Tricky Dick

Richard Nixon & Bebe Rebozo?

A new biography by Don Fulsom, a veteran Washington reporter who covered the Nixon years, suggests the 37th U.S. President had a serious drink problem, beat his wife and — by the time he was inaugurated in 1969 — had links going back two decades to the Mafia, including with New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello, then America's most powerful mobster.

Yet the most extraordinary claim is that the homophobic Nixon may have been gay himself. If true, it would provide a fascinating insight into the motivation and behaviour of a notoriously secretive politician.

Fulsom argues that Nixon may have had an affair with his best friend and confidant, a Mafia‑connected Florida wheeler-dealer named Charles 'Bebe' Rebozo who was even more crooked than Nixon.

I remember my parents and their friends joking about how much Nixon hung with this mediocre ex-baseball player all the time, but they'd never really imagine this at the time. Was foul-mouthed, bigoted Dick Nixon the ultimate homosexual masochist in the age of fascistic repression of gay rights? It would explain so much. As President, Nixon was of course part of that repression.

The only and ultimate escape for RMN: resignation.

Inflection Point

This is the year that serious health care legislation comes before Congress and, if successful, the President, at the President's behest, which is to say doing the nation's wishes, having voted for this major platform plant, albeit without having had to agree on the form of that health care relief.

So as the meetings are happening and the existing health insurance industry is getting it's say behind closed doors, it's fair to ask why Single Payer, whether you're sold on it yet or not, is not at the table.

Ed Schultz is the only cable news guy bringing it up...yet?:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

This is the first inflection point on national health insurance since Hillary took her shot, and that before that when Richard Nixon sold us down the river, per the recording of his conversation with John Ehrlichman the day they launched the HMO business.



Will Single Player be a real part of the debate?

Frosted Dick

I heartily enjoyed Frost/Nixon on a number of levels. For one, it's set up and played like a boxing match, which plays into the second level of enjoyment, that Ron Howard has made a piece of not-very-visually-spectacular history into something that might actually reach people by making it clear and understandable, not unlike my personal favorite of his movies, Apollo 13 (ripped off for Oscars by Mel Gibson/Braveheart?). The third level is performance -- not only is Frank Langella terrific as Nixon, but Michael Sheen does a great David Frost, both reprising their performances from the play by Peter Morgan, who also did the screenplay.

But what I liked best about the movie, and something I felt slightly lacking in Oliver Stone's admirably ambitious W., is the success in capturing Richard Nixon's character. While the Stone movie missed a key element of El Presidente Bush, namely his cruel cunning (he knew how to win elections by undercutting like a preppy frat president might win over a room), Morgan, Howard and Langella caught that particularly needy ambition of Nixon's, where the very thing that made him admirable -- his intelligence pulling him up out of low circumstances of birth -- was his undoing in a way emblematic of the times in which he rose.

Let me explain.

As TV's Mad Men and James Ellroy's American Tabloid so accurately depict, there's a period in 20th Century American history where the difference between what was seen and what was hidden in society was rolling downhill to a tipping point. Even now there are differences between the public perception of how business is done -- and government and sex/romance -- and what really happens behind the scenes. I believe it was a hell of a lot worse back then, as the older, more brutal ways of society bumped up against the powerful image of The American Dream, reaching a tipping point with the lies of the Vietnam War that sent American youth into the streets and led to the first big call for transparency, climaxing with Nixon's Watergate scandal.

In the movie, Nixon asks about the price of things -- just between friends -- and looks for the hidden motives behind everyone's actions, with a predilection to ascribe actions of others to their ethnicity or religion. This fascination with how things really work, clear-eyed to him but cynical to others, was part-and-parcel of his ambition. As a bright young man who got into Harvard and Yale but couldn't attend because he lacked the financial means, Nixon always felt looked down upon by the swells, an inferiority complex that drove him to doing anything to win, hence the dirty tricks dating back to his college election days. He wouldn't really ever apologize for them because that was how the world worked -- to him President Lyndon Johnson installed the tape recorder, President John F. Kennedy got us into Vietnam, he took no real personal responsibility for his own actions extending both of those practices.

