Obama To Heed Nixon’s Advice To Reagan?

January 27, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Barack Obama, Economic issues, Presidents, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

The legendary Lou Cannon:

[E]conomic recovery became the exclusive early Reagan agenda. The president was further encouraged by a detailed private memo from Richard Nixon, then too much of a pariah to appear in public with Republican office holders. Reagan valued the former president’s experience, particularly on foreign policy, but the memo instead urged him to focus on economic policy for at least the first six months. “Unless you are able to shape up our home base it will be almost impossible to conduct an effective foreign policy,” Nixon wrote. Reagan was so impressed that he quoted the opening portion of Nixon’s memo to a friend and added: “If we get the economy in shape, we’re going to be able to a lot of things. If we don’t, we’re not going to be able to do anything.”

Treviño For The Grey Lady

January 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under News media | Leave a Comment 

Instapundit cites a nomination for TNN contributor Joshua Treviño to replace Bill Kristol as conservative columnist at the New York Times:

All this is prelude to my own suggestion to replace Kristol, of course. I am of course biased because he is my friend, but I think that Joshua Treviño meets and exceeds the criteria above and would in fact be the ideal advocate for the conservative movement in the Obama era. Josh was a speechwriter for the Bush Administration, served in the Army, and had a brief stint at the Pacific Research Institute, a mid-level conservative think tank. Josh was one of the original conservative bloggers, including founding RedState.com (though no longer associated with them). He currently is running his own media consultant firm, and has had numerous media appearances on television and guest columns at National Review.

Resume aside, though, what is more important is that on the issues, Josh transcends the raw divisions of the conservative movement. He’s a contributor to Credo, the religion blog at Culture11, and is unabashedly pro-life. Josh has endorsed the Rebuild The Party 10-point plan (focused on technology innovation) and is highly active on twitter (@jstrevino). Despite his loyalty to the Republican brand, he was a conservative critic of the Bush Administration, was skeptical of Sarah Palin and Harriet Miers (to put it mildly) and (with the luxury of being a California Republican) abstained from voting for John McCain. And with respect to the Iraq war, he remains convinced it was the right thing to do, albeit poorly-executed. This places him all over the conservative v2.0 map, which is a good thing if you are looking for someone who can relate to all sides.

One Man’s Humor Is Another Man’s Humidor

January 27, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Humor, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

The former presidents traveling road show of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton pulled into New Orleans yesterday for a gig with the National Automobile Dealers Association.

Everybody knows that you’re supposed to open a speech with a joke, but who knew that Mr. Bush (41) has been taking lessons from Sarah Silverman?

Next Time You Think You’ve Had A Bad Day

January 27, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Next Time You Think You've Had A Bad Day | Leave a Comment 

Swan Song

January 27, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Bush Administration, Music | Leave a Comment 

Henry Hey is an Iowa-born, Texas and Interlochen-trained, New York-based musician and composer.  Inspired by President Bush’s farewell press conference, Mr. Hey composed a supplementary and complementary soundtrack.

Mr. Hey is a go-to session player for many jazz artists; he has toured with Rod Stewart.  You can read about his piece Watershed here; and you can listen to examples of his work here.

Next Time You Think You’ve Had A Bad Day

January 27, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Next Time You Think You've Had A Bad Day | 3 Comments 

You’ve spent another hard day at the office in Tsuruoka city.  It’s late and you want to get home and put your feet up and watch CSI, but you’re a bit peckish.  So you stop off at a local eatery where you’re greeted by a genial host/chef who takes your order.

What could go wrong?

As AP reports today:

Blowfish testicles prepared by an unauthorized chef sickened seven diners in northern Japan and three remained hospitalized Tuesday after eating the poisonous delicacy.

The owner of the restaurant in Tsuruoka city, who is also the chef, had no license to serve blowfish and was being questioned on suspicion of professional negligence, police official Yoshihito Iwase said.

Three people died and 44 others were sickened by blowfish poisoning in 2007 — most of them after catching the fish and cooking it at home — according to the Health Ministry.

Three people died and 44 others were sickened by blowfish poisoning in 2007 — most of them after catching the fish and cooking it at home — according to the Health Ministry.

Iwase said the seven men ordered sashimi and grilled blowfish testicles at the restaurant Monday night.

Shortly after, they developed limb paralysis and breathing trouble and started to lose consciousness — typical signs of blowfish poisoning — and were rushed to a hospital for treatment, Iwase said.

