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Police arrest kid for having a "Fu*k Bush" sign! Still not as bad as Nixon?


[Edited by - Silverfuel on 08-19-2006 10:42 PM]

How can you compare Bush to Nixon?

Nixon went to China, got us out of Vietnam, and was never questioned about his competency to be President. He was just caught doing what everyone else was doing behind the scenes.

Bush on the other hand got us into Iraq, has alienated most of our former allies, and his competency is questioned by most of this nation, if not the world, on a daily basis.

Posted by OasisBU:

How can you compare Bush to Nixon?

Nixon went to China, got us out of Vietnam, and was never questioned about his competency to be President. He was just caught doing what everyone else was doing behind the scenes.

Bush on the other hand got us into Iraq, has alienated most of our former allies, and his competency is questioned by most of this nation, if not the world, on a daily basis.

silver was referring to comments i've made that nixon was worse. nixon is pretty seared into the brains of us "children of the 60's" as the ulitmate face of domestic evil. here's an interesting depiction that brings back a lot of memories:

http://www.commondreams.org/views/050300-103.htm

Published on Wednesday, May 3, 2000 in the Boston Globe
What The Nation Learned At
Kent State In 1970
by Martin Nolan

The battle lasted only 13 seconds, yet it became the Dien Bien Phu of the American involvement in the Vietnam War. On May 4, 1970, on the sunny campus of Kent State University, Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on unarmed students. Their bullets wounded nine and killed four.

Shocking the nation and the world, Kent State would eventually turn public opinion against the war, but in the short run, the shooting aided the aims of those two self-admiring geniuses of manipulation, Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger. Within a week of the shooting, a Newsweek poll indicated that 58 percent of Americans blamed students for the deaths at Kent State. Only 11 percent blamed the National Guard, which was ordered to Kent State by Governor James A. Rhodes ''to eradicate the communist element'' on campus.


Nixon was elected in 1968, saying he had a secret plan to end the war. In truth, he had no clue.


With Kissinger, his national security adviser, Nixon widened the war because, the president said on April 30, 1970, America would otherwise become ''a pitiful, helpless giant.'' Nixon and Kissinger concealed their plans to invade Cambodia from Congress and from Secretary of State William Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. When campuses erupted in anger, Nixon blithely said four days after Kent State: ''I have not been surprised by the intensity of the protests.''


To understand the emotional intensity of the time, multiply the Elian Gonzalez uproar by 100 million. The issue of Vietnam was not symbolic but life and death. I know that my anger disturbed my professional composure, which I found surprising but not regrettable. On May 4, I was at the White House when press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler read Nixon's statement that Kent State ''should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.'' Blaming the victim was a Nixon-Kissinger trademark.


Since 1968, I had earned my place on Nixon's ''enemies list'' by asking questions, but never heatedly. I seldom hassled Ziegler, for whom I had a certain respect, repaid when he avoided trouble during Watergate. I was also skeptical of the flag-burning elements within the antiwar movement, which I covered eagerly because it was a great story. My refusal to cooperate with J. Edgar Hoover's investigations fattened my FBI file, but as a recent Army veteran, I didn't think soldiers were automatically killers.


That afternoon, I thought the Ohio Guardsmen were. ''How do you know those students weren't walking to the library?'' I bellowed at Ziegler. Startled, he began to backpedal, talking about ''further investigation.''


Months later, the FBI report stated that the students were no threat to the Guard: ''Jeff Miller's body was found 85-90 yards from the Guard. Allison Krause fell about 100 yards away. William Schroeder and Sandy Scheuer were approximately 130 yards away from the Guard when they were shot.... Sandy Scheuer, as best we can determine, was on her way to a speech therapy class. We do not know whether Schroeder participated in any way in the confrontations that day.''


Thus began what Russell Baker called ''that sour decade'' and what David Halberstam called the era of ''us against us.'' A few voices in Congress warned against what the war was doing to America. Tip O'Neill, then a midlevel member of the Rules Committee, urged the House to ''look at the situation. No nation can destroy us militarily, but what can destroy us from within is happening now.'' But the House backed Nixon heavily, buying the ''helpless giant'' argument. So did most Americans. In 1972, Nixon won reelection and 49 states.


Revisionist historians now argue that the war was somehow a swell idea. They imply that Nixon and Kissinger were thus virtuous and wise. I was there and bear witness that their legacy is one of lies and blood.


Martin F. Nolan's column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company

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interestingly, here are some thoughts from another former member of nixon's enemies list who believes bush is worse:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-halperin16jul16,0,999290.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail

Bush: Worse Than Nixon
The writer was on Richard Nixon's "enemies list," but Bush's power grab has him really worried.
By Morton H. Halperin, MORTON H. HALPERIN served in the administrations of presidents Johnson, Nixon and Clinton. He is a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress and the director of U.S. Advocacy for the Open Soci
July 16, 2006

THE BUSH administration's warrantless wiretapping program may have shocked and surprised many Americans when it was revealed in December, but to me, it provoked a case of deja vu.

