a campaign is dreaming. [/quote]
Blah blah blah. More blind hatred, and the comparison of apples and oranges with one guy who isn’t the president yet with another who got in there and demolished American’s faith in their government.
This is how I know you guys are all fucking loons…
Irish- I’m not absolving Nixon for Watergate and cover up, just putting it into perspective with more recent political doings.
re: Vietnam War – Correct about Eisenhower, but remember, you laid the ‘expansion of war’ solely in Nixon’s lap in your post. Nixon inherited LBJ’s clusterfuck and did what he could do with that momentum.
In the end, you must credit him, as most historians do (PBS? HA!) with the final de-escalation, withdrawal, and end of Vietnam.
He de-escalated tensions with Russia, he entered into talks with China.
Hell, the guy was almost a Liberal with his domestic policies-- whioh are significant. The guy won his re-election in a Landslide at the height of new Liberalism.
His real crime? He dissed the Press. He hated the Press (for good reason) and they hated him. You’re a journalist according to your profile? C’mon, you’ve been indoctrinated to hate Nixon 