The Buch-McCain Challenge
I just took The Bush-McCain Challenge -- an online quiz to see if you can tell the difference between George W. Bush and John McCain. Check it out, and see if you can do any better than I did!
http://Bush-McCainChallenge.com/?rc=tafcarrot
Washington Montly: Those Weren't the Days
Those Weren't the Days
Nixon has been looking better lately compared to George W. Bush. But in fact he's as bad as we remember.
By Jacob Heilbrunn
Nixon in particular broke new ground as a polarizer. He wanted to turn his domestic critics into the functional equivalent of traitors; the antiwar college kids, whom he loathed, were supposed to serve as a kind of domestic Fifth Column, like the communists of the early 1950s, that could shore up the Republican base and stigmatize the Democrats in the eyes of the Silent Majority he felt he represented. In 1970, for example, Nixon’s press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler read a statement of Nixon’s after the shooting of students at Kent State which declared that it “should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.” It almost seemed that the president of the United States was blaming the students for their own deaths. According to Dallek, nothing shook Nixon’s conviction that he needed to wage warfare on his opponents. Despite his landslide election victory in 1972, Nixon was, Dallek writes, “almost morbid,” convinced that his adversaries in the Georgetown salons and elsewhere were already plotting to undo him. Indeed, “he saw the price of reelection as a fresh round of conflict with domestic enemies”—read liberal elites.