It is interesting how the revival of interest in the original interviews with the release of the feature has coincided with El President Bush's interview with Charlie Gibson, a similar attempt to rescue his legacy. While the lack of personal responsibility is similar, the intellectual curiosity level is monumental:





But the failing in Nixon's own intellectual curiosity, as so well depicted in Frost/Nixon, is that he always ended up drawing the same shrunken conclusions. That's how things really work. And I'm the smartest man in the room, so I know I'm right.

What a waste.

Smiley

Jane Smiley, author (13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, A Thousand Acres, a really good episode of Homicide), sums up my feelings towards the Clintons and especially Hillary Rodham Clinton now that she's popped the lid off her narcissistic socio-psychosis for all to see and bathe in its spew:

I cannot believe how angry this makes me. I cannot believe that after the last seven and a half years, I can even get this angry. Yes, I know she is pandering to her audience. Yes, I know she will do anything to get elected. Yes, I know that she and Bill Clinton are corrupt to the core, and that I should have never expected anything better of her. But, please, any of you angry white women who still support this craven shill, don't mention it to me. Do me the following favor -- apologize to your children for not stopping the war that HIllary voted for, the war that is going to impoverish them. Then apologize to them for the effects of global warming that are going to make their lives hell. Then apologize to them for the school shooting they may someday see, the one where the kid gets the guns out of his father's gun case, or buys at a gunshow. Apologize to them for the meaningless wars they are going to fight and pay for. Then tell them that "American values" killed their hopes and maybe killed them. And ask them if they think it's going to be worth it.

Even if she has Obama assassinated, I won't vote for her in the fall. I'll find a Third Party candidate I agree with (not Ralph Nader), a party I'd rather spend my vote on to up its ballot placement for the next election (where your Third Party vote will really count). It's not that I'd want John McCain or (should he not live to November) Mitt Huckabee to run our country, it's just that I can no longer trust her to do it.

Who wants to spend four years with her fucking up over and over again, clinging to loyalty, secrecy and victimization, and then spinning like crazy in a cynical attempt to bully the media in hopes it will scare the electorate enough to camouflage her disaster-prone shortcomings.

I'm sorry.

One Nixon in my lifetime was enough.

Hillary Nixon?

The battle is on and the Clintons are doing their best to win, even if it means plays straight out of the Karl Rove textbook -- undermine his strength. Per one of Andrew Sullivan's astute readers:

Many of your recent posts on the Obama-Clinton contest are missing the forest for the trees. They are focusing on small annoyances from Camp Clinton. The big story of the last week is that the Clintons are trying to strip Obama of his rightful advantage on the Iraq war "judgment" issue and carry out the tactic from the Rove playbook that says, "Attack your opponent's perceived strength." If that strength is merely "perceived" and not real, it's a legitimate tactic, but Rove attacks even when the perception is justified, and the Clintons are now doing the same.

Bill did this in New Hampshire when he contended that Obama was not really a consistent war opponent. Hillary put this tactic way out front on Meet the Press today. She said that Obama's campaign is premised entirely on his October 2002 speech, and she said that Obama did nothing after that speech. This is just an out and out lie; there are no shades of gray here.

An equally astute reader of Talking Points Memo has the goods on the very subtle race-baiting from the Clinton side:

Cuomo didn't utter the phrase "shuck and jive"without forethought; nor did Clinton bring up LBJ and MLK on the spur of the moment. Both are experienced street-fighting politicians who don't say that kind of thing to the press without thinking it through. Such comments are a provocation, waving a red cloak in front of the Obama people. When they respond angrily with charges of racism, suddenly they look like Jessie Jackson redux...just the kind of angry, militant black folks who scare white people (btw I think black anger and militancy are completely understandable...this is just a point about how much of the white public reads such charges of racism). Then the Clintons deny responsibility.

