Would Ron Sider Trust Richard Nixon?

Published on by D. G. Hart

Ron Sider comes out for Hillary over Trump and appeals to statesmanship:

Do we evangelical Christians trust Donald Trump to be a wise statesman leading the world to avoid conflict and war? The US president is the leader of the democratic world and the commander of the world’s largest military. A wise, thoughtful president who listens carefully to the best-informed advisers is essential if the United States and China are to avoid catastrophic conflict in the next decade or two.

Trump has absolutely no experience in foreign affairs or global diplomacy. He has repeatedly demonstrated arrogant, impulsive decision making. I can’t trust him to control the nuclear trigger. In August, 50 of the nation’s most senior Republican national security officials issued a public letter saying Trump “lacks the character, values, and experience” to be president, and added that Trump “would be the most reckless president in American history” and would “put at risk our country’s national security.”

I don’t understand why Richard Nixon doesn’t haunt anyone who thinks of backing Clinton. It’s not like paranoia and secrecy worked out that well for the Republican president. And