Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
February 21,
2005
Michael Neumann
Startegies
in Palestine: a Shrinking Pie in the Sky
February 19
/ 20, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Back
to Salem: Paul Shanley and the Return of "Recovered Memory"
Kathleen Christison
Struggling
for Justice in Palestine
Ted Honderich
On Being Persona Non Grata
Gary Leupp
Self-Hating Gays: Welcome to the White House & Welcome to
Commit Suicide
Don Santina
Reparations for the Blues
Jennifer Roesch
John Negroponte: Dirty Warrior
Scott Richard
Lyons
Ward
Churchill and the Identity Police
Chris Clarke
Ward Churchill and Liberal Outrage
George Beres
Censorship in the Land of Wayne Morse: Gagging W. Churchill in
Oregon
Harry Browne
The Belfast Heist: the Plot Unravels
Manuel García,
Jr.
Who Killed Rafik Hariri?
Mark Scaramella
Lessons from the Hidden Afghan War
Michael Donnelly
Whatever Happened to John Edwards?
John Pilger
First, They Attack the Past
Norman Madarasz
Death Wish for Reform in Brazil?
Surendra Devkota
The Monarchy in Nepal
Deborah Rich
How Anti-GMO Ballot Measures May Miss the Mark
Fred Gardner
When Dr. Tod Met Merle Haggard
CounterPunch
News Service
About King Mswati: Political Developments in Swaziland
Richard Oxman
CounterPunching Arthur Miller
Poets' Basement
Albert, Giebel, Tripp, Engel and Orkin
February 18,
2005
Ben Moxham
In
East Timor, the Nightmare Continues
Dave Lindorff
The
Scum Also Rises: the Bloody Career of John Negroponte
Larry Birns
Negroponte: a Resume of Death Squads, Deceptions and Bribery
Gregory Elich
N, Korea's Phantom Nukes and the US's Subversion of Diplomacy
Samuel Logan / John Meyers
The Future of Colombia's Paramilitary Death Squads
Nicole Colson
Shock and Awe on Civil Liberties: From Lynne Stewart to Ward
Churchill
Suzan Mazur
Whose National Security Are We Talking About?
Mickey Z.
"One
Man Has Stopped Killing"
February 17,
2005
Joshua Frank
Hogtying
of the Deaniacs
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
Willing Sychophants: the Conservative Media
Robert Fisk
Under
the Shadow of Death in Lebanon
Christopher
Brauchli
Where
Time Stands Still: Kinsey and Darwin in Cobb County, GA
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Military
Recruitment TV: Why Send Them to College, When Your Kid Can be
Cannon Fodder?
Alison Weir
Russia, Israel and Media Omissions
Ahrar Ahmad
A Review of Shahid Alam's "Is There an Islamic Problem?"
Saul Landau
An
Interview with Cuban VP Ricardo Alarcon: "The US Tramples
the Laws It Wrote"
Website of the Day
Petition to Support Ward Churchill
February 16,
2005
Robert Fisk
Lebanon:
a Battlefield for the Wars of Others
Kevin Zeese
Creating a Real Ownership Society: Share the Wealth; Protect
Retirement
Gary Leupp
Meanwhile, in Nepal...
Ron Jacobs
Why the Iranian Opposition Should Not Trust the Bush Administration
Jessica Leight
Oil-Flush Chavez Begins to Strut His Stuff
Greg Moses
Houston, You've Got a Problem: Documenting Voting Irregularities
in Texas
Mark Engler
The Last Porto Alegre
Jack McCarthy
Where's the Outrage About Pat? Buchanan Does a Churchill
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy Dangerously Slanted Toward Israel
Website of the Day
The
World is Melting: a Photo Survey by Gary Braasch
February 15,
2005
CounterPunch
News Service
Dean
a "Safe" Moderate, Says NYT Citing CounterPunch
Robert Fisk
The
Killing of Mr. Lebanon
Uri Avnery
"Sharm-al-Sheikh,
We Have Come Back Again"
Stan Cox
Fighting Big Pharma in Little Digwal
Mickey Z.
Radio
Active North of the Border: an Interview with Chris Cook
Dave Zirin
Bashing Bush: Jose Canseco Comes Clean
Nadia Martinez
Ending
World Poverty? Opening at the World Bank, Apply Now
Lila Rajiva
"Little Eichmanns" and the 'Harijan': the Danger of
Magical Thinking in Politics
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
American Job Sell Out
February 14,
2005
Robert Jensen
Ward
Churchill: Right to Speak Out; Right About 9/11
Brian Cloughley
Kuwait's Freedom, Bush-style
Patrick Cockburn
Outcome
of the Iraqi Elections: Shortages, Corruption, Guerrilla War
Gary Leupp
Post-election Iraq: What Next?