The whole point was to get the Obama people to respond angrily, which they did. Clintons win.

Who's Hillary Clinton using to bolster her (previously impressive) credentials with African-Americans? The first African-American billionaire estate-tax enemy and Bush Social Security destruction enabler, Robert L. Johnson, founder of BET. The inflammatory quote seems to hint again at Obama's acknowledged teenage drug use:

"I am frankly insulted," Johnson declared, "that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood -­ and I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in the book -­ when they have been involved."

At least Johnson's ex-wife and BET co-founder, who divorced him in 2002, is a confirmed Obama supporter.

On the legal front, Hillary and company just opened up with a lawsuit to try and quell caucusing in Nevada by the type of workers who's union just endorsed Obama. Republican-style voter disenfranchisement?

And is she starting to overplay the type of voice-breaking emotional moment that's credited by many with contributing to her win in New Hampshire?

Look, there's no doubt in my mind that the GOP will try to trash Obama in exactly the same ways, if not worse, if not more nefarious, should he win the Democratic nomination. It's just that should Hillary end up winning, I'd prefer that I not think of her, her husband and her entire campaign apparatus as evil.

As to the horse race, over at MyDD you have Todd Beeton making a strong case for how Hillary is starting to gain traction in the "heart" area, while Obama needs to get some momentum in winning "minds." Meanwhile, Josh Marshall points out how Obama is winning some incredible endorsements at a time when there's considerable risk to those Dem politicians now that Clinton has won New Hampshire.

But the two most interesting observations I found were from hardcore Obama supporters Andrew Sullivan and Byron Williams, backers ostensibly from opposite sides of the political spectrum.

Sullivan has the clip of Hillary on today's Meet the Press and declares that the kinder, gentler Hillary is gone and the operator is back:

I just watched the whole thing. I'd say this: the old pre-New Hampshire Clinton was back...

If you want yet another president who cannot say he or she made a mistake, who can never cop to errors, and who uses everything as a political tool against his or her opponents, you have your candidate. And she is ready on Day One. Oh, so ready.

Then there's Oakland pastor Williams, who claims it's all gutter politics to win on the part of the Clinton campaign, going so far as to write:

Maybe Nixon's 1968 playbook is the answer for the 2008 Clinton campaign. You don't have to be liked, just be tough, formidable, smart, and divisive enough to carve out a majority of the electorate to secure the nomination in the summer and 270 electoral votes in the fall.

I guess we'll get a taste of her "Southern strategy" in South Carolina soon. But I'm wondering how it'll all be seen by the Democratic electorate. Will Obama's campaign of "hope" survive the Clinton campaign of "fear?" Will he end up appearing tough enough or wily enough to beat her at this game?

Just like in the last most powerfully idealistic year in U.S. Presidential politics, 1968, will we somehow end up with a Republican President at the end of the year?

Pity Party

Several articles over this long weekend making self-pity the dominant theme of the Bush Administration's final turn. Just like with failed President Richard Nixon.

Primary amongst these tales are advance excerpts/word from Robert Draper's upcoming book on Mister Bush, for which he received unprecedented access to our supposed Chief Executive. Bush decries self-pity in a President, all the while doth protesting too much:

“Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Draper, by way of saying he sought to avoid it. “This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity.”

In the same interview, Mr. Bush seemed to indicate that he had his down moments at home, saying of his wife, Laura, “Back to the self-pity point — she reminds me that I decided to do this.”

Bush's passive self-pity is matched only by his alarming, even horrifying passiveness over the key decision in the Iraq debacle:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

Should play nicely in his "legacy."

