Our crooks are better than their crooks

 

Northeastern Liberal Republicanism is new again?

Can wage and price controls be far behind?

How about a bigger, better EPA, renewed affirmative action, a larger welfare state, more Keynesian deficit spending, and detente with Putin, Xi, and that little squirt from North Korea? 

Young Conservatives Have Unlikely New Icon: Richard Nixon...

J. D. Vance wants you to believe white people got Reagan elected in 1984 but not Nixon in 1972, among other fantasies

In any case he's going with "we're more like Nixon than Reagan".

Alrighty then.

I think they'll be a LOT more like Nixon after November.

Watergate a Story of How the Deep State Took Down Nixon

VP Vance, Nixon Library

 

It's not a story, it's a statement of an opinion: "Watergate is a story ...".

 

Like the remark about whites, the Deep State remark is just another one-off Vance burbles more than he argues.

 

Some call this knowing how to get in the headlines, others call it dog-whistling.

 

But let's talk substance instead. 

 

The actual luminaries of the Deep State in 1974 turned out to be Richard Hofstadter's 1964 practitioner of the paranoid style himself, the father of the conservative movement, Senator Barry Goldwater, and a moderate Republican Senator, Howard Baker from Tennessee, Nixon's would-be protector.

 

Goldwater was the one who had to break it to Nixon on August 7, 1974 that once impeached by the House there were not 34 votes to acquit in the U.S. Senate, not even half that, and maybe not even his vote. He was 1974's John Thune of 2026, who doesn't have the votes for Trump's election interference bill.

 

Baker's June 1973 question, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?", asked 53 years ago tomorrow, unintentionally became the opportunity for White House Counsel John Dean to detail Nixon conversations which implicated Nixon in the cover-up of his aides' Baker-styled "rogue activity", the Watergate break-in. 

 

It didn't take long for Baker to realize Nixon also was guilty.

 

At length seven Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee joined all the Democrats in voting to impeach Nixon by July 1974.

 

Had Nixon not taped himself, however, there would have been no Smoking Gun tape from June 23, 1972, which showed that the president ordered H. R. Haldeman to use the CIA to stop the FBI's investigation into the Watergate break-in six days earlier.

 

It doesn't get more Deep State than that. 

 

The release of its transcript on August 5, 1974 convinced everybody that Nixon obstructed justice and covered it up. That's what sent Goldwater & Co. to the White House on August 7th.

 

Nixon announced his resignation the very next day and left office August 9, 1974. 

 

Nobody took down Richard Nixon except Richard Nixon. 

 

By August 1974 66% of the country had joined this so-called Deep State conspiracy against Nixon, which marked an astounding reversal from the 67% who had approved of him in January 1973. 

 

Trump's not far behind Nixon at 58.6% disapproval just one month ago.

 

We'll see what mood the country is in to get rid of him shortly. The November election will be a referendum on this. 

 

A healthy republic repents of its mistakes, and a Christian society accepts that repentance. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

J. D. Vance: Barry Goldwater was the Deep State lol

 Vance: Watergate Is A "Story Of How The Deep State Took Down Nixon"

 

The president with the largest popular vote mandate over his opponent in the post-war was Richard M. Nixon in 1972 over George McGovern

 1.61 votes for Nixon for every vote for McGovern, the real reason Democrats hated him so much.

The smallest popular mandate belonged to JFK over Nixon in 1960 at 1.0033. Democrats stole that election but Nixon let it pass for the good of the country.

There were smaller mandates, if you count Bush 2000 at 0.98 (Gore 1.01), or Trump 2016 at 0.95 (Hillary 1.04), lol, but those aren't really popular vote mandates now are they?

LBJ was second in 1964 with 1.58, because JFK had been assassinated in 1963. I don't think Jesus himself could have won it for the GOP in 1964.

Third overall was Reagan in 1984 with 1.44, followed by IKE at fourth and fifth with 1.36 and 1.24 respectively in 1956 and 1952.

If back-to-back terms is your yardstick, Reagan was tops with a combined mandate of 1.335, followed by Nixon at 1.31, IKE at 1.30, Bill Clinton at 1.17, and Obama at 1.115. Bush 43 brings up the rear at a distant 1.015.

People who think Trump is a repudiation of Bush 43 Republicanism should consider that Trump's not-back-to-back combined score is now 0.99.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Trump is a transitional figure for the GOP, and certainly not a nationally transformational one like Reagan who destroyed the bipolar world, IKE who re-moralized a victorious but demoralized nation, and Nixon who fatefully opened the door to China.

Unfortunately for the GOP, Trump is mostly just a wrecking ball who is wrecking his own HDQ, and the Democrat threat remains just decimal points away.

