Ridiculous Nixon Quotes

The Republican establishment is haunted by painful memories of what happened to Old Man Bush in 1992. He peaked too early and he had no response to “It’s the economy, stupid.” Which has always been the case. Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the military-industrial complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous “trickle-down” theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow “trickle down” to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.

NIXON: Accuse you of what? AGNEW: Accuse me of— NIXON: Putting the pressure on them to make contributions? AGNEW: No, he may say he gave me a kickback of some kind. Came over here and handed me $50,000. Totally ridiculous. But— NIXON: Oh, God. AGNEW: I mean, they say it. I don’t know what this guy’s liable to say. NIXON: And Ted, they’re— AGNEW: They say he gave a federal judge some money. There are all kinds of rumors. NIXON: Good God, isn’t it awful? AGNEW: But this man is— NIXON: Well, can we destroy him?

It was supremely ironic. Nixon, ridiculed for his irrational hatred and “paranoia” toward the Eastern Establishment, may in the end have been done in by forces controlled by that very establishment. Of course, it was nothing less than that level of power to remove presidents, plural, one after the other if necessary.

second aspect of European anti-Americanism after 1918 was a pronounced aversion to certain American politicians; this, too, proved to be a quite durable prejudice.With the major exception of John F. Kennedy (and, to a lesser extent, Bill Clinton), all other twentieth-century American presidents were frowned upon by European elites—either disliked (Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush fils, Bush pe`re) and/or not taken seriously as political persons and ridiculed (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush fils, Bush p[egrave]re).53 In the interwar period, animosity was focused on Woodrow Wilson. The European Right treated him as the prototype of the wimpy internationalist, pursuing self-serving American interests under the hypocritical guise of national self-determination as a general principle.