Republicans Haven't won Since Eisenhower

[starroute]

20. Nixon was pulling all sorts of bizarre crap at once

There's been some nostalgia for Nixon around here lately, because compared to the current crop of Republicans he looks good. But we should never forget that he was doing his best to undermine democracy -- in concert with the more dubious elements of the CIA, the Mafia, and his merry gang of Cuban exiles.

I've been sorting through some of my old notes on what was going on in the Nixon White House with regard to drug policy. The story is complex, but the short version is that Nixon wanted to use the drug agencies as a means of domestic surveillance and covert operations, one that would be completely under the control of the White House and without even the degree of external oversight imposed on the CIA.

The chief motivators behind the plan were E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy -- both of whom got snared in Watergate, which strongly suggests that the break-in was part of that pattern of covert operations and not specifically an election dirty trick.

The culmination of all of this was to have been the creation in 1973 of the Drug Enforcement Agency -- which was huge, largely unaccountable, and combined former CIA and military intelligence people with old-line drug enforcement agents. And if it hadn't been for Watergate, they might have gotten away with it.