 

 

 

 

Happy 50th Anniversary of Watergate

 

Now endorsed by Trump for Senate from Ohio, J. D. Vance in 2016 couldn't decide if Trump was Nixon or America's Hilter

 Backs Candidate Who Said He's 'America's Hitler'... 

 

Yeah, well, at least Nixon had enough class to concede his stolen election in 1960, and Hitler committed suicide.

 

Vance touting Trump's endorsement makes them birds of a feather:

“Trump fought back and so have I,” Vance adds. “Now, I’ll take our fight to the U.S. Senate.”

 You can count on J. D. Vance in office to advance nothing but J. D. Vance.

Former Democrat Donald Trump laughably calls Mike Pence a RINO and is now the mirror image of the 2016 Hillary Clinton who wouldn't accept the election results

It's obvious to anyone who has looked at this issue carefully that Trump's stance isn't a serious position.

Leave aside the question of the powers of the VP. The fact remains that 50 state legislatures certified their votes in Election 2020, making Trump the narrow looser, just as they certified their votes in Election 2016, making him the narrow winner.

Trying to overturn any of that, no matter how justified one may think it might be, is a fool's errand.

That ship has sailed and Popeye isn't going to turn it around. The inertia is simply too great. There is nothing any legislature will "figure out" at this point.

Trump's continued whining about his loss makes him nothing if not the mirror image of Hillary. They are unserious, self-absorbed people who can't accept what's happened to them. Richard Nixon, from whom the election in 1960 was stolen, was a better person than these two ever could hope to be.

They should both just go away.

 

Bill Clinton adviser Mark Penn: Mueller investigation is the progeny of Obama administration abuses

"We thought, after the actions of J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, that we had put in place safeguards to prevent such abuse. ... [T]he Page warrant is a significant indication that government officials are quick to assume the worst about disliked rivals and to use those beliefs to overcome the guardrails on their authority through this backdoor secret FISA process."

Read the whole scathing thing here.

Conrad Black warns that judges can evolve unpredictably

I predict Gorsuch will be no different simply because of the way he was quick to grovel before Sen. Blumenthal.

Here:

Once in a life sinecure, judges often evolve unpredictably. President Gerald Ford named John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court as a conservative, and he eventually became one of the most left-wing judges in the Court’s history, making William O. Douglas seem like “Hanging Judge” Jeffreys in comparison.

Richard Nixon had a similar experience with Harry Blackmun, and John F. Kennedy named Byron White to the high court as a liberal and he proved quite conservative. Judge Robart has metamorphosed into another northwestern liberal, seizing most opportunities to utter rabble-rousing left-wing battle cries.

The McLaughlin Group is history: John McLaughlin dead at 89

Reported here.

The show was a singular venue for decades to hear weekly the "old right" point of view as understood by Patrick J. Buchanan, long-time friend and associate of John McLaughlin going back to the days of Richard M. Nixon.

Some of those ideas now find expression in the candidacy of Donald John Trump.

Rush Limbaugh compares Ted Cruz to Richard Nixon, says it's still possible for Cruz to come back

Limbaugh's as crazy as Cruz.

I knew Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon was a friend of mine. Ted Cruz is no Richard Nixon.

Heavy sarc.

You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more

Elite conservative opinion about Hillary Clinton translated into working class

From Conrad Black, here:

Clinton carries the baggage of the Obama administration and has scarcely uttered a sentence of unchallengeable truthfulness since she was first noticed in the crucifixion party that bustled Richard Nixon to his Golgotha more than 40 years ago.

Translation:

That cunt Hillary Clinton has been a liar for 40 fucking years.

Hillary and State both stonewalled the House Committee on Oversight about her private email already in December 2012

Hillary Clinton knew well in advance that what she was doing in shielding her email was wrong and likely to get her into trouble, which is why she subsequently destroyed the evidence, obstructing justice. Hillary makes Richard Nixon look like a piker in comparison to the scope of her crimes.

The New York Times reports here that she and the State Dept. deliberately did not respond to the House's inquiries about whether she used private email for government business while she was still Secretary of State in December 2012:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton was directly asked by congressional investigators in a December 2012 letter whether she had used a private email account while serving as secretary of state, according to letters obtained by The New York Times.

But Mrs. Clinton did not reply to the letter. And when the State Department answered in March 2013, nearly two months after she left office, it ignored the question and provided no response.

The query was posed to Mrs. Clinton in a Dec. 13, 2012, letter from Representative Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Mr. Issa was leading an investigation into how the Obama administration handled its officials’ use of personal email.

“Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?” Mr. Issa wrote to Mrs. Clinton. “If so, please identify the account used.”

Gold bug Ralph Benko thinks Richard Nixon had to resign over the closing of the gold window!

