Oh, For A Nixon To Lead Us Now!
Nixon was a sneaky bastard, a sweaty, hard-drinking, suspicious, hands-on reputation-ruining former prosecutor who looked somehow right in a bulbous black Cadillac getting a pelting of rotten guavas in downtown Caracas. They said he wore too much makeup on TV, and his grizzled jowls became the target of a George Carlin punch line in which a jowl-print, taken from a moist plaster wall at the Watergate, becomes the smoking gun that points suspicion to the Oval Office.
But Nixon also coined the terms, “Peace With Honor,” and more pragmatic terms like “Phased Withdrawal,” and “Troop Reductions.” He ended the war in Vietnam, albeit while conducting secret wars in Laos, Cambodia, Burma and other heroin-producing nations in Asia's Golden Triangle.
Eventually, the last GI was out of a defoliated, napalmed, booby-trapped jungle filled with whores, drug dealers, phony South Vietnamese officials, and dotted with spots of urban night life where some of the girls spoke French. Eventually, the roof of the US Embassy was used to airlift out the lucky few who managed to get safe passage out of Saigon as it fell to the North Vietnamese, who had been accummulating forces for the final offensive for months. It was an ignominous end to a dishonest enterprise, that left friends of the Americans in Saigon to shift for themselves in a holocaust of revenge. Peace with honor, indeed.
The current leader of the free world, a man who slanders with a smile and a shake of his cocky little head, who stands straight and tall as a wooden soldier, isn't the same type of knave as Nixon, who had plans, who manipulated and machinated relentlessly, who tactically governed events by the force of his stratagems.
The secret problem Nixon had with winding down the war was how to revert the economy to a peacetime condition. “War is Good Business, Invest Your Son,” was a slogan often seen in Nixon's day. The young, being drafted to fight a war against people they'd never heard of in geography class, accused greedy capitalists of funding imperial agression for profit. But the economic challenges of those times were so severe that Nixon actually imposed Wage and Price Controls for about two years, to combat “spiralling inflation.”
By spending about $200 Billion on war industry and spending hundreds more injecting funds in the Dept of Homeland Security and the Transportation Safety Administration, we have created a wartime economy in which even Wired magazine gives tips on how to land venture capital from the CIA, and the Dept of Education pays people to plug the No Child Left Behind Act on the radio. It is a new way of doing business, and has shifted federal funding from Blue States to Red States with a vengeance. The security buildup along the Mexican border is inflating border states like Arizona, Texas and Southern California with military and security personnel, construction and funding.
The rationale for all this spending was the deaths of over 3,000 people when two large skyscrapers collapsed for what some say are unexplained reasons. We have been throwing money at “security” and “terrorism” ever since, and that money has blown away like the $170 Million that the FBI paid SAIC to build a computer network that just got junked. Airline security is just inconvenient for travelers, but it's an engine of the economy and another sink of low wage employment for those who aspire to flip more than burgers, and are ready to step up to rifling through luggage for sex toys.
There's an old song called “Give Me 40 Acres, And I'll Turn This Rig Around,” about driving big trucks. Well, we're driving about twenty thousand big trucks in the desert, plus humvees and such, and if Nixon was president, every day some of them would be driving to the beach, gettin' loaded on cargo ships, and sailing home to the land of the free. Oh, for a Nixon to lead us now!
But Nixon also coined the terms, “Peace With Honor,” and more pragmatic terms like “Phased Withdrawal,” and “Troop Reductions.” He ended the war in Vietnam, albeit while conducting secret wars in Laos, Cambodia, Burma and other heroin-producing nations in Asia's Golden Triangle.
Eventually, the last GI was out of a defoliated, napalmed, booby-trapped jungle filled with whores, drug dealers, phony South Vietnamese officials, and dotted with spots of urban night life where some of the girls spoke French. Eventually, the roof of the US Embassy was used to airlift out the lucky few who managed to get safe passage out of Saigon as it fell to the North Vietnamese, who had been accummulating forces for the final offensive for months. It was an ignominous end to a dishonest enterprise, that left friends of the Americans in Saigon to shift for themselves in a holocaust of revenge. Peace with honor, indeed.
The current leader of the free world, a man who slanders with a smile and a shake of his cocky little head, who stands straight and tall as a wooden soldier, isn't the same type of knave as Nixon, who had plans, who manipulated and machinated relentlessly, who tactically governed events by the force of his stratagems.
The secret problem Nixon had with winding down the war was how to revert the economy to a peacetime condition. “War is Good Business, Invest Your Son,” was a slogan often seen in Nixon's day. The young, being drafted to fight a war against people they'd never heard of in geography class, accused greedy capitalists of funding imperial agression for profit. But the economic challenges of those times were so severe that Nixon actually imposed Wage and Price Controls for about two years, to combat “spiralling inflation.”
By spending about $200 Billion on war industry and spending hundreds more injecting funds in the Dept of Homeland Security and the Transportation Safety Administration, we have created a wartime economy in which even Wired magazine gives tips on how to land venture capital from the CIA, and the Dept of Education pays people to plug the No Child Left Behind Act on the radio. It is a new way of doing business, and has shifted federal funding from Blue States to Red States with a vengeance. The security buildup along the Mexican border is inflating border states like Arizona, Texas and Southern California with military and security personnel, construction and funding.
The rationale for all this spending was the deaths of over 3,000 people when two large skyscrapers collapsed for what some say are unexplained reasons. We have been throwing money at “security” and “terrorism” ever since, and that money has blown away like the $170 Million that the FBI paid SAIC to build a computer network that just got junked. Airline security is just inconvenient for travelers, but it's an engine of the economy and another sink of low wage employment for those who aspire to flip more than burgers, and are ready to step up to rifling through luggage for sex toys.
There's an old song called “Give Me 40 Acres, And I'll Turn This Rig Around,” about driving big trucks. Well, we're driving about twenty thousand big trucks in the desert, plus humvees and such, and if Nixon was president, every day some of them would be driving to the beach, gettin' loaded on cargo ships, and sailing home to the land of the free. Oh, for a Nixon to lead us now!