Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

I made my mistakes. But in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service. I've earned every cent. And in all my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice, and I think too that I can say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got.

-President Richard M. Nixon, November 17, 1973

Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

-Spain's Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana

Well, Tricky Dick, yes you were a crook, but Washington takes care of its own. Your tapes also show that you were intensely paranoid and consumed with your bigotries. You were also a treasonous war criminal who, with your capo Henry Kissinger, sabotaged the Paris Peace Accords, resulting in 50,000 more American casualties and estimates of up to 1,000,000 more Vietnamese casualties. If the world was sane, you would have been tried and spent the rest of your days rotting in a rat-infested dungeon until your clothes and skin fell off your bones. Instead, in Washington, one hand washes the other no matter how filthy that hand is. You were pardoned by another sleaze named Gerald R. Ford, who, on more than one occasion, said "No one wants to see the President of the United States in jail." Sez who! Everyone I knew at the time knew damn well where Nixon belonged. Instead, he was allowed to resign and retire to his San Clemente paradise, living off a plush pension which we, the American citizens paid for.

Nixon's "I am not a crook" line was such a bold-faced lie that it instantly entered the national lexicon. Nixon imitators, commentators, and comedians had, and still do have a field day with it. It was such a big bullshit lie that just quoting it at parties or any social gathering is still guaranteed to get laughs. Nixon's cry was the "Fake news!" of its day, 44 years ago. It came as his administration was beginning to unravel as the Watergate investigations were snowballing to their inevitable result. Does all of this sound horrifically familiar?

Nixon had gotten elected to his first term in 1968 by promising that he had a "secret plan to end a war," the Vietnam War (Think "end ISIS in 30 days"). His victory was an extremely narrow victory. In 1972, he had won re-election in a huge landslide. But, he had been caught trying to jigger the system. He had sent a team of burglars into Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate complex. That's the way crooked politicians played the game in those days. There was no social media. There were no bots. There were no personal computers. There were no emails for wiki-leaks to hack. There was no wiki-anything. Nixon was a prototype for Trump. Say what you will about Tricky Dick, he employed Americans to do his dirty work. Maybe that was because, unlike Trump, underneath all of the insanity, sleaze, and filth, he was still a patriot; something Trump will never be. All of Trump's predecessors, right center, or left were patriots; not Trump. Not even as heinous a figure as Nixon would have consorted and colluded with a hostile foreign power, and he certainly would not have had family members helping him.

Nixon lowered the bar. I've always believed that the fact that Nixon got off and proceeded to lead the life of Riley set a horrible example to Americans in the years since Ford gave him his get out of jail card. It not only confirmed to America and the world that those Washington folks who let him off are every bit as corrupt as the politicians of any country, it showed that greed, vulgarity, bullying, and an extreme lack of morals meant nothing and that rules and laws were to be laughed at. Nixon's getting off showed, particularly young people, that if the President Of The United States can get away with crimes and mayhem, so can they. I lay the ensuing exponentially exploding rise in crime and extreme rule-bending, from "ordinary Americans" to banks like Wells Fargo in this country that exploded after Nixon, squarely at the feet of Gerald Ford and his accomplices in the $enate who nodded in approval. Better yet, drape it around their necks with a cinderblock. Acceptance of criminality equals normalization of same. After that, it's only a matter of time before someone comes along and pushes the envelope. That someone is Trump.

This is how countries decay. Nixon didn't invent sleaze. Neither did Trump, John Gotti, or any criminal you care to name. But, Gotti ended his days in the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois while Nixon went free. There are still mobsters, but we no longer wake up to daily news of things like bodies being found in car trunks like we did in Nixon's time. Many Gambino and Bonanno descendants now abide the laws better than people on Wall Street. You could say that our politicians have made the need for mobsters semi-obsolete, at the least, and not just the democrats in my native New Jersey.

After Nixon got off, it was inevitable that a worse figure would follow. As a people, we accepted corruption at the highest level and now we are paying the price. That's how it works. Once we let George W. Bush get away with having his brother purge the voter rolls in Florida, it was inevitable that banana republic state legislatures would codify voter suppression and make it all nice and legal like, as if this were Bolivia, Uganda, or Mussolini's Italy. Witness Scott Walker's Wisconsin. We know how that turned out. Need a template for Trump's disregard for Puerto Rico? Check out Katrina. If Bush and Trump were in some sort of perverted contest, Trump won.

The point is: The more we accept and normalize, the worse we will get. That Trump is still in office may not be, legally, a crime, but it sure as hell is morally. To Washington, Trump appears to be a role model for a future in politics. Flake and Corker are mere aberrations who only said what they said because they aren't running again. They both backed Trump to the hilt with their voting records anyway. So, let's predict what comes next. What will the corrupt inactions of Congress and our legal system lead us to in 10, 20, or 40 years? What could be worse than Trump? Who will push the envelope of acceptable behavior even further? Thanks to Washington's Congressional Criminal Class, it looks like we'll find out. That is if we don't die from radioactive fallout when it drifts over from Korea to us.