I like Ralph Benko. Ralph Benko often makes important arguments on behalf of the gold standard. But when he tries to force everything in the universe to be interpreted through the lens of it you know you have met an ideologue who has become unhinged from reality. Which is why Forbes is a good place for him.

His latest screed here is a mere flight of fantasy, imagining Richard Nixon was forced to resign over the closing of the gold window in 1971. Had he presented it as such, it would have entertained and illumined, even pleased. Instead, its talk of correlation only annoys, the way a chart reader plots two things on a graph and yells 'See! See! They both go up together!' Against Benko, Pat Buchanan may be forgiven for ignoring what didn't exist, just as Nixon's enemies ignored it, except in the fever camps of utopianism.

Benko makes Thomas Paine's opinions about gold a prophecy reaching 200 years into the future where gold becomes Nemesis and the end of Bretton Woods Hubris. Covering up Watergate? Well, simply an instrumental little detail:

"The House Judiciary Committee’s charges and the Connally indictment uncannily fulfill a prophecy by Tom Paine. ... Connally was acquitted on the charges of graft and perjury.  Later he underwent bankruptcy before dying in semi-disgrace.  Nixon resigned rather than undergoing impeachment, also living out his life in disgraced political exile.   The spirit of Paine’s declaration was fulfilled in both cases. Connally and Nixon engineered this violation, abandoning the good, precious-metal, money contemplated by the Constitution. Nemesis followed hubris. The closing of the 'gold window' was based, by Connolly, on deeply wrong premises.  It was sold to the public, by Nixon, on deeply false promises."

Methinks Tom Paine himself would be a little embarrassed at the almost religious regard with which some of his present day followers come to what he has left behind for us on paper.

He'd probably call them Burkeans.

Bush And Obama Piss Down The Backs Of Older Workers And Tell Them It's Raining

In the post-war period, the unemployment level for workers 55 and over first reached the 400,000 mark in 1948, and rattled up and down around that for five decades, briefly doubling during the recessions after 1980 and 1990. The weakness was already apparent however by July 1974, when the level last got effectively to 400,000, at 402,000. The superlative growth of GDP under Truman, Eisenhower and JFK/Johnson had propelled the country strongly forward but ran out of gas, quite literally, the summer after I graduated from high school. It was the immediate aftermath of the Arab oil embargo, and also the summer when Richard Nixon's presidency went tits up. The Vietnam denouement occurred the following year, Jimmy Carter got elected a year after that, and within four years interest rates and inflation rose to crippling levels. America had lost her way. The reforms during the Reagan/Bush years would take until the presidency of Bill Clinton in the 1990s to make GDP look once again like it did during the immediate post-war years. Things got so good by the late 1990s that people routinely quit their jobs, looking for greener pastures elsewhere. Finding and keeping qualified workers became very difficult for employers. But it was not to last.

It was in May 2001 that the unemployment level for America's oldest workers last saw that old normal territory, at 493,000, and it hasn't looked back since.

Since that date there has been a sustained problem of unemployment for older workers, for whom the new normal level quickly became 800,000 during the Bush administration. Now it has ramped up much higher than that under Obama, the new normal since 2008 rising five times the old normal to 2 million. The unemployment level for workers 55 and over has gone from 493,000 in 2001 to a peak of 2.233 million in 2010, an increase of nearly five fold. Today the level remains stuck just under 2 million.

Under George Bush the unemployment level for older workers never really came down, and under Obama it has hardly moved after ramping up so high. It is hard to believe that it isn't by design, since older workers tend to be the highest earners. You can save a lot of money as an employer by firing them. 2 million workers no longer making $50,000 a year comes to a savings of $100 billion annually.

Older workers no longer working aren't depreciating assets. They're expenses, written-off.

Who will be next?

Can Liberals Count? Can Liberals Remember?

George Bush won Ohio in 2004 by 118,000 votes, but Andrew Sullivan remembers it differently, here:

"At this point in 2004, one recalls, George W. Bush was about to see a near eight-point lead shrivel to a one-state nail-biter by Election Day."

The real nail-biters were in Iowa, where Bush won by just 10,000 popular votes (7 electoral college votes), and in New Mexico, where Bush won by just 6,000 popular votes (5 electoral college votes), neither of which separately or together would have given victory to Democrat John Kerry.

Be that as it may, the real point of Sullivan's story is this:

"If Obama wins, to put it bluntly, he will become the Democrats’ Reagan."

Ah, no, he'll become the Democrats' W, or maybe their George H. W. Bush. Or if he's really really lucky maybe their Richard Nixon.

Obama's economic performance in the next four years would have to improve by 40 percent in seven key categories of economic measurement in comparison with all previous presidents to achieve the fair-to-poor record achieved by Ronald Reagan, whom I have shown elsewhere scored a lousy 42, just like Jimmy Carter.

