I'm 64 and I never expected to say THIS, but...

[RVN VET71]

31. I have to agree -- but I'm taking a shower shortly

because I'll need one after this:

Nixon guided legislative changes through Congress that improved the lot of every citizen. He was, as Marian suggests, indeed the most intelligent president of, at least, the 20th century. But he was deeply flawed, deeply paranoid, and hatefully vengeful. Still, you have to remember that it wasn't his many acts of corruption that forced him out of office. It was one stupidly conceived and clumsily carried out burglary engineered not by Nixon, himself, but by his chief fixer John Mitchell and, of course, "superman" G. Gordon Liddy.

Sadly, as I noted at the time, Tricky Dicky wasn't going down for his many, many crimes against the constitution and human decency. He went down because he engaged in a cover up to protect the moronic vipers who bugged the campaign headquarters of presidential candidate George McGovern. Had he thrown the participants under the bus, I think he would have served out his second term.

But,to be clear, I hated the bastard, hated him deeply, for his escalation of a war he and Henry Kissinger said they would end "with honor" and quickly. I hated his war on drugs, his phony promise to "defeat cancer" -- even as our new Leader has promised. His breaking into Ellsberg's psychiatrists office, sans warrant or legal reason. Shoot, his "pink lady" campaign against Helen Gahagen Douglas. But nasty son of a bitch though he was, his evil pales almost to invisibility in comparison to "Individual-1".

Nixon was a bad man, a corrupt man, a hateful man. But Nixon was not a traitor.