A 68-year-old diner remained hospitalized in critical condition with respiratory failure and two others, aged 55 and 69, were in serious condition, he said. 

Blowfish poison, called tetrodotoxin, is nearly 100 times more poisonous than potassium cyanide, according to the Ishikawa Health Service Association. It can cause death within an hour and a half after consumption.

In Sync?

January 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Islam and the West, Israel and Palestinians, Middle East | Leave a Comment 

President Obama was interviewed on Al-Arabiyah telvision yesterday to strike a more “conciliatory” and nuanced tone with the Muslim world than what was apparent during the “cowboy diplomacy” era of the Bush administration. But according to Jennifer Rubin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton doesn’t sound that remote from the consistent, steadfast, and resolute President Bush:

Straight declarative sentences. A firm line on terrorism. An unapologetic tone about the United States’ ongoing humanitarian efforts for the Palestinian people. And an unequivocal stance in support of Israel’s right of self-defense. That sounds, well, downright reasonable.

Whether she is the lone voice in the wilderness or one of many conflicting voices emanating from the new administration (which seems to have a plethora of power centers) remains to be seen. But if she is going to maintain her influence as the President’s primary voice on foreign policy she better make sure everyone else is in sync with her. And right now that might not be a bad place to be.

Headed Our Way

January 27, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Barack Obama, Media, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

There’s enough going on right now to keep everyone well occupied.  But here’s a heads up about the March issue of Vanity Fair that is barreling down the road in our direction.  The rather curious cover photo by Annie Liebovitz will undoubtedly stir up controversy — exactly as intended.

British Olympian-journalist-BBC sportscaster Brian Syed wrote a provocative piece about Muhammad Ali in The Times (London) last week, on the occasion of The Greatest’s sixty-seventh birthday — about how his suffocating embrace by the establishment has robbed him of the subversively radical contribution he made to the advancement of civil rights.  

That, of course, remains the central irony of Ali’s life. In an era when hope battled fear in the hearts and minds of Americans of every colour, Ali chose to fight on the side of fear. It was not just that he bought into a segregationist ideology that preached that whites were blue-eyed devils or that he was openly scornful of peaceful protest at a time when the entire nation had been energised by the dignity and power of the Montgomery bus boycott and the student sit-ins; more influential still was the potency of his persona in radicalising a new generation of politically self-conscious African Americans, handing the Nation of Islam an influence wholly out of proportion with its tiny membership and threatening the fragile consensus erected by King.

This wasn’t the first time Mr. Syed rehearsed that thesis.

Every nation fights for the way its heroes are remembered, but in the case of Ali it has been a knockout blow for the conservative elite, something that is rendered more poignant because Ali, quivering under the affliction of Parkinson’s disease, is in no fit state to have a say in the matter. In the eyes of a new generation, he is a Gandhi-esque caricature: non-controversial, utterly non-threatening and devoid of the contradictions that symbolised the deep divisions in postwar American consciousness.

Benedict XVI, SSPX, And The Williamson Kerfuffle

January 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Faith | Leave a Comment 

Fox News’ Vatican correspondent Father Jonathan Morris sets the record straight on the Pope’ intent when lifting the excommunication on the Society of Pope Pius X:

By lifting the censure of ex-communication of their four bishops (ordained without Vatican approval in 1988), Pope Benedict is removing a legal–”canonical”–barrier for the bishops and their followers to return eventually to the fold, if they choose.

An essential condition for “rehabilitation” completely missed by the media.

But an invitation of this kind always comes with a condition: believe and obey what the Catholic Church authoritatively teaches on faith and morals, in conformity with the Gospel.  This body of Church teaching would include the recognition of the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) that officially and famously condemned all forms of anti-Semitism.

The media missed completely this essential condition for “rehabilitation”.

The result has been a firestorm of confused public opinion and righteous indignation over what was communicated by most news sources as a papal blessing on an unrepentant anti-Semite.

If there was any doubt what the Vatican thinks about the schismatic Bishop Williamson’s claim that only a few hundred thousand Jews were killed by Hitler and that there were no gas chambers in Auschwitz, the Vatican official in charge of inter-religious dialogue, Cardinal Walter Kasper, cleared it up (why was he so rarely quoted?):

“They are unacceptable words, stupid words. To deny the Holocaust is stupid and it is a position that has nothing to do with the Catholic Church”.

And since the story continues to be told either poorly or dishonestly, in bits and pieces, with fits of fury by one not-so-expert, expert after another, the Vatican published today an editorial in its official newspaper saying Pope Benedict XVI deplores all forms of anti-Semitism and that all Roman Catholics must do the same.