Michael Donnelly
Sacred Nature: Just Another Commodity?
Dave Lindorff
When Bush Came to My Neighborhood
Elaine Cassel
The
Lynne Stewart Verdict
February 12
/ 13, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill's Genes
Saul Landau
Alarcon
Speaks: an Interview with the Vice President of Cuba
Paul Craig
Roberts
Nothing
to Fear But Bush Himself
Patrick Cockburn
Two Years After the Fall of Saddam, the Resistance Controls All
Major Roads into Baghdad
John Feffer
Bush
v. N. Korea: Round Two
Mickey Z.
Right to Remain Silent; Duty to Speak
Kurt Nimmo
Viva la Cucaracha!
Fred Gardner
Waiting for Raich
Dave Zirin
Fighting the New Republic(ans)
John Chuckman
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Ben Tripp
A Leftist on the Bush Payroll
Carol Norris
"Buddy, Can You Spare a Dwarf?"
Robert Fisk
No Middle East Peace Without Justice
Frank / Chowkwanyun
Muzzled Activist in an Age of Terror: the Case of Sherman Austin
Mike Whitney
Condi's Euro Tour
Deborah Frisch
A Psychologist's Defense of Ward Churchill
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Reading Khomeini in Colorado
Christine TenBarge
What's So Special About Ward?
Ron Jacobs
Curtis Mayfield's Train to Jordan
Dr. Susan Block
Chemistry of Love: a Valentine's Greeting
Poets' Basement
Louise, Smith-Ferri, Ford and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Free Sherman
February 11,
20055
Manuel Garcia,
Jr
The
Eight Percent War
Kurt Nimmo
Ann
Coulter's Racism: Where's Geronimo When You Really Need
Him?
Dave Lindorff
Guckert
or Gannon? The Perfect Plant; He Fit Right In
Larry Birns
War is Peace; Slavery is Freedom: Democracy According to Elliott
Abrams
Bill Quigley
Twenty Questions: a Social Justice Quiz
Tom Barry
Bush's State of Delusion
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Lynne
Stewart's Conviction Hurts Us All
February 10,
2005
Dave Lindorff
What
Academic Freedom?
Christopher Brauchli
The Love of Slaughter: From Rwanda to Iraq
Patrick Cockburn
In Baghdad, It's Easy to Get Killed
Nicole Colson
Have the Democrats Surrendered on Abortion Rights?
Suzan Mazur
More
on the Assassination of Lumumba from Mr. Garsin of Kinshasha
Michael Donnelly
Salvaging an Opposition
Mike Stark
Driving Ossie Davis: "Give Them a Little Truth, a Little
Hope"
Greg Moses
Taking
Jesus Back from the Hijackers
Website of
the Day
The Missionary Positions
February 9,
2005
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Duck
and Cover Redux: Bunker Busters and City Levellers
Mickey Z.
What Ward Churchill Didn't Say
John Ross
Hecho
en Mexico: the Iraqi Election
Tom Barry
Ambassador of Lies: Elliott Abrams, the Neocon's Neocon
Conn Hallinan
The
Coup in Nepal: Nursing the Pinion
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Vision for Iraq: Cricket is Fine, But Chess is "Absolutely
Forbidden"
Steen Sohn
Danish PM Says It's OK for Israel to Violate UN Resolutions
Tim Wise
Reflections on Empire and Uppity Indians
Website of
the Day
Support Antiwar.com
February 8,
2005
Patrick Cockburn
Shia/Kurd
Coalition to Dominate New Iraqi Govt.: "It's an Electoral
Pact, Not a Party"
Brian Cloughley
Out
of the Mouths of Generals: "It's Fun to Shoot Some People"
Steve Breyman
Against the Selfishness of the "Ownership Society"
Harry Browne
"Don't
Get on that Plane!": Soldiers Seek Asylum in Ireland
Doug Giebel
"We Love Free Speech in America": the People, the President
and Ward Churchill
Nate Collins
The Censorship of Ward Churchill and Dancehall Reggae: It's the
Same Beast
Dave Lindorff
It's Time for a Labor-Oriented Newspaper
David Smith-Ferri
Sanctions and the Health Crisis in Iraq
February 7,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
War on Jobs
Carolyn Baker
The New McCarthyism on Campus: Churchill and the Attack on Higher
Ed
Joshua Frank
Marc Cooper's Hit List: First Mumia; Now Ward Churchill
Mickey Z.
