Regular readers of this blog may know, and people who know me personally should know that I am a Richard Nixon freak.
I’ve lost count how many Nixon books I’ve read, how many
Nixon documentaries I’ve watched. I’ve read the Woodward and Bernstein. And
I’ve read the japes by those who saw Nixon as no conservative and Watergate as
only a minor blip to the man’s many sins. I even got a real big kick out of
Elvis and Nixon which, if you have not seen, you should. It’s hilarious.
And fictional, like what I’m about to talk about.
Yes, Nixon had his dark side and yes-men who enabled that
dark side to come out. And as the Watergate crisis continue to evolve, he
listened more and more to that dark side and to those yes-men, to the point he
destroyed his presidency.
In one hour, President Donald Trump, rambling accusations at
the Georgia Secretary of State, presented a new low in American presidential
politics, because in the eyes of this amateur Nixon scholar, not even Nixon and
all the president’s men were as ham-handed as what I heard and read in that
call.
But as in Nixon’s time, he has his supporters, both in
government and out. I hold no illusions that no matter how Congress handled the
ill-conceived approach to decertify the election, nor even after Joe Biden is sworn
in as president later this month, the ham-handedness of Trump and his enablers
and supporters will continue to believe the election was stolen. God and Jebus
themselves could descend from above and say the election was above board, and
they would not be believed.
There’s a thread in Mormonism that believes the Constitution
will dangle by a thread, meaning it will be brought to the point that those in
power or those who want to stay in power will spit on it and wipe their poxy
bottoms on it. Mostly they tend to believe it’ll be done on liberal watch. I’m
not so sure. Because the only ones I see approaching the Constitution with a
boogery nose now are coming from the right.
Here’s what I find most telling in the hour-long call to
Georgia: Trump does, by far, the majority of the talking. He had some of his
legal team on the call. They said little. If there were any legal merit to the
accusations flung in this call, the lawyers would be the ones talking. Instead,
they sit there very much like Mr. Slant, the head of the Guild of Lawyers in
Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork, satisfied to let his client make a fool of
himself because they were not in front of judge and jury and they were secure
in the fact they were getting paid $400 an hour. There was no legal merit to
the 60 plus court cases brought before the call, some to the Supreme Court,
where Trump pretty much thought he’d emerge victor, as three of the nine there
were appointed by him and conservatives enjoy a majority. But even there, among
friends, there was no legal merit. No standing.
More straws, ladies and gentlemen. And the strong-men in the
Middle East, Russia, China, they’re laughing at our political mess. As they
should be. Because a wannabe dictator is throwing a fit that the election he
was sure he’d win didn’t go his way. But more dastardly, they’re laughing at
us. At the fact that some of us can see the facts of the election, know who
won, but insist on throwing stupid fits because our guy isn’t the one who won
it.
(And yes, there are those who crow that they don’t care if
it’s Trump or Biden; all they want is a free and fair election. Nevermind that
they fall into the same logical fallacies and blindness the Trumpers fall
into.)
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