In my opinion, Pope Benedict XVI knew the public relations mess he was about to make, but believed the possibility of estranged members of the Catholic Church leaving the world of schism (and the conspiracy theories that often thrive in it) and coming back to the fold, would be more important for both Catholics and Jews long-term, than the unfortunate short-term affects of predictable media misinformation.

For the record, as things stand now, and until the leaders of the schismatic Society of St. Pius X accept the Pope’s invitation to come back home–with this invitation’s monstrous condition attached–this group remains illegitimate (not sanctioned by the Catholic Church), its bishops (including Bishop Williamson) remain suspended and the services carried out in its chapels are considered illicit.

Now that’s not exactly the story you heard most places, right?

Warning: A Blog About Monetary Policy

January 27, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Economic issues, Richard Nixon, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Richard Nixon was politically crucified on the cross of the gold standard, argue Stephen Moore and John Tamny in the “American Spectator”:

With the real economy weakening due to rising inflation, Nixon’s approval ratings tanked, which allowed the relatively minor scandal of Watergate to force his resignation. Some years after he left office, Nixon told a group of friends and advisors that the policy decision he regretted most was taking America off the gold standard, and that had he not done that, he could have withstood the Watergate scandal.

If The President Does It, That Mean’s It’s Legal

January 27, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Barack Obama, Terrorism | Leave a Comment 

Mark Hosenball in “Newsweek”:

In a closed-door appearance before the Senate intelligence committee, White House counsel Gregory Craig was asked whether the president was required by law to follow executive orders. According to people familiar with his remarks, who asked for anonymity when discussing a private meeting, Craig answered that the administration did not believe he was. The implication: in a national-security crisis, Obama could deviate from his own rules. A White House official said that Craig’s remarks were being “mischaracterized.”

Some Capitol Hill sources and intel officials said Craig’s private remarks constituted a big loophole in new guidelines, one that would allow Obama to behave much like President Bush. “I don’t think there’s a really big change, sub rosa,” said one veteran undercover spy. Intel sources cautioned that Craig’s declaration does not mean Obama plans to issue secret orders that would contradict his public anti-torture stance. (During his confirmation hearing, Dennis Blair, Obama’s new intel czar, said emphatically that there would be no torture “on my watch.”) What it probably means in practice, the spy said, is that Obama could, in a dire emergency, issue a secret presidential “finding” instructing the CIA or another agency to overstep boundaries of public policy.

It’s A Mad Mad Mad Etc. World

January 27, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Art, Humor, Obama administration | 12 Comments 

 

“Congratulations President Obama,” the website proclaims.  ”The fun is over.”

Mad’s February edition —the magazine’s 498th issue— leads with a cover by Mark Fredrickson that is full of amusing, and telling, details.  

Click here to see some excerpts from the issue.  

There’s an exposure of what participants and observers were really thinking during President Obama’s swearing-in (e.g., Chief Justice Roberts: “I can’t wait to start crushing this liberal bastard’s progressive agenda with a 5-4 Supreme Court decision,”; Oprah Winfrey: “Look at him — the second most powerful African-American in the country.).  

And there’s a purported diary of the new President’s first hundred minutes in office, with illustrations by Drew Friedman, who was responsible for The New Yorker’s Inauguration Commemorative cover.  Among the “diary” entries: “03: Remove stupid flag pin from lapel…:07: Schedule weekly brunch with Bill Ayers…:08: Submit Keith Olbermann’s name for Presidential Medal of Freedom…:14-16: Watch trailer for new Star Trek movie….:35: Decline Barney Frank’s invitation to Sex and the City marathon….:48: Screw with Secret Service agents by shouting out, “Hey, it’s almost prayer time, which way is Mecca?!”)  

If you’re surprised to learn that Mad is still publishing, you will be less surprised to learn that, starting with the 500th issue in April, it will change from monthly to quarterly publication.  Editor John Ficarra explined that  “The feedback we’ve gotten from readers is that only every third issue of Mad is funny. So we decided to just publish those.”   It will appear less frequently but each issue will be bumped up from the current 48 to 56 pages.

Featured Articles — January 27, 2009

January 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles | Leave a Comment 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

Economic Cures Are Like Booze for an Alcoholic By Caroline Baum
Someone returning to Earth from a yearlong sojourn in outer space could be excused for feeling disoriented.
After all, when said space traveler departed our fair planet, the U.S. economy was buckling under the weight of the burst housing bubble.

