voters

Nixon Resigns – Then and Today


After the flood of lying, cheating, whining, denying, abandoning of his criminally loyal co-conspirators and all the rest of the cover up deceit, we at last learned for certain that Nixon had lied when he declared, “I am not a crook.” His “opening of China” might have been a good thing in itself and it might have been useful to make him look like he was a world statesman, but he lied. He lied about everything, especially the crook part.

It took a lot to get to that camel-load collapse to resignation, the final straw of which was the Supreme Court deciding against his hording of evidence. He was begging and pleading that the subpoena for his secret tapes be quashed because of some imagined presidential right to keep the incriminating materials out of the hands of Congress. “Nope,” the Justices unanimously said. The president has no privilege when the items in question are part of a criminal cover up.

Poof! Nixon’s protection from the disclosure of his wrongdoing dissolved with just a few signatures. All of it, except for the magically missing 18 minutes of recording that his ever faithful secretary, Rose Mary Woods, erased via gymnastic contortions. Choose your own description of what key evidence disappeared through her supposed abuse of her transcription device.

But with that Supreme Court decision it just wasn’t tenable for Republicans to stand by their felon, so Sen. Barry Goldwater and a few more Republican senators paid a visit to the Oval Office. They made it clear that they would vote to convict Nixon in an impeachment trial. The headline above is what happened next. Nixon got out of Dodge just ahead of the jury.

We can imagine that those senators were imbued with fine, upstanding moral convictions. It may be that they saw their duty to the Constitution and to their constituents and uprightly insisted upon honoring that duty.

And we can also look at the pragmatics of the situation and recognize that the vast majority of Americans were sick of the demoralizing spectacle of inane presidential excuses and the plodding pace of Congress in the face of his obvious criminality. We wanted Nixon gone.

Failure of the senators to make that happen by continuing to support Nixon was just not a good re-election strategy for Republican legislators who craved re-election, so they were forced to tell Nixon the truth: they would dump him in a public vote. I suspect that the dumping was less an exercise in doing the right thing and more an exercise in self-preservation. Voters have a way of making the path to lose an election quite clear.

Here’s the connective tissue to today.

We have over 6 years of elected Republicans succumbing to a plague of self-deception. It’s a near certainty that most of them know better, but they refuse to speak out against Trump and extremism, and they do so for practical reasons.

We’ve seen that those who did speak out lost their primary races to radical candidates, so staying mum about Trump or any extremist is a fine primary election strategy for Republicans with Wimpy Spine Syndrome. After all, it’s the extremist voters who show up in Republican primaries. Moral rectitude has no place there, it seems.

It was the voters, We The People, who at last forced the stalwart Nixon supporters to do the right thing 50 years ago.

And it is the voters, We The People, who, conversely, haven’t turned out to vote in big enough numbers to defeat the crazies and to ensure that our rights, our democracy and our Constitution are protected and defended. It is our failure to vote that has kept a minority of extremists in power over all of us.

Yes, it’s pleasing to blame and castigate Trump and his wild-eyed, angry sycophants worshiping at the Shrine of Hatred, but we are the ones who put them in a place to harm us all. The remedy for this terrible disease is as plain to see as it can be.

Today is a good day to be the light.

______________________________

  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


    Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take a lot of us to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

This Continues To Be True


A while back I wrote:

It’s easy to pin that clear and present danger on Trump, but it’s critical that you see him as the embodiment of the forces of absolutism running hellishly in our society. Trump is both the repugnant inciter of rage and a tool of the brutal, angry mob. He wouldn’t be in office or be getting away with his criminality, his cruelty and the destruction of our democracy if there weren’t millions of people who want that, who think his behavior is okay, who believe the end justifies the means. It doesn’t matter to them how evil and eventually tyrannical both the end and the means prove to be.

Then this:

It is truly frightening that millions of people are demanding authoritarianism in America. They want an end to our self-rule, our long and noble experiment in democracy. Christopher Ingraham spells out the truth that has been so difficult to define in his Washington Post article, “New Research Explores Authoritarian Mind-set of Trump’s Core Supporters.” Key takeaway: We practice apathy at our collective peril.

This continues to be true.

