NIXON! YOU WERE SO AWESOME! Except for how much you sucked.

[Atman]

Tricky Dick would have been 100 today. Listening to the cable news pundits (Chris Matthews, et al) you'd think we're honoring the death of Christ himself.

Nixon was a hateful, paranoid, evil douche bag. Just because he would have been 100 years old today doesn't change anything. The "pundits" are all now trying to say all of Nixon's badness was just because of his staff stirring up shit and making Dick crazy.

Now Chris Matthews is waxing nostalgic about the good old days of Richard Nixon. Excuse me while I puke.

[leftstreet]

1. Nixon wanted a Guaranteed Annual Income in the US

Read Daniel Moynihan's book THE POLITICS OF A GUARANTEED INCOME The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan.

Pretty interesting

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/specials/moynihan-income.html

[dionysus]

2. there's a thread on here doing it.

[Waiting For Everyman]

3. Nixon was slime.

He was worse than Reagan and the Bushes. Those of us who were alive at the time, and followed events, know that.

Revisionism is disgusting. It's only to set the next several generations up for the same bag of tricks.

[Buzz Clik]

4. Don't pound so hard on the old Dick!

After all, he gave us the EPA, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act.

As for celebrating Jeebus's death, we do that in a couple of months. You'll recognize the eggs and bunnies.

[Atman]

5. He gave us the 55 mph speed limit, and wage/price controls.

Crazy socialist liberal! Oh, wait...the Republicans love him because he was...uh...what the fuck was he?

[Buzz Clik]

6. 55 mph wasn't Carter?

[Atman]

9. Nope. Nixon.

My stepfather was a staunch Republican. Nixon said it, so dammit, he never exceeded the 55mph speed limit.

As an emergency response to the 1973 oil crisis, on November 26, 1973, President Richard Nixon proposed a national 50 mph (80 km/h) speed limit for passenger vehicles and a 55 mph speed limit for trucks and buses. That, combined with a ban on ornamental lighting, no gasoline sales on Sunday, and a 15% cut in gasoline production, were proposed to reduce total gas consumption by 200,000 barrels a day, representing a 2.2% drop from annualized 1973 gasoline consumption levels.[6][a] Nixon partly based this on a belief that cars achieve maximum efficiency between 40 and 50 mph (64 and 80 km/h) and that trucks and buses were most efficient at 55 mph (89 km/h).[

[Buzz Clik]

11. Well, there you go. Thanks for setting me straight.

[NYC Liberal]

14. The Democratic Congress gave us those things -- including Ed Muskie --

as well as overwhelming public pressure.

Nixon signed much of the good legislation he did to try to get some good PR for his re-election campaign amid the unpopular Vietnam War.

The EPA and the Clean Air Act Extension both passed in 1970. Clean Water Act was sent to Nixon's desk near the end of 1972, past the time where he had to care about re-election, so he VETOED it.

EPA was mostly a reshuffling and consolidation of existing responsibilities spread among various agencies, and did not increase federal spending on environmental protection. The Clean Air Act was watered down before it was sent to Nixon's desk, and after he signed it he lowered standards even further. He withheld funds for implementing the Clean Water Act and fought the ban DDT in court.

He also fired his Interior Secretary, Wally Hickel, for pushing for more environmental reform and criticizing the Vietnam War.

[Honeycombe8]

7. Most people are not all bad or all good. There's a tendency

in forums such as these to really hate someone unquestioningly, or to really love someone unquestioningly. When the truth is...the ones we hate are often not all bad at all times, and the ones we love are not all good at all times.

Nixon apparently did some good things, to his credit. He created the EPA, for example.

[MrSlayer]

8. He was a very complicated guy.

A true mixed bag. His bad traits were very bad but his good traits were very good. I just finished reading The Presidents Club and I was struck by just how smart he was. Most people don't know about how he personally led secret diplomatic missions to Soviet Russia, the Middle East and China, how brilliant he was at reading foreign affairs and how much influence he had during the Reagan through Clinton administrations. His advice was invaluable to those Presidents.

Yeah, he did some fucked up, illegal things. Watergate wasn't the worst of them actually. His sabotaging of the Vietnam peace talks in order to win the Presidency was pretty much treason. But Watergate happened because LBJ was illegally wiretapping Nixon and the break in was to obtain and destroy the evidence those illegal wiretaps uncovered. It's quite a story. In a sense, he resigned to protect the office and his predecessor as much as anything else.

And there is no denying that he was the last socially liberal President we had. In comparison to Obama and Clinton he's a far lefty.

Hate him for his bad behavior if you want but the story is much deeper than just those things. Much deeper.

I highly suggest the book The Presidents Club to anyone interested in politics. It certainly changes your perspective of the office.

My favorites from the book were Nixon and Carter.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

10. Compared to today's GOP, Nixon was AWESOME

That's how far we've fallen.

[tableturner]

12. The OP did not accurately portray what Matthews said.....

Yeah....he mentioned a few good things about Nixon, because there were some positive aspects of Nixon's history and makeup. On the other hand, he spent a lot of time talking about Nixon's despicable makeup and conduct. I could not stand Nixon, but yes, he did some good things.

Matthews was very clear about his disdain for much of what Nixon was and did. Can't a guy lead an intelligent conversation about Nixon and mention a few good things about him, when that is the truth? Did you expect him to be inaccurate in his appraisal of Nixon because you and I cannot stand him?

[Special Prosciuto]

13. EPA

As much as I want to do the boogaloo and piss upon Nixon six feet under, he did ONE admirable thing in giving us the Environmental Protection Agency, not of his accord but signed by his own "executive," nervous, about-to-be-ousted hand.