Animal Spirits Depend on Trust By Robert J. Shiller
President Obama is urging Congress to pass an $825 billion stimulus package as soon as possible. But even that may not be enough to stabilize the economy, since it fails to take into account the downward spiral of animal spirits that is underway and may continue to worsen.

Bi-Curious By John Dickerson
It has always been hard to define bipartisanship in Washington. Is bipartisan legislation simply a bill that wins a certain number of votes from the minority party? Is a bipartisan politician simply one who disagrees with his or her own party? And in Barack Obama’s Washington, the term may be even harder to define. He delivered an inaugural address sharply critical of his predecessor, and then as soon as he was done, he turned around and hugged him.

Obama’s Wounded Treasury Man By Lawrence Kudlow
Over a third of the Senate voted against Tim Geithner’s confirmation as Treasury secretary, though he did pass the test by 60 to 34 early Monday evening. That is the closest post-WWII margin for a Treasury secretary.

F.D.R’s Example Offers Lessons for Obama By Steve Lohr
The economic morass that confronted Franklin D. Roosevelt 76 years ago was undeniably deeper and more ominous than the trouble President Obama is facing.

Power, politics, gossip on daily call By John Harris
The conversations don’t begin with hello. They don’t end with goodbye. Most often they pick up with a low, drawling voice uttering something between a sentence and a grunt. “Wahzgoanawn?”

As Iraqi Elections Loom, al-Sadr’s Political Clout Fades By Mark Kukis
The once fearsome Muqtada al-Sadr has been very quiet lately in Iraq. Political analyst Amir Hassan Fayht says the reason the onetime Iraqi militant shows less and less political muscle is simple. “He gave it up,” says Fayht, the dean of the college of political science at Baghdad University. “Just like that.”

Bolivia’s Revolutionary New Charter By Jean Friedman-Rudovsky
If President Barack Obama were to decide that “change” includes rewriting the United States constitution, he would probably find himself on the curb of Pennsylvania Avenue quicker than you can say Bill of Rights. But for left-wing Latin American Presidents, redoing national charters has become a norm.

The CIA Vs. the Mullahs By Reuel Marc Gerecht
How good is American intelligence on Iran? With the clerical regime intimately involved in Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iraq, with the mullahs quite probably on the verge of enriching sufficient uranium to make a bomb, and President Obama promising to use more diplomacy and sanctions to stop them, it’s a fairly pressing question.

The End Of Bi-Partisanship

January 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Congress, Economic issues | Leave a Comment 

Despite the dignity of Inauguration Day, did it ever go away? Nevertheless it’s astonishing that 75 % of Republican Senators voted against confirming Treasuty Secretary nominee Tim Geithner, even the flambuoyantly bi-partisan John S. McCain.

Closing GITMO And The Case Of Said Ali al-Shihri

January 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Terrorism | 1 Comment 

Bret Stephens offers a fitting anecdote for closing down the infamous detention facility:

According to an unclassified June 2007 document from Guantanamo’s Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants, Mr. Shihri “was identified as an al Qaeda facilitator in Mashad, Iran, for youth traveling to Afghanistan”; “wanted two individuals to assassinate a writer based on a fatwa by Sheikh Hamud bin Uqla” (a favorite of Osama bin Laden); and “trained in urban warfare at the Libyan Camp north of Kabul, Afghanistan.”

Charming résumé. But what’s remarkable here is that the dark lords of Gitmo justice nonetheless found sufficient exculpatory evidence to release Mr. Shihri from detention. “The detainee stated that he was just a Muslim not a terrorist”; that he “denied any involvement or knowledge of assistance provided to jihadists traveling to Pakistan or Afghanistan”; and that, upon his release, “he would attempt to work at his family’s furniture store, if it is still in business” in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Maybe the store had gone out of business. Last week, Mr. Shihri, who had undergone a “rehabilitation course” courtesy of the Saudi government, resurfaced as al Qaeda’s deputy chief in Yemen, alongside an accomplice named Mohamed Atiq Awayd al-Harbi, a colleague of Mr. Shihri’s from Guantanamo who was released the same day.

Mr. Shihri’s role with al Qaeda hasn’t been merely ceremonial. According to reports, he was involved in a September attempt to bomb the U.S. Embassy in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a. No Americans were killed, but 16 others died in the attack. It’s a pity we don’t know their names.

Yesterday, Reuters reported that the embassy had again “received a threat of a possible attack.” Some such attack is probably bound to succeed in killing Americans one day, perhaps in a big way, and possibly with the fingerprints of one of the 60-odd Gitmo graduates the U.S. believes have “returned to the fight.”

