2013 in Review -- A Prayer to the Janitor of Lunacy,* Part 4: A great anniversary approaches!

Plus more "Quote of the Year" nominees

[*TO MEET THE JANITOR OF LUNACY, SEE PART 1]



by Noah

One of the greatest anniversaries in our nation’s history will happen this year. Forty years ago, on August 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned! It was either that or certain removal from office via impeachment, and it was bipartisan. That’s how bad it was. If Nixon wanted to retire with a pension and perks, it was the only way.

The anti-semitism. The racism. The criminality, the paranoia, and the screaming down the halls of the White House. Psychosis. "I am not a crook." Yes you were, Richard, and worse. What a horrific human being! We can be thankful that he is gone, and we can be very thankful that he wasn't the president during the Cuban missile crisis or we wouldn't be here at all.



True story: One day, back in the early '80s, I went to the Fifth Avenue Doubleday record dept. here in NYC. It was on the second-floor mezzanine. When I got there, I immediately saw Tricky Dick at the counter with his daughter and son-in-law Julie and David Eisenhower. No one else was in the department except two very large bodyguards, who always managed to place themselves between me and His Evilness (I discreetly played with that one a bit). Here's the kicker: Nixon was buying blank tape! Tape! The very thing that had sunk him!

There was just one employee, a young kid who was nervous as hell. The kid was so nervous that he dropped all the boxes of cassettes all over the place. Nixon, in an unexpected (by me, at least) display of humanity, said in his distinctive voice, "Ah, that's all right, young man." I will say that other than the irony of Nixon buying tape, I was struck by the fact that he was very charismatic, but then, many psychotic bigots and war criminals are. They always said that Zodiac and Ted Bundy were very charming, and that Adolf dude could sure give a speech!

But there he was, wearing an expensive royal blue overcoat. I wanted to scream, but I knew I’d be thrown over the balcony or something. So all I did was mutter “war criminal” within earshot of one of the bodyguards as I walked out of the store. My desire to purchase anything was gone.

I had seen the man, in person, who, in an act of treason, sabotaged the 1968 Paris peace talks that President Lyndon Johnson was working on to end the Vietnam War. LBJ’s tapes reveal that he knew of the treason that would lead to tens of thousands of addtional American casualties, but he and his VP, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party’s 1968 presidential nominee, did nothing. They didn’t want to expose some wire-tapping. Humphrey thought he was going to win anyway, and LBJ was also thinking that America couldn’t handle the knowledge that a presidential candidate was guilty of treason. LBJ was wrong, just as he had been wrong about our ability to deal with the truth of JFK’s murder.

Sleazy cover-up artist Gerald Ford

Not only had the Paris peace talks been wrecked, Nixon -- who said he had a “secret plan” to end the war -- was elected president. Eventually he got some of what was coming to him, but so many got so much that they didn’t deserve. A sleazy cover-up artist named Gerald Ford was handed the presidency, and he in turn pardoned Nixon of any and all crimes, famously saying that no one wants to see the former president in jail. Really?

So many families were destroyed, all because one lunatic had to be president at any cost. I spit on your grave, Dick Nixon.

There’s huge irony to be seen as we look back on the Nixon presidency. The irony lies in the fact that he was a Republican and there is no way he would ever be able to be in today’s Republican Party. Here’s why:

1. Nixon improved Social Security benefits. He increased some taxes on the wealthy, and he also championed finding a way to guarantee a minimum income.

2. Nixon supported a Clean Air Act and affirmative action.

3. Nixon created the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency.

4. Nixon created OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

5. Nixon’s top economic advisor, Herb Stein, is on record as saying, “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon Administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”

The man had well-documented issues. The tapes and the eyewitness accounts don’t lie, but if not for the complete evil of the treason for which he should have been hanged, or at least jailed, Nixon would be considered a socialist by the lunatics that inhabit the Republican Party today -- not just a liberal, a raving socialist. They would treat him much like they treat President Obama today. That’s a measure of how sociopathic and psychopathic today’s Republicans are. Obama and the Conservadems? They would fit in fine in the Republican Party of the early 1970s. The Janitor of Lunacy is in full force.


Note the blue-penned time and initials from the witness, the bouncing-off-the-walls Nixon's companion of his final days in office, Henry Kissinger.


NEED MORE EVIDENCE OF THE INGRAINED
LUNACY OF REPUBLICANS? HERE ARE SOME
MORE "QUOTE OF THE YEAR" NOMINEES

1. Judge Edith Jones, U.S. Fifth Court of Appeals, Reagan appointee

Sigh, where do the Republicans keep coming up with these troglodytes? Well, in this case, while Judge Jones may “serve” in Louisiana, she’s from the ultimate loonyland, Texas!


“[C]ertain racial groups like African-Americans and Hispanics are predisposed to crime and prone to commit acts of violence.”

And: “Some groups seem to commit more heinous crimes than others.”

Really? Really? If I didn’t know that she had already made it clear that she was talking about African-Americans and Hispanics, I might have thought she was talking about 20th-century Germans, Nixon’s napalm, Stalin’s Russia, 16th-century Spaniards pouring molten gold down the throats of Incans -- or Texans aiming their trucks at Mexicans on their highways, for that matter. Who or what brought this cretin up? And what kind of people invite such a person to speak? This is a judge -- on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, no less? This horror show of a throwback to the Civil War, a Reagan appointee, was even on the short list for promotion to the Supreme Court under both Bushes. Well, no surprise there, is there?

