Fast Eddie

Now More Than Ever Forever! nixon-tricia-mccain.jpg

We now know that Tricia Nixon’s Iowa Mccain appearance was only the scene setter in the Nixon Cox family’s new adventures in politics.

nixon-ed-cox.jpg Tricia’s husband Ed Cox had previously roused from his thirty year slumber to flirt with challenging Hillary Clinton for Senate, only to retreat. This time they are all in.

Cox is McCain’s New York State Chair, and son Christoper Nixon Cox, nixon-christopher-nixon-cox-nina-khrushcheva.gif Richard Nixon’s first grandson, is state campaign Executive Director.

The familiar rituals of resume inflation are beginning. Buffalo Business First reports that Eddie “served under three U.S. Presidents.” but even his law firm biography claims only his father in law and something a fair distance from Reagan’s side:

“He served former President Nixon in the international arena and was general counsel to a major energy agency which financed synthetic fuels projects under President Reagan.”

And Reagan killed the Synthetic Fuels Corporation.

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“Richard Nixon’s visits seared into York countians’ minds”

Yikes! Hard to outdo that headline.

Fortunately the York Town Square story doesn’t try.

All politics may be local, but local history often tries too hard to rope in stray connections with historic figures.

Those Nixon mentions in full:

“The Menges Mills Market is a throwback to old York County. There, customers can still buy fresh, custom-cut meat. The market has also played host to a famous customer – Richard Nixon.”

“York countians long remember Richard M. Nixon’s visits here.”

“It even had a famous patron. President Richard Nixon stopped in the store while he was visiting his parents who lived a half mile from the store on a farm on Old Hanover Road.

Sterling eventually bought the 350 acres that Frank and Hannah Nixon lived on and farmed corn, soy beans, wheat and hay”

….and a link to another rip-roaring Nixon tale, this one involving a park near York named for him. nixon-woods.jpg With a classic Mr Comfortable walks in the woods picture.

What might be seared into the memory of townspeople is recalling their eccentric left-wing newspaper editor. J.W. Gitt.

Gitt edited the York Gazette & Daily, the predecessor of the blog’s parent newspaper. Gitt’s was the only commercial newspaper in America to endorse Henry Wallace york-gazette-and-daily-henry-wallace.jpg in 1948, and survived an onslaught from 50s Redhunters.

Just the novelty of seeing classic cliched editorial cartoons,

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but with left wing content, is illuminating.

No Longer Operative

It’s Like Old Times! nixon-and-ziegler.jpg

We’ve reached that glorious stage in the White House email scandal where the Bush Administration is denying that which it previously affirmed, leading their opponents to dump the ugly details on the record.

Tiny Terror Henry Waxman hasn’t yet released the text of the 2005 White House document finding 473 whole days worth of emails are gone, along with many suspiciously “light” days. But he’s put out enough to make the Administration look clumsy at best. One of the parties suing the White House over the emails has upped the estimate of the lost to ten million.

Try and follow the ball with White House mouthpiece Tony Fratto:

“Q Tony, on the subject, could you address the missing White House emails and the law suit? It is a subject of reports this morning. Are there in fact the emails missing? What’s the likelihood of their recovery versus the —

MR. FRATTO: I think our review of this, and you saw the court filing on this, and our declaration in response to the judge’s questions — I think to the best of what all the analysis we’ve been able to do, we have absolutely no reason to believe that any emails are missing; there’s no evidence of that. There’s no — we tried to reconstruct some of the work that went into a chart that was entered into court records and could not replicate that or could not authenticate the correctness of the data in that chart. And from everything that we can tell, our analysis of our backup systems, we have no reason to believe that any email at all are missing.

    Q So where are they?

 MR. FRATTO: Where are what?

 Q Where are part of --

MR. FRATTO: Which email? Look, no one will tell you categorically about any system — any system, whether it’s your system at Bloomberg or our system here at the White House, past and present, categorically that data cannot be missing. All of our review of it and all of the our understanding of the way that the backup system works, it’s a backup system that captures existing data, it captures things that are stored and archived. We have no reason to believe that there’s any data missing at all — and we’ve certainly found no evidence of any data missing.

Q So that would mean that if you were asked, you would be in a position to comply with a request to produce those documents?

MR. FRATTO: Yes, which documents? I mean, if someone has a specific request for documents and they would like us to search for particular emails, of course we could search for emails — and we have. And we have been responsive to requests in the past.

Q And they have been produced? They do exist?

MR. FRATTO: We have produced emails upon request, either for our own internal review or sometimes in response to investigations that have taken place on the Hill. I mean, we have been able to go back and find email. The question is, have we been able to find a large mass of missing email? No, we have not located somewhere in the system the absence of something. We have not been able to note the absence of anything in our databases.*

Q You’re saying they’re there, you just haven’t located them yet?

MR. FRATTO: No, I’m saying we have no evidence that shows that anything at all is missing. And you’re saying, well, have you found the missing emails — and we say we have no evidence that anything is missing.

Q So you’re saying that would include emails that were erased from the Republican National Committee system that was used by some White House officials?

MR. FRATTO: I can’t speak to the RNC’s system of archiving and storing email. All I can tell you is that the email on the White House computers, we have no reason to believe that any email or other data are missing.

Olivier.

Q Yes, I want to follow up on that, I’ve taken a real sky view of this particular story, but — so it was wrong to say a few months ago that there were possibly millions of emails missing?

MR. FRATTO: I think those charges came from outside the White House. I think that’s the charge of one of the —

Q One of your colleagues addressed those from the podium and suggested that that was accurate — again, I’m taking —

MR. FRATTO: I’m not sure what was said on that. I can tell you today, though, that we have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any email at all are missing.”

From Nixon to Castro

How Was I to Know? nixon-dismissive.jpg

Portfolio runs an excerpt from John Rosen’s The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate, focused on colorful 70s corporate bandit Robert Vesco.

Vesco’s currently doing the last years of a 13 year sentence in Cuba, jailed on murky charges after years of gilded exile in socialism’s southern redoubt. vesco-cuba.JPG

But once he was somebody, with the SEC investigation of his activities to prove it. Leading to the scene where Vesco’s bag men deliver wads of cash to Richard Nixon’s chief re-election fundraiser Maurice Stans.

“Here were three upright members of the Greatest Generation, one carrying a briefcase stuffed with $200,000 in $100 bills. No one present likely harbored any delusions that the cash was being delivered—anonymously and past the lawful date—because Vesco had such passionate beliefs about détente or wage and price controls.”

Unlucky in Kentucky

kentucky-holler.jpg

Out of tragedy, new insight nixon-rec-center.jpg

Or in the case of the fire at Hyden Kentucky’s Richard M. Nixon Recreation Center, new opportunities to enjoy part of Nixon’s sunset years, early edition.

nixon-hyden-ky-rec-center-dedication.jpg To recap, the 1978 dedication of the building bearing Nixon’s name was one of the first public appearances by the Disgracedformerpresidenttrademark2.gif after his 1974 resignation.

Nixon entertained the recreation-seeking locals with a forty minute speech. He called for strengthening the CIA to confront “aggressive dictatorships,” presumably Cuban intervention in Africa, attracting the attention of Ronald Reagan, then plotting his 1980 run.

The Recreation Center fire prompted a local TV station to put a 25 year retrospective on the event up on their web-page. Sadly the only sound from Nixon is him commenting on how hot it is, but the era’s immense cars provide some excitement.

A sample of how Hyden’s youth spend their time these days can be found here.