Preferring A Stronger Man To Civil War

January 26, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Iraq War | Leave a Comment 

Max Boot writes that the MSM is concerned that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is garnering to much power in his nascent state. Boot contends that he prefers a democracy, ally, and strong leader to a country on the brink of civil war:

It’s pretty clear that stronger central government results in better security. Of course, Iraqi politicos, still understandably traumatized by the Saddam Hussein years, cannot help thinking that their government can become so strong as to repress them. That is a legitimate concern in the future but for now, with 140,000 U.S. troops still in the country, there is a powerful outside guarantee that no faction in Iraqi politics can override the constitution and oppress everyone else. That, by the way, is another argument for keeping a substantial U.S. force presence in the country for years to come. In the meantime, I’d rather have the Iraqi political class fretting that their prime minister is too strong rather than too weak.

Nixon/Vietnam, Bush/Iraq, Obama/Afghanistan?

January 26, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Afghanistan, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Iraq War, Richard Nixon, Vietnam | 1 Comment 

A site called Democrats.com, while still displaying an “impeach Bush and Cheney” feature, already sounds as though it could be persuaded under certain circumstances to update the names. Writes David Lindorff:

Based upon the ludicrous premise that Afghanistan is the biggest military threat facing the US today, our new president, Barack Obama,is preparing to send another 30,000 US troops to that country,effectively doubling the number of American soldiers already there.Inevitably, this will mean more killing and more anger towards Americaamong the local population.

Al Qaeda members, meanwhile, have largely moved away from the battle to Pakistan, a much larger nation to the east of Afghanistan, whichraises the question: What the hell are we trying to do in Afghanistan?

Let’s get it straight. No Afghan has ever, to my knowledge, harmed the United States. I’m not sure most Afghanis, if they could scrape together the money to go to the US, would even know where this country is. (Okay, most Americans probably couldn’t tell you where Afghanistan is, either, but at least we have libraries, and computers, which the geographically challenged can turn to in order to locate the place.That’s not true for the people of Afghanistan, who have neither.)

For eight years, America has been attacking and destroying a country that is about as dangerous a threat to America as is Mali, or Haiti, or the Comoros Islands. If Obama follows through and doubles the number of troops fighting over there, it will just make this whole policy twice as stupid.

The Afghanistan commitment must be watched carefully. The U.S. military is right to say that more resources are needed to accomplish the mission it has been given by civilian commanders. The question then becomes what Obama’s mission will be. Is he acting on his campaign rhetoric, when he accused Sen. McCain of being unwilling to follow Osama bin Laden to his cave? Does he want to keep a hawkish anchor to rightward to cover his big-government moves at home? Is he listening too much to the military’s demands for more resources and thus risking letting the tactics drive the strategy?

Lindorff obviously minimizes the remaining dangers to U.S. security interests lurking in those forbidding mountains. Wherever a potent al-Qaeda and its enablers are, there must we be (though the danger of destablizing Pakistan also looms, yet another “another Vietnam” for Obama). But for the sake of the tens of thousands of young Americans preparing to redeploy as well as Afghanistan’s people, this is a time for an inexperienced leader to remember how the same dangerous land broke the mighty British and Soviets.

Next Time You Think You’ve Had A Bad Day

January 26, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Next Time You Think You've Had A Bad Day | Leave a Comment 

A thirty-seven year old Akron man, who is not a frequenter of strip clubs, decided to make an exception to this rule in order to entertain some friends from out of town.

Tiara, one of the XTC club’s artistes, began her show by running toward the pole at center stage, grabbing it with one outstretched arm, and using the momentum of the run to execute an exuberant circle.  Sounds pretty straightforward,  but that’s when the trouble began.  

As the victim described it, ”She ran, at a nice speed, grabbed the pole and flung her whole body around, all her weight flung that in a circle around the pole and her boot flew off and it hit me in my nose.”

In fact, it broke a bone in his nose and he spent the next several minutes writhing and moaning until the paramedics pulled up.  He can still only breathe out of one nostril and is looking at surgery to restore his schnoz to its pre-performance perfection.

So he has gone to the Summit County Court of Common Pleas to sue the XTC management for $25,000 damages for allowing performers to wear improper attire and allowing them to execute routines that made the stage a hazardous place.

As he puts it, ”The bills, the pain, my nose that ain’t gonna go away unless I have surgery and I don’t like surgery so I don’t know what I’m gonna do about that.”