Warning: More Hate Speech from W. Churchill
Patrick Cockburn
The
Kidnapping Gangs of Iraq
Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman: Scribe for New Age Imperialism
Stacie Jonas
Pinochet: Fit to be Tried
Dave Zirin
A Miserable Super Sunday: Clinton, Bush and the FBI
Tariq Ali
Imperial
Delusions
February 5
/ 6, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill and the Mad Dogs
Kurt Nimmo
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day
Joshua Frank
Liberals Trash Ward Churchill
P. Sainath
Mumbai's Man-Made Tsunami
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Triumph; Allawi's Bust
Laura Carlsen
Bush, Rice and Latin America
Dave Lindorff
How the NYT Killed the Bush Bulge Story
Pamela Olson
West Bank Story
Behzad Yaghmaian
The Future of Sudanese Refugees in the West
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
A Threatened UN in King George's Court
Roger Burbach
World Social Forum: a Tale of Two Presidents
Robert Fisk
History by Laptop
David Swanson
James Forman and the Liberal-Labor Syndrome
Justin E.H. Smith
Gay Marriage: a Report from Canada
Cacie Hart
The "State" of the Union: More War and a Ban on Love
Ron Jacobs
Chairman Bob Avakian: a Revolutionary Life
Mickey Z.
Viewing America from the Outside
Ben Tripp
Republican Heroes: a New Breed of Good Guy
Ben Sonnenberg
France at the End of the Devil's Decade: Renoir's Rules of the
Game
Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Davies, Collins, & Albert
Website of
the Weekend
John Trudell: How to Earn a 17,000 Page FBI File
February 4,
2005
Brian Cloughley
The
Army Symphonist: "Sometimes the Only Way to Change the Behavior
of Someone Like That is to Kill Them"
Bill Christison
Election
Parallels: Vietnam, 1967; Iraq, 2005
Elaine Cassel
Did Zoloft Make Him Do It?
Jacob Levich
Chomsky and the Draft
Kanak Mani Dixit
Return of the Royalists in Nepal
Ron Jacobs
The
Downward Spiral in Iraq
February 3,
2005
Ward Churchill
On
the Injustice of Getting Smeared: a Campaign of Fabrications
and Gross Distortions
Sharon Smith
Resisting
Soldiers Need Our Support
Mickey Z.
Leslie
Gelb Asks Iraq: Who's Your Daddy?
Mike Whitney
President of Alienation: a Desperate State of the Union
Jenna Orkin
9/11 the Sequel: the Toxic State of Lower Manhattan
Saul Landau
Elections Won't Prevent Civil War in Iraq
Yitzhak Laor
Strange is the Silence
Dave Lindorff
The
Assault on Social Security: a New Campaign of Lies
February 2,
2005
David Domke
/ Kevin Coe
Bush's
Brand of Christianity
Noam Chomsky
Iraq
After the Elections
M. Shahid Alam
O'Reilly's
Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me
in Its Crosshairs
Richard Oxman
Ringing in 1984 with Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen
Joshua Frank
The Suckering of Howard Dean
Dave Lindorff
A History Lesson from the NYT
Nina Hartley
Feminists for Porn
Website of the Day
War is a Racket
February 1,
2005
Joshua L. Dratel
The
Torture Memos
Patrick Cockburn
New Doubts About Allawi
Robert Fisk
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"
Uri Avnery
The Stalemate
Col. Dan Smith
"W" Stands for Withdrawal
Alison Weir
Making America as "Secure" as Israel
Alan Farago
Heaven and Hell in the Everglades
Ray Hanania
Low Voter Turnout of Iraqi Expatriates: Less Than 10% of Qualified
Voters
Paul Craig
Roberts
American
Police State
Website of the Day
Statisticians Refute Official Rationale for Exit Poll Errors
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
February 21, 2005
HST Says Farewell
"He
Was a Crook"
By
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Editor's Note: How Thompson said goodbye to Richard
Nixon is as good a way to remember the high priest of gonzo as
any. AC/JSC
MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS
DESK
DATE: MAY 1, 1994
FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON
SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD
NIXON:
NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN
AMERICAN MONSTER....HE WAS A LIAR ND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD
HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA. ...BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.
"And he cried mightily
with a strong voice, saying Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen,
and is becoming the habitation of devils, and the hold of every
foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."--REVELATION
18:2
Richard Nixon is gone now and I am poorer
for it. He was the real thing--a political monster straight out
of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand
and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends
and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the
unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison,
was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in
Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf
partners that I know Iwill go to hell, because I pardoned Richard
Nixon."
I have had my own bloody relationship
with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing
me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard,
andI am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability
to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense
of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hatedNixon all their
lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon,
and this hatred has brought us together.
Nixon laughed when I told him
this. "Don't worry," he said. "I, too, am a family
man, and we feel the same way about you."