The Nixon administration bugged my home phone — without a warrant — beginning in 1973, when I was on the staff of the National Security Council, and kept the wiretap on for 21 months. Why? My boss, national security advisor Henry Kissinger, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed that I might have leaked some information to the New York Times. When I left the government a few months later and went to work on Edmund Muskie's presidential campaign (and began actively working to end the war in Vietnam), the FBI continued to listen in and made periodic reports on everything it heard to President Nixon and his closest associates in the White House.

Recent reports that the Bush administration is monitoring political opponents who belong to antiwar groups also sounded familiar to me. I was, after all, No. 8 on Nixon's "enemies list" — a curious compilation of 20 people about whom the White House was unhappy because they had disagreed in some way with the administration.

The list, compiled by presidential aide Charles Colson, included union leaders, journalists, Democratic fundraisers and me, among others, and was part of a plan to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies," as presidential counsel John Dean explained it in a 1971 memo. I always suspected that I made the list because of my active opposition to the war, though no one ever said for sure (and I never understood what led Colson to write next to my name the provocative words, "a scandal would be helpful here").

As I watch the Bush administration these days, it's hard not to notice the clear similarities between then and now. Both the Nixon and Bush presidencies rely heavily on the use of national security as a pretext for the usurpation of unprecedented executive power. Now, just as in Nixon's day, a president mired in an increasingly unpopular war is taking extreme steps, including warrantless surveillance, that many people believe threaten American civil liberties and violate the Constitution. Both administrations shroud their actions in secrecy and attack the media for publishing what they learn about those activities.

But there also are important differences, and at first blush, it is hard to say which administration's policies are worse. Much of what the Nixon administration did was clearly illegal and in violation of the Constitution. Nixon and his colleagues seemed to understand that and worked hard to keep their activities secret. On the occasions when their actions became public, administration officials tried to blame others for them.

These actions were not limited to its warrantless wiretap program and the investigation of political opponents by the IRS and other agencies. They also included, among other things, the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist (to find evidence discrediting Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times) and the effort to have the CIA persuade the FBI to call off the investigation of the Watergate burglary (by asserting that it threatened national security).

Although the Nixon administration did argue (like the Bush administration) that virtually anything the president did to promote national security was lawful, it never presented an argument to justify these particular transgressions.

By contrast, as far as we know, the Bush administration has not engaged in any such inherently illegal activities. Nor has it, to our knowledge, specifically targeted its political opponents (aside from the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife, CIA agent Valerie Plame).

But even though Nixon's specific actions might have been more obviously illegal and more "corrupt" (in the sense that they were designed to advance his own career over his rivals), President Bush's claim of nearly limitless power — including the ability to engage in a range of activities that pose a fundamental threat to the constitutional order and to our civil liberties — overshadows all comparisons.

Among the many such activities are the seizure of U.S. citizens and their indefinite detention without charge or access to lawyers; warrantless wiretaps of citizens in violation of procedures mandated by Congress; and the seizing of individuals in foreign countries and their movement to third countries, where they have been subjected to torture in violation of U.S. laws and treaty obligations.

When these activities have leaked out, the president has not sought to deny them but has publicly defended them (and attacked the press for printing the information). The administration has vigorously opposed all efforts to have the courts review its actions, and when the Supreme Court has overruled the president, as it has several times now, the administration has given the court holdings the narrowest possible interpretation.

Congress has been treated with equal disdain. When the Senate voted overwhelmingly to prohibit torture and cruel and degrading treatment by all agencies, including the CIA, Vice President Dick Cheney warned lawmakers that they were overstepping their bounds and threatening national security. When Congress persisted and attached the language to a defense appropriations bill, the president signed the law with an accompanying statement declaring his right to disobey the anti-torture provisions.

The administration has repeatedly failed to inform Congress or its committees of what it was doing, or has told only a few selected members in a truncated way, preventing real oversight. Even leading Republicans, such as Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have voiced strong concerns.

During the Nixon years, the laws governing what the president could do and under what circumstances he needed to inform Congress were murky. There were no intelligence committees in Congress, and there was no Intelligence Oversight Act. There was no legislated prohibition on national security surveillance.

In response to Watergate and the related scandals of the Nixon years, however, Congress constructed a careful set of prohibitions, guidelines and requirements for congressional reporting.

Bush's systematic and defiant violation of these rules, as well as of the mandates of the Constitution and international law, pose a challenge to our constitutional order and civil liberties that, in the end, constitutes a far greater threat than the lawlessness of Richard Nixon.

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maybe it's partly a generational thing. nixon is so seared into the brains of people of a certain age as the ultimate domestic repreessor that it's hard to dislodge him. it felt like a massive shared victory of the people when "we" got him to resign.

then agian, maybe it's my unresolved father complex

Good read Marv. I really liked the second one. Shows the level of deceit in our leadership.

Asshole! Check this video out: http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/21/bush-on-911/ (Fuking ****)

President Bush was in the midst of explaining how the attacks of 9/11 inspired his “freedom agenda” and the attacks on Iraq until a reporter, Ken Herman of Cox News, interrupted to ask what Iraq had to do with 9/11. “Nothing,” Bush defiantly answered. Watch it.

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like clockwork he is!

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