Remembering history the way they wished it had been
The new Nixon tapes deepen our knowledge of the late President’s “complex” relationship with the Jews. Now Nixon’s “House Jew,” Leonard Garment, has spoken out on his ex boss’s thoughtful utterances.
Garment writes the New York Times that Nixon wasn’t so much anti-Semitic as abrupt. “Let him be the house Jew” is a “characteristic piece of cynical Nixonian shorthand.”
Almost Churchillian in it’s brisk brusqueness!
Nixon Foundation Executive Director John H. Taylor has issued a stirring call to the faithful, those who might feel a little lost in world gone mad and Nixon Library gone federal.
And yes, Nixon still didn’t do it.
“So newly available documents and tapes weren’t enough for some scholars and reporters as the new Nixon Library prepared to open its doors. They required an act of public expiation and sanctification, namely the smiting of the beast of the old Nixon Library Watergate gallery, that last lonely place where the lingering possibility flickered of a malfunctioning Uher 5000.”
And then it gets weird:
“…the Nixon Library has finally been washed clean – the price President Nixon’s family and friends needed to pay before his Library could finally be admitted to the fraternity honoring all the paragons of high achievement and moral purity represented in the Presidential library system, which starts with Herbert Hoover and goes through Bill Clinton. ”
What’s he got against Hoover?
What can’t we blame on Richard Nixon?
Disgruntled anti-HMO activists gladly seize upon the Nixon tape used in Michael Moore’s “Sicko” to blame Nixon for the spawning of Health Maintenance Organizations and all the unhappiness entailing.
For those who came in late, in the film Moore plays an audio tape of Nixon and John Erlichman discuss the joys of HMOs and then videotape of his hearty endorsement of launching the unloved institutions. It’s all his fault.
[The exchange is at about 2:07 in this chunk of the film]
Moore’s links are laid out on his self defense page.
The Nixon Vaults give up their secrets slowly, but the revelations are stumbling forth.
We now learn that a youthful Karl Rove suggested campus screenings of marijuana classic “Reefer Madness” in order to cement the Nixon majority.
Pothead: 
Other denizens of the Republican sideburn era: 