It was Richard Nixon who got
me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was
a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive--and
he was, all theway to the end--we could always be sure of finding
the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere
else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instinctsof a
badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back
and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures
them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it
is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is
a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat
of the enemy and seizing it by thehead with all four claws.
That was Nixon's style--and
if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers
don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.
Nixon was a navy man, and he
should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing
people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and
some of them wanted a full naval burial.
These come in at least two
styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed
both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead  president's
body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and
dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the
coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse
could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.
The family opted for cremation
until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications
of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the
man who was, after all the President of the United States. Awkward
questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin.
People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental
charts. Long court battles would be inevitable--some with liberal
cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others
with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death
benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure
to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked
his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese
interests on the Central Asian Mainland.
It would also play into the
hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me
who believe these things already.
If the right people had been
in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched
into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean
just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering
dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants
to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral
was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should
have been burned in a trash bin.
These are harsh words for a
man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend
George McGovern--but I have written worse things about Nixon,
many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly
long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange
every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Let there be no mistake in
the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil
in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality
of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics
or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except
maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember
him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
It is fitting that Richard
Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal
series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace
of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many
children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned
burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly
illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard,"
said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."
Many were incensed about the
howitzers--but they knew there was nothing they could do about
it--not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away
and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last
war, and he won.
The funeral was a dreary affair,
finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians
and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile
and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker,
but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates:
Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who
formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when
he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No.
3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving
eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.
Dole's stock went up like a
rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson,
speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator
and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California
in November.
The historians were strongly
represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary
of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to
grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly
self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his
mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments--most
of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California
as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy,
genius, Stalin, H.P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time,
including himself and Richard Nixon.
Kissinger was only one of the
many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the
sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History
will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it
himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already
ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like
Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists
have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming
that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written,
no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He
will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from
Duke University.
It was all gibberish, of course.
Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was
more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap
crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to
death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of
World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When
students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing,
he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the
National Guard.
Some people will say that words
like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism--which
is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots
of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither
into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on
paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed
so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able
to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to
get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition
was often painful.
Nixon's meteoric rise from
the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years
would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier.
He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech
in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about
it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When
Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960
presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed
mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel
and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard
those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming
TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they
voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon
lost an election.
When he arrived in the White
House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the
rise--a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American
dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be
President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like
a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.
Nixon had no friends except
George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him.)
It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to
Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone.
He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's
ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.
Hoover was Nixon's right flank,
and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson
got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's
flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.
For Nixon, the loss of Hoover
led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring
a New Director--who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named
L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first
time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House
Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over,
instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless,
vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our
eyes on TV.
That is Watergate, in a nut,
for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real
story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery.
They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear
his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says--and he is,
after all, the President of the United States.
Nixon liked to remind people
of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was
not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told
a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't
be illegal."
Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew
was that dumb. he was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the
morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president
for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed
taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.
Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't
argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where
he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed
him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange
for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that
he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get
a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was
an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but
he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like
salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew
he was scum, but it didn't bother him.
Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco
of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They
were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man
out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted
most. Together they defined his Presidency.
It would be easy to forget
and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave
Nixon. Yes, we could do that--but it would be wrong. Kissinger
is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick
German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of
the power structure, Nixon was one of these, and Super K exploited
him mercilessly, all the way to the end.
Kissinger made the Gang of
Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo
of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age
of Nixon.
Nixon's spirit will be with
us for the rest of our lives--whether you're me or Bill Clinton
or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy
Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old
beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life
like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational
thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be
a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.
He has poisoned our water forever.
Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting
in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was
the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand.
By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States,
by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon
broke the heart of the American Dream.
KICKING NIXON WHILE HE WAS
UP
It is Nixon himself who represents
that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character
that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and
despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife
and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer
to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us;
the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable,
full of claws and bleeding string warts, on nights when the moon
comes too close....
At the stroke of midnight in
Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man
and head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in
the South Wing of the White House and leaps 50 feet down to the
lawn ... pauses briefly to strangle the chow watchdog, then races
off into the darkness...toward the Watergate, snarling with lust,
loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue and trying
desperately to remember which one of those 400 iron balconies
is the one outside Martha Mitchell's apartment.
Ah...nightmares, nightmares.
But I was only kidding. The President of the United States would
never act that weird. At least not during football season. But
how would the voters react if they knew the President of the
United States was, according to a New York Times editorial on
Oct. 12, presiding over "a complex, far-reaching and sinister
operation on the part of White House aides and the Nixon campaign
organization ... involving sabotage, forgery, theft of confidential
files, surveillance of Democratic candidates and their families
and persistent efforts to lay the basis for possible blackmail
and intimidation?"
|