Wednesday 9 January 2013

Richard Nixon, One Hundred Today

The Trotskyists, white supremacists and Israel Firsters who had conspired to replace LBJ with the trigger-happy race huckster Bobby Kennedy as the Democratic Presidential nominee, then to bring down the President who had suspended of the draft, who had pursued détente with China and with the USSR, and who was edging towards ending the Vietnam War. Nixon had declared that "I am now a Keynesian in economics." As Milton Friedman bitterly put it, "We are all Keynesians now." Not for much longer, they weren't.

Nixon's was the age of wage and price control, of the Clean Air Act, of the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, of the War on Cancer and the War on Drugs, of Title IX that banned sex discrimination in federally funded education, of the desegregation of schools in the Deep South, and of the insistence that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union's treatment of its Zionist dissidents.

Nixon was forced out over something that no one really found shocking then any more than we should find it shocking now, although I suppose that we ought to mourn the passing of a world in which they felt obliged to pretend that they were shocked by it.

1 comment:

  1. It doesn‘t surprise me he did it but he still should have gone for it. Shame though because in a number of areas (including those you list) he was excellent.

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