Richard Nixon

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My Grandfather once told me back in about 1979. "Richard Nixon was a bastard, but a great President. Jimmy Carter is a good man, but a lousy fucking President. Politicians are corrupt assholes, so they didn't like Nixon, but they understood and could work with him, because he was one of them. But Jimmy Carter was an honest guy, so they didn't understand him and couldn't work with him. You need a corrupt asshole to get anything done in Washington".


Nixon

Richard Nixon was a complex and successful President, and as usual, much of the History written by the left, is shallow, wrong and makes people dumber if they believe it. That doesn't make Nixon a saint, but he was more saintly than many of his contemporaries: more honest and less corrupt and power abusive than a Johnson, JFK or Eisenhower. So history, and the rubes that repeat what they've been fed without learning more, is doing a disservice to reality and what we could learn, if we weren't programmed by lying leftists in education and the media: Nixon : 5 items


Why we fought the Vietnam War -
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The point isn't that I'm pro war, or even pro Vietnam war. It's that if we want to learn and grow we have to accept both the good and the bad of positions we agree/disagree with. This article tries to cover some of those tradeoffs for the Vietnam War. At least what lead up to Kent State, which is where the view of the war turned for American, internally/politically.

Who won the Vietnam War - There's a prevalent myth that America lost the Vietnam war. But about 30 years ago, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, (who is largely credited with the “Singapore Miracle”, turning a backwater nation into an economically prosperous nation), wrote an op ed in the New York Times in which he claimed the U.S. had largely won the Vietnam War.
  • His contention was that the U.S. wasn’t just fighting to protect South Vietnam from the Communist yoke, but that the U.S. was fighting to protect all of Southeast Asia (including his native Singapore). While South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos fell to Communism, the U.S.’s fight delayed the Communist surge long enough for Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines to develop their nations economically enough to make the Communist lure undesirable.
  • Prime Minister Lee argued that had the U.S. not fought the Vietnam War, Communism would have taken over all of Southeast Asia. So the U.S.’s participation in the Vietnam War allowed the much larger portion of the Southeast Asian population (≈475 Million people) to escape the yoke of Communism and the violent purges that come with it. And in Lee’s eyes (as a significant insider), this meant the U.S. largely won the Vietnam War, even though Indochina fell to Communism.
  • Despite the historical and philosophical importance of that, and who it was spoken by, where have you ever heard that taught in a public school or mentioned on the airwaves?

Who lost the Vietnam War -
There's a prevalent myth that America lost the Vietnam war. But rememeber history :
  • 1972 - The Paris Peace Accords in 1972. Vietnam surrendered, we had a peace agreement and everything was fine. Tada. War over.
  • 1974 - (two years later), the Democrats won congress. They immediately started cutting off all funding/support for South Vietnam
  • 1975 - in January 1975 the North tried a probing attack to see if the U.S. would stop them (the South had a 2:1 advantage in most areas like artillery/planes/etc -- but no money for fuel). The Democrats denied treaties and obligations, and without that financial support, the NVA overran the country by the end of April.

So Americans didn't lose the first Vietnam war, democrats lost us the second one, by letting Russia, China and North Vietnam know they could have it.


Memes-Nixon - Nixon is remembered by the less than historically informed for one thing, saying, "I am not a crook". They think it's ironic, but he wasn't a crook. So ironically, most of the memes that mock Nixon's caricature, actually mock the people that are mocking Nixon, they just don't know it.

Grandfather on Nixon - My Grandfather (who was quite a personality), summed this up for me before he died. At one of the holiday meals he was pontificating about past presidents:
  • Carter was a great man, but an incompetent President; Nixon was a flawed man, and a great President
  • The reasons were because Carter was trustworthy and straight-forward and giving. People took advantage of him, or let him down, and all the other politicians, who were corrupt, didn't know how to deal with him. So he couldn't get what he wanted or make a difference; the system was against him.
  • Nixon was a bastard that would didn't always let principles get in his way of his agenda. However, the other politicians understood him. The foreign leaders, who were also corrupt, understood him and could deal with him: he wasn't going to get walked over, and he was going to get what he wanted. So he was far more effective President.

Of course there's more to Presidential politics than just that (it's a lot more nuanced). But I had to laugh, and there's a certain wisdom that when you're in a pit of snakes, you can't be a saint and succeed. Idealism can't get in the way of pragmatics, which is part of why I did my best to avoid being involved in politics. (I hate having to compromise my ethics).

Conclusion

Despite Nixon's reputation and vilification by the left and the ignorant, he was one of the more accomplished Presidents. I'm not a huge fan of his domestic policies, as he was a bit too left leaning for me: he compromised in creating programs and solutions that weren't bad for the time, but didn't have the right incentives in place to prevent them from becoming foul over time. So while he was better than the alternatives, he did some harm and some good. But in foreign policy he was a bit of a rockstar of the 20th century and did more by just opening China, while simultaneously fighting them to stop their spread in Indochina than all the Democrats of the last century combined. (Which is a low bar, but work with me here).

His impeachment and resignation was a travesty of justice, both in the process, why it happened, the hypocrisy and partisanism and elitism shown against him, and the craptastic job the media and the left has done to stain his history and what this nation once stood for. He is everything they claim to love (a guy that raised himself up by his bootstraps and was successful in spite of the bullying by the elites/powers that hated him), and they really hate him for it.

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Presidents
This is a list of Presidents that I've written things on (or collected info about).
Memes-Nixon
Nixon is remembered by the less than historically informed for one thing, saying, "I am not a crook". They think it's ironic, but he wasn't a crook. So ironically, most of the memes that mock Nixon's caricature, actually mock the people that are mocking Nixon, they just don't know it.