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Especially Wack  

They’ve had to surrender parts of the Nixon Presidential Library to ancient enemy the National Archives, they’ve seen their beloved Watergate exhibit trashed, but the Nixon bitter-enders still have some fight in them.

Coming Monday at the Nixon Library, the return of a particularly byzantine branch of the Nixon tree: a former Nixon aide claiming Watergate was but an elaborate scheme to install Teddy Kennedy as President, with a walk-on by youthful ingenue Hillary Clinton.

The details need not concern us here [trust me, it’s a stretch], it’s the spectacle of these lost battalions hoping against hope that over that next hill is the promised land.

It makes the Truman cult look normal by comparison.

The Nixonian event flogs a book which appeared in 2008 and promptly sank from view, the book’s blog remaining a dream unfulfilled.

If only they’d mobilized the awesome power of social media®!

Meet Your New Overlords!

Hopes for a dynasty-free nation soared with the sputtering end of George W. Bush’s administration and the announced retirement  of the Kennedy’s last office holder.

Over The Shoulder, Out Of Reach

But new threats emerge.

Jimmy Carter’s Grandson has been elected to the Georgia State Senate, and Richard Nixon’s Grandson aspires to do in a Long Island Democratic Congressman if the Republican nomination can be secured.

The drums have grown silent on George P. “little brown one” Bush’s inevitable rise to greatness, but all this can’t but help build the tired stench.

What’s Under The Tree For You & For Me? …

Architects of Victory      

Presidential grade inflation reaches a tragic apotheosis with the unveiling of an exciting new Frank Gehry design for DC’s long awaited Eisenhower Memorial.

The scheme accomplishes so many goals:

– obliteration from sight of DC’s only recognition of Lyndon Johnson.

– dimming if not completely blocking Education Department views of the Capitol, giving Department employees the experience of life behind a billboard.

– further destruction of L’Enfant’s Washington street grid.

– bringing to DC more of the Stalinist bombast we’ve all so enjoyed at the World War Two Memorial.

The thing is huge. Tiny people will cavort amidst giant topless pillars to nowhere strewn about the plaza, with vast metal mesh screens blocking the Department of Education’s Lyndon Johnson Building from sight.  These jumbo-trons in steel will portray scenes from Ike’s career, “amplifying the setting and creating an ideal background for the memorial experience.”

Or, as greatergreaterwashington said, ” It’s like we’ve taken the tarps that are supposed to hide the parking garages at Nationals Ballpark and turned them into a monument.”

But not to worry.  “we’re very concerned about that issue,” Gehry said of the tapestry’s impact on the LBJ building.”

Beneath the masses of metal a collection of stones will be arrayed in a semi-circle. This half-assed Stonehenge may host the memorable quotes we all associate with the Hero of Anacostia Flats.

The Memorial Commission presents as almost a done deal its land grab of Maryland Avenue, with the street and the triangle northwest of it already absorbed into Ike’s lebensraum.

We can look forward to further retrospective attempts to position Eisenhower as a quiet force for Civil Rights, stepping briskly past Ike’s view that “All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”

Also perhaps best avoided is his only gotten son, Richard Nixon.

Beck Banishes   

Awakened from their slumbers by patriot/seer Glen Beck, conservatives across America rush to join the antic showman in tossing Teddy Roosevelt over the side.

Until now, who knew that TR’s hysterically masculine crackpot vision of a white man’s world had some problems?  Evidently not Jonah Goldberg.

Wonkette peers under the hood of Teddy’s utopia:

“One day soon, Jonah’s going to hear about this “Nationalized Parks” thing, and he is NOT going to be happy about it.“

Grant Me This 

It was a gathering of the conservative faithful at CPAC this past weekend, and the search for novel political analogies reached strange new heights.

Among the oddities was Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, whose doomed Presidential campaign took its first tentative steps off the cliff by reminding the assembled Neo-Confederates    of a past glorius Republican office holder,  U.S. Grant.

Somehow today’s conservative struggle resembles Grant’s grinding Civil War victories over the South, his scandel infested administration, or his occasional lunges towards protecting blacks and Republicans from the Klan in the South. Which is unclear, but Pawlenty has his own upbeat, crackpot version:

“We’re on the side of limited government. And, like Grant, we fight.“

But perhaps not win.  Pawlenty came in fourth in CPAC’s presidential straw poll.

Also up for CPAC recycling,  Margeret Thatcher, AKA The Iron Lady.  Indiana Representative Mike Pence, straw poll fifth place holder, put America’s striking coal miners and Trotskyist local office holders on notice by evoking everyone’s favorite Churchill in drag. Just wait till that North Sea oil saves our ass!

A Romantic View Of History

Pence also entertained the crowd with a musty Ronald Reagan yarn, one where Reagan encountered a magic pipe-fitter.  This proto Joe The Plumber begged Reagan to save tax cuts for the rich, so guys like him could be hired by them.  Pence has trotted out the tale of this wondrous encounter at least twice going back to 2005.

CPAC turned to Glen Beck for insane historical tales with a grain of truth.

Peeing all over John McCain’s myth of a muscular progressive Republican past, Beck rightly called Teddy Roosevelt an interventionist.

But calling Roosevelt a socialist is as insane as labeling Obama one.