The Seeds Of Regret

January 26, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Frost/Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Jonathan Aitken is a former member of the British Parliament and author of Nixon: A Life (sadly and I hope temporarily out of print, though you can grab a copy here). A frequent visitor to San Clemente after President Nixon’s resignation, including during his honeymoon with his first wife, he had a fascinating insider’s account of the Nixon-Frost interviews in Saturday’s London Daily Mail.

Aitken begins with a glimpse of the honeymoon visit:

[A]n awkwardly but determinedly romantic Richard Nixon presented us with a formal corsage of flowers, made delicate inquiries on how we were sleeping, and took immense pains in putting on a festive dinner party which he called ‘La Casa Pacifica’s welcome to the honeymooners from three happily married couples’. They turned out to be ex-President Nixon and his wife; David and Julie Eisenhower (President Ike’s grandson and Nixon’s daughter); and Congressman and Mrs Jimmy Roosevelt (FDR’s son and daughter-in-law).

Having recently interviewing RN’s then-chief of staff (played in “Frost/Nixon” by Kevin Bacon), Aitken describes what really happened after the former President successfully filibustered David Frost in their first videotaped exchanges:

As Colonel Jack Brennan tells it: ‘Frost sent his aide, John Birt [later boss of the BBC], to see me. He said: “This has been terrible. We need more time.”‘My immediate reaction was “Tough. We’ve kept our side of the deal: the taping is over.”

‘But later I talked it over with my staff. We all agreed that Nixon should voluntarily go further and express some regret.

‘So I went to see the boss and I said to him: “Listen, if this ends the way it has, the world is going to say, there goes the same old Nixon.”‘

At first, Nixon was curtly dismissive of this criticism. But Brennan and his team persisted. Their argument was that some expression of regret for Watergate needed to be put on record….

‘From that moment onwards,’ recalled Brennan, ‘I knew that Nixon was spending all his time preparing himself for how to say something that would not be a confession or an expression of guilt, yet would say sorry for what had happened.’ Throughout his life, Richard Nixon had difficulty giving apologies. This one was the hardest of all.

We’re All Nixonians Now

January 26, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Economic issues, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

Bruce Bartlett is a former Reagan administration official who wrote in 2002 that President Nixon had “betrayed” conservative principles by acquiescing in big-government policies. Bartlett now argues that all conservatives will have to live with big government and higher taxes. He wants them to focus on promoting economic growth and keeping tax increases as moderate as possible:

I think conservatives would better spend their diminished political capital figuring out how to finance the welfare state at the least cost to the economy and individual liberty, rather than fighting a losing battle to slash popular spending programs. But this will require them to accept the necessity of higher revenues.

It is simply unrealistic to think that tax cuts will continue to be a viable political strategy when the budget deficit exceeds $1 trillion, as it will this year. Nor is it realistic to think that taxes can be kept at 19 percent of GDP when spending is projected to grow by about 50 percent of GDP over the next generation, according to both the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office. And that’s without any new spending programs being enacted.

***
I had an enjoyable exchange of e-mails with Mr. Bartlett in response to this post. I don’t have his permission to reproduce his messages, so I won’t. But in his first one, he said he wouldn’t be surprised if I accused him of flip-flopping when it came to the need to hew to conservative principles no matter what. My reply:

I wouldn’t say a flip-flop at all. Just an irony. You make clear that we are in unanticipated times and that conservatives need a new script to match. It does seem that for nearly a century they have been fighting the same improvisational and ultimately losing rear guard action against the growth of government. Depression, World War II, Cold War, war on poverty, civil rights, Vietnam, 1980s recession, Social Security crisis, war on terrorism, war on global meltdown — in response to every crisis, government has grown. I believe it was you who demonstrated somewhere that by the end of his term Ronald Reagan himself had earned the title of biggest tax increaser ever.

I hear you saying that there’s a point at which the market will cease having an incentive to recover and grow. Perhaps one sign would be the feds telling Detroit what kinds of cars to build in the teeth of a recession. (Oops! Already happened.)

As for President Nixon, whatever his pragmatic disposition, I don’t think conservative critics have appreciated how hard it was to stay in Vietnam (which he’d determined was a vital national interest) with a Democrat-dominated Congress. He couldn’t have been more conservative if he’d wanted to (which the tapes and memos show he did, at least sometimes). In California even the governor was tacking to the center. It took the 1980s for Reagan to be Reagan. In the early 1970s, I’ll bet he would’ve been Nixon.

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