Reply #105: By today's standards, NIXON would be a liberal [View All]

[jmowreader]

Let me see...

in the Senate Nixon voted in favor of civil rights for minorities and voted for disaster relief for India and Yugoslavia.

As Vice President he worked to get Eisenhower's civil rights bill through the Senate.

When he was inaugurated president in 1969, his hand was covering Isaiah 2.4--"They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." And he said in his address, "the greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker." He also said, "In these difficult years, America has suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading. We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.”

He ended the draft and converted the military to an all-volunteer force, which is one of the reasons our military is so good: everyone asked to be there.

He instituted a wage and price freeze to help battle inflation. He then went on television and said, "Working together, we will break the back of inflation."

Nixon indexed Social Security to inflation and created Supplemental Security Income, presented a balanced budget--the next one would be presented by Bill Clinton--and was loathe to use deficit spending.

He took the United States off the gold standard.

He signed the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Federal Water Pollution Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and established the EPA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the Council on Environmental Quality.

He desegregated public schools. He sent men to the moon. He was pro-choice. (However, he was kinda racist on this one: he thought "interracial child" was justification for abortion. No one said Nixon was perfect.)

The healthcare plan Obama signed? It's very close to the one Nixon wanted.

This is fucking NIXON, man. You know, the worst piece of shit president America ever inflicted on America. If you were to take Nixon's liberal policies (Noam Chomsky calls Nixon the last liberal president) and present them to any teabagger, without telling them who was responsible for them, Nixon would be pronounced the worst hippie who ever lived. Remember, Nixon campaigned against hippies.

The perfect president would be a blend of Nixon, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter: Take Nixon's liberal stands and foreign policy expertise, FDR's statesmanship, TR's larger-than-life image and Carter's honesty, and it would be a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, if you said you were a Richard Nixon Democrat people would think "crook!" and not realize the heart of environmental legislation (the Clean Air Act and the water act) has Nixon's signature at the bottom.