She said this in a talk before the Federalist Society at U. Penn’s law school. I guess she felt comfy as she gazed out into an audience of sheet-wearing Republican morons. What’s next? “Why, I hear them darkies loves pig's feet and fried chicken. And they love our prisons, for the free meals and other free stuff”?

Really, where do they get these people? I guess Judge Judy wouldn’t take the job.

A couple of hundred years ago, people in Europe thought you could tell a person’s criminal proclivities by measuring the size and shape of their skulls. In Republican World, it is still a couple of hundred years ago.


2. John “Where’s My” Boehner, to CBS’s Bob Schieffer


“Well, Bob, we should not be judges on how many laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws that we repeal."

Rrrriiiight, John-boy. Damn all them laws and regulations. They just get in the way of Republican free expression. Now those folks in Florida, they’ve got it right. See a black kid in a hoodie? Blast him! Voting rights? Hah, who needs ‘em? No one important anyway! Employee pensions? Follow the lead of Michigan’s Governor Snyder: Declare the cities bankrupt and steal the workers' pensions and give that money to the corporations! We don’t need no stinking laws. Do the same with Social Security! Obamacare? Why do we want those people to live anyway? They don’t vote for us.

I wonder why.


3. $en. John Cornyn, $enate Republican whip

From a bizarre place called Texas (which translates loosely from the Mexican as “Land of Los Locos”), comes yet another apparently peyote-button-induced word jumble from the $enator. Cornyn seeks to prove that, while Texas has given us straitjacket candidates like Rick “1-2-?” Perry, Louie “The Bestiality Guy” Gohmert, Canadian-born Rafael “Ted” Cruz, and Steve Stockman, the guy who thinks Cornyn is a liberal, nobody does wackobird better than he, his sun-baked self.

Heeeere’s Johnny as he follows the Fox lead in resurrecting ACORN in another deep-digging desperation attempt to destroy Obamacare, orchestrate more deaths by cancer, increase the infant mortality rate, and do all the other fine things on the Big Republican Wish List. They’ve tried everything else except claiming that Obamacare caused Fukushima.


“We’ve already heard some anecdotal reports about Obamacare navigators, including a woman who had an outstanding arrest warrant at the time she was hired, along with former members of an organization known as ACORN . . . . ”
   
Maybe Obama hired that “Cadillac-driving welfare queen” from the mind of Ronnie Reagan too! “Anecdotal reports”? Some guy who knows some guy who knows some guy who got the real story from the Bigfoot family that live in the treehouse in his back yard. Hey, Cornyn, you want true crime? Take a look around you on the $enate floor. While you’re at it, the House of Representatives is just down the hall. You can find someone with a legal problem in any group of size.

You know it’s bad when people reference something they got from Fox “News” as if it were actually factual. Consider the source. We already know what righties think of “community organizers.” They buried three of them in an earthen dam in Mississippi back in 1964.
   

4. Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) and Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI)

I started this post with Dick Nixon so why not end on an impeachment theme too? I’m putting these two together because they’re really just two cheeks of a horse’s ass.

Notice that we have yet another twit from Texas. We'll let him go first.


“If we were to impeach the president tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it.”

I’m sure Boehner would drink to that, but wouldn’t Ol’ Cheez Doodle Face drink to just about anything?

Now, the guy from Nugentland gets his say. Ain’t free speech grand?


“If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true.”

I have to say that if I were a congressman, writing a bill that would create jobs or alleviate poverty and hunger or give people a shot at health care or help children get an education would be my dream come true. I have to admit that I’d also be tempted to write a bill that would send cretins like these two into space -- to one of the big gas giants like Jupiter, where they would be at home. No need to be cruel about it.

And I’m sorry, I don’t really mean to insult horses. That’s just not fair of me. I should have compared these men to cockroaches, the kind that have imbibed too much insecticide and just race around in circles accomplishing nada. If that isn’t an apt metaphor for the current poison-fueled House of Representatives, I don’t know what is.

Oops, there I go again. Sorry, cockroaches.

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NOAH'S 2013 IN REVIEW --
A PRAYER TO THE JANITOR OF LUNACY*

Part 1: Take a bow, Repugs! (*including Nico's "Janitor of Lunacy") [Monday]

Part 2: Remember when Reagan cut funds for insane asylums? (Storms, guns, bombs, free stuff, and the secret gay life of Obma: Some top Republican lies of 2013) [Tuesday]

Part 3: No Cruz control (Rafael "Ted" Cruz in his own words) [Wednesday]

Part 4: A great anniversary approaches! (Nixon's resignation) (plus more "Quote of the Year nominees") [Thursday]

Part 5: Everyone's a critic, including me -- Some people really try my patience (Bill-O, Howie Kurtz, E. W. Jackson, et al.) [Friday]

Part 6 (and last): In the words of Dan Quayle, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind" (Exploiting tragedy for a buck; Miss America's not American?; "Quote of the Year" winner) [Saturday]

And don't forget Noah's recent --
"Need a last-minute Christmas gift suggestion?" [12/22]
"50 Years Ago Today: The Beatles" [12/26]
"A Tale of Two Popes -- the one in the Vatican and the one in North Carolina" [12/27]

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