President Obama's current score after 4 years is already 2 points worse than George Bush's score of 51 after 8 years, the worst two records in the post-war period. That means Obama would have to pull out  of his hat a veritable golden age to make him look as good as Reagan, which as I've said isn't saying much. To do it Obama would have to score a 32 in the next four years just to average out to a 42.

Can you imagine an Obama second term turning in an overall performance roughly close to that of JFK/LBJ, who rank 4th best out of 10 since WWII? Because that is what it would take.

Obama would have to go from worst for unemployment to 4th (think Clinton and W), starting tomorrow. He would have to go from worst to 4th for GDP (think Reagan and Eisenhower), for the next four years. He would have to go from worst to 4th for housing values (think Harry Truman). Only George Bush has been worse for the increase in Americans' total household net worth than Obama has been. To address that Obama would have to restore at least 1960s levels of prosperity to the country, if not Clinton era levels.

Fat chance.

Despite all the ruin which one man can rain down on a country through sheer incompetence and arrogance, the American people are a resilient lot and things will improve no matter who gets elected. The economy adjusts and moves on, and in many respects there is only one way to go but up. But if it's Obama who is elected again, I don't expect him to finish much better than a 48 after 8 years overall, because the first 4 have been such a disaster.

Unemployment Falls to 8.1 Percent, 115K New Jobs

Consensus estimates had new jobs at 170K. Gee, they were off by only 55K this time.

Obama has been president for 39 full months, all of them with unemployment above 8 percent.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the anemic results for April 2012 here:

Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 115,000 in April, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 8.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment increased in professional and business services, retail trade, and health care, but declined in transportation and warehousing.

Unemployment in the US in the post-war period seems to get progressively worse only since America jettisoned strong dollar policy under Richard Nixon in 1971, as this graphic from The Wall Street Journal plainly illustrates.

And Obama wants us to go FORWARD with that, which means unemployment will only get worse over the long haul with the likes of him at the helm.

If only forward meant the past, like 1948-1968.

The Economic and Social Value of the Joint Income Tax Return Produced the Baby Boom

So says Phyliss Schlafly, who thinks Texas Gov. Rick Perry's flat tax plan flattens the traditional family and rewards kinky couples, here:

The joint income tax return for husbands and wives was landmark legislation. The Republican Congress passed it in 1948 over President Truman's veto.

As originally designed, the joint return recognized a husband and wife as two equal partners, even if the husband earned all the family's income. Each tax bracket, deduction and exemption was equal to twice that of a single person.

Subsequent tax reform bills, especially the one signed by Richard Nixon in 1969, which also introduced the hated Alternative Minimum Tax, reduced the value of a joint return to only about 1.6 persons, while increasing the tax benefit of an unmarried "head of household" to about 1.4 persons. Simple arithmetic shows that a single parent with an unmarried live-in "partner" gets more favorable tax treatment than respectable married couples struggling to support their own children.

And by the way, the postwar "baby boom" happened during the 20-year period when married couples were fairly valued in the federal income tax. That's not coincidence; incentives matter, and America's marriage rate and birth rate plummeted after the value of the joint return was reduced.

A Rival Electoral College

As we pointed out previously, the National Popular Vote Campaign is an extra-constitutional end run around the constitution's designated amendment process which seeks to replace the constitutionally prescribed electoral college with a rival process in which states agree to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote nationally.

Is this not a form of sedition, indeed a revolt, against our long-accepted "federal democracy"? Jeff Jacoby is right to style the rival proposal a "national democracy," utterly foreign to our experience.

He also rightly points out for The Boston Globe in "Massachusetts for Palin?" that the new process would have nullified the votes of Massachusetts voters by awarding their electoral college votes to Republican winners of the popular vote nationally, like Richard Nixon and George Herbert Walker Bush, when they had voted instead for liberal Democrats, like George McGovern and Michael Dukakis.

Jacoby's assessment coheres with our own:

Massachusetts is the sixth state to approve this end run around the Constitution, following Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington. It is no coincidence that all six are Democratic strongholds. The movement is fueled by lingering Democratic resentment of George W. Bush, and of the Electoral College system that made him president in 2000, even though Al Gore drew more popular votes. It is a comical irony that if the compact ever goes into effect, its only practical impact in these states will be to occasionally award their presidential electors to the Republican nominees their voters reject.

But the other side of the coin is that in 2008, just two of the eleven largest states by population went Republican, and just three of the next largest ten. The situation for them in 2008 would have been just the reverse under the National Popular Vote scheme, and Republican majorities in Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri and Arizona would have seen their electoral votes cast for Obama, not McCain.

To quote a famous ex-president: "That doesn't make any sense."