Texas Republican lawmakers and their governor continue their battle against rampant voter fraud in the Lone Star State. These brave warriors of the ballot are at the pointy end of the spear to prevent a continuation of the cheating that threatens our elections. Indeed, the Texas Tribune reported last December that,

“As of election week, the Texas attorney general’s office had closed cases on just over 150 defendants prosecuted for election offenses since 2004, according to the attorney general’s office. That’s out of nearly 90 million ballots cast in Texas in statewide primary and general elections since 2004  .  .  .  “

Or check it out in the Houston Chronicle.

That’s 150 prosecutions, not convictions, which amounts to 0.00017% (that’s 17 one-hundred-thousandths of a percent) of total votes cast which were found to be questionable. Not fraudulent; questionable. It’s a really good thing that Texas is crafting the most draconian anti-voter, anti-voting laws in the country to stop this stampede of non-fraud. Kudos to the state Republican Ballot Warriors for their courage to battle the near-complete absence of voting fraud in Texas. I believe they should be awarded a trophy of a windmill mounted in a jail cell.

Clearly we are indebted to Mike Coudrey for his sharp-eyed reporting from Wisconsin. He told us that Wisconsin had more votes cast in the November 2020 election than the number of registered voters in that state. Clearly, voting fraud is a pestilence upon the dairy state.

Except for one thing: The actual numbers supplied by the Wisconsin Election Commission show that there are roughly half a million more registered voters in Wisconsin than the number of votes cast in November. Guess we dodged that pestilence thing and the cheese is still safe to eat.

Mike Coudrey is an activist and promoter of all things Trump. What we don’t know is how to explain his false claim. We don’t know whether he’s a terrible – as in: inept or lazy or evil – elections researcher or just another Trump liar. But, really, does it even matter?

Because we are constantly beset by false claims, many, perhaps most of which, are painfully, obviously self-serving lies. The Big Lie of a stolen election is, of course, the most dangerous, because it is being used as an in-plain-sight attempt to end our democracy.

This continues to be true.

It may have always been true that mere accusations are enough to establish a false claim as truth in the minds of we gullible humans. However, we have been beset by wild, false political accusations going back decades and they have led to absurd and dangerous actions.

The Gingrich Republicans hated Bill Clinton and fabricated salacious stories about him and Hillary, like their claim that Vince Foster’s suicide was really a murder done by Clinton and their claim that Hillary Clinton’s Whitewater land deal in Arkansas was somehow illegal. They had no evidence to suspect either accusation, so there was only one thing to do: appoint a special prosecutor, which they did.

They hired Ken Starr to investigate all things Clinton and he spent four and a half years and 52 million taxpayer dollars poking into their underwear drawers, metaphorically speaking. He pored over every aspect of the Clintons’ lives and came up with nothing. Literally, absolutely nothing.

Until Monica Lewinsky’s friend Linda Tripp went out of her way to betray Lewinski and told Starr about sex in the Oval Office. You may find such behavior repugnant – here I’m talking about the sex, not the ugly stab-in-the-back betrayal – but it isn’t illegal. Yet it was all Starr got out of those millions of dollars and all those years of feigned moral superiority. His prosecutorial genius was limited to getting Clinton to lie to a grand jury about the sex.

Even better was that years later, after a most tragic attack in Benghazi, Libya where four Americans died, the Republicans controlling Congress held hearings into, not the incident, but into then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s culpability. Did I say hearings? They held 11 hearings over 2 miserable years of muck raking and every time found no culpability.

In both cases, Ken Starr’s investigation and the Benghazi Congressional spectacles, the true victory belonged to the Republicans who did their self-righteous crowing and tsk-tsking for years, keeping phantom Democrat wrongdoing in the public eye. They were surely the true white knights of our country, saving us from the unworthy ones. You just have to ignore their dishonesty and hypocrisy. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Just like they’re saving us from that most awful hoard of fraudulent voters. The same ones they can’t find in Texas or Wisconsin or in any other state.

This continues to be true.

————————————

Did someone forward this to you? Welcome! Please subscribe and pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) Use the simple form above on the right.

Said John Maynard Keynes, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” So, add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

Thanks!

The Fine Print:

  1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings, so don’t bug me about it.
  2. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
  3. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.

JA


Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

 Scroll to top