Meanwhile Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is having a pity party of her own, participating in an unprecedented number of bios while still in office, desperate to shape the post-Admin impression of her performance (this from the former National Security Advisor who failed us by failing to prevent the forewarned 9/11 attacks on her watch):

Ms. Rice is rarely, if ever, self-reflective. But in an interview with The New York Times this month, she acknowledged, ever so obliquely, that her first four years working for the Bush administration were not her best.

“I don’t know; if that’s the assessment, you know, I’ll accept people’s assessment,” she said, her demeanor resigned. “The national security adviser is a great job, because you’re very close to the president; you’re working with him, but it’s also a very difficult job because everything is by remote control. You do not own any of the assets...”

...In fact, her friends say that she rarely questions whether she is right or wrong, instead choosing to believe in a particular truth with absolute certainty until she doesn’t believe it anymore, at which point she moves on. “Now you’ve got me trying to psycho-analyze myself,” she complained...

“...I told Steve Hadley once, I frankly prefer being coordinated than coordinating,” she said, referring to the current national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley.

Hadley again. What would these "leaders" do without him? Whine alone?

There's no end in sight to the self-pity, which will eventually morph into the traditional (and well-documented) rightwing "stabbed in the back" meme. Now that the British, with Tony Blair safely escorted from power, are doing exactly what the American public wants us to do, i.e. leaving, you've got plenty of Bush fury -- those backstabs bleed self pity every time:

Downing Street said the withdrawal from Basra Palace was part of the continuing process of handover to Iraqi forces.

But the move produced an angry reaction in Washington. Bush administration officials were furious that the operation was launched at a time when the president is begging for more time for his 'surge' strategy to turn the tide of the war.

Although the Prime Minister refuses to say when he will order UK troops home, observers believe the stage is set for a fullscale pull-out - and a serious rift in the special relationship with the U.S.

Who can blame the Brits -- even our own troops know our continued expenditures of blood and treasury in Iraq is futile at best.

But maybe the entire GOP establishment's childlike rage at the mess they've made of their Party and our country can best be summarized by Republican strategist Mary Matalin's toddler-tantrum act today on Meet the Press:

On this morning’s Meet The Press, Senior Cheney apologist and right wing sniper, Mary Matalin, threw a little hissy fit at Bob Shrum on the issue of Iraq and the upcoming presidential election. As Shrum continually smacks down her spin, Matalin becomes increasingly perturbed and at the end of the segment as Mike Murphy was getting in some right wing spin of his own, she chucks her pen across the table in front of him, noticeably drawing his attention and making a loud noise as it bounced across the table and onto the floor.

Hey, as one who finds being right a better feeling than, well, let's not go there, I'm sympathetic. It sucks to be wrong.

About everything.

Rats

I just saw Ratatouille yesterday, which is excellent and often astonishing and a lot of fun for adults, but it's funny how now I'm thinking about rats and there's Irving Lewis "Scooter" Libby and Fred Thompson.

With Libby there's been a lot of GOP mouthpiece bloviating about how Bush commuting Libby's sentence is somehow the moral equivalent of Bill Clinton as one of his final acts of office pardoning millionaire crook Marc Rich.

While sure, Clinton was wrong to do it, Rich wasn't material to a potential high crime perpetrated in conspiracy including Mister Bush and directed by President Cheney. In fact, there's ample evidence that the Libby defense team put the squeeze on Cheney and got the guaranteed fix from Cheney in return for not calling Dick to testify.

But the most delectable twist of all is this:

Guess who was Marc Rich's lawyer, instrumental in getting the pardon in front of then-President Clinton, and one of the first to call and congratulate Rich once the fix was in?

That's right. The Scoot.


Meanwhile, supposed GOP Presidential savior candidate Fred Thompson turns out to have been a rat who actually squealed, during the 1974 Watergate Hearings, which led to the last Republican President resignation. He was Minority Counsel. He leaked to Nixon and his henchmen what was going on in committee:

The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.

"Thompson was a mole for the White House," Armstrong said in an interview. "Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was."

They can't handle the truth. They never could.