The Gold Dust Twins 
The Bush Administration goes out as they ruled, flailing madly about and unable to keep their stories straight on items large and small.
Today’s sign of their decline: the partial collapse of a Bush fundraiser for the McCain campaign. In McCain’s hometown.
Ticket sales were bad, protesters loomed, so the thing shrank from the Phoenix Convention Center to a private home.
The White House made clear there was nothing to see here:
“A White House official said the event was being moved because the McCain campaign prefers private fundraisers and it is Bush administration policy to have events in public venues open to the media.”
A brisk dip into the past quickly found multiple Bush private, closed events.
I Dream of Africa 
The Ghanaian army has ended our fun, denouncing independent presidential candidate Richard Nixon Tetteh as a fraud.
Tetteh claimed to be a former Warrant Officer, but the army says he was only a private, and under the name Samuel Nixon Tettey.
Where It All Went Wrong? 
A perennial feature every campaign season is the release of genealogies supposedly demonstrating which kings, past presidents and vaguely familiar names 
presidential candidates are related to.
A lot of the work is done by genealogy hobbyists, sometimes assisted by the candidate’s own wild-ass claims. John McCain was recently called out for a bogus claim of descent from Robert The Bruce.
Hunt To Kill 
And now Richard Nixon is nominated for historical orphan-hood.
A long and lustrous line is shown for Nixon on Genealogy.com, but a critic hopes to chop it off in the 18th Century. Will Johnson says Genealogy.com grafted Nixon onto a family tree he has no business in.
Getting down in these weeds leads you to questions like: “The 1st and 2nd Baronet of Burton Agnes: dead-enders?”
“…the extinction of the baronetcy proves that neither Sir Henry 1st Baronet, nor Sir Henry 2nd Baronet had any surviving male- line issue. i.e. brothers, sons, nephews in the male line…[It] also disconnects Richard Nixon from this family. His ancestor, if he was indeed his ancestor at all, Samuel Griffith said-to-be “of Wigmore” who died in Maryland in 1717, does not belong to this family. “
If Nixon’s Genealogy.com ancestry held up he would be some sort of cousin to McCain and Obama . They are all supposed to be relatives of King Edward 1, famous for invading Scotland and expelling the Jews from England.
Father of Our Country 
The New Nixon blog is a last holdout for Nixon loyalists, the brave band who followed him into exile and the world of deferential memorializing.
Frank Gannon is of this band of brothers [Diane Sawyer and Monica Crowley having gone to glory elsewhere], and in the New Nixon Gannon displays once more the epic tone deafness of Nixon and his minions.
Gannon’s post on Politico‘s “50 Greatest Political Moments“starts off making minor harrumphs over Nixon resignation details [at the time of His choosing!], then closes quoting approvingly from Politico‘s tear-stained account of Nixon’s last conversation with his 1968 rival.
On Christmas Day 1977 Hubert”He Showed Us How To Die” Humphrey was literally dying. He called Nixon and they chatted about their pasts. Humphrey assumed Nixon would be spending the holiday with his daughters, but Nixon choked up, confessing that he and Pat were alone. 
The story tells us not much on Humphrey, but a great deal about Nixon’s pathalogical inability to feel any emotion but self-pity.
OOOOOH!
Thanks to the impish pranksters at boingboing for steering us to Adie Russell, who for some reason lip-sinks to old tapes of Richard Nixon among others.
It can only be described as disturbing. 
Nixon appeared on the Merv Griffin Show [Roger Ailes, Producer] as part of his New Nixon build up to 1968. Griffin asked the candidate about being a little shopworn, and Nixon responds with two timeless strategies: praise for the thoughtfulness of the question followed by changing the subject.
“GRIFFIN: But you must be aware of an undercurrent with politicians, with people in our business, even comedians who refer to Richard Nixon as a loser. You have that stigma because of losing two big contests. How do you plan to combat that? You must be aware that that’s been said. It’s been written about in newspapers.
RICHARD NIXON, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Sure. I think it’s a legitimate question that should be raised by those who are trying to find the strongest possible candidate and the way you combat it is to win something.”
It’s not in that little transcript snippet I’ve found on-line, but Nixon’s soon off into audience testing early drafts of his ’68 acceptance speech complaint that “when the President of the United States cannot travel abroad or to any major city at home without fear of a hostile demonstration – then it’s time for new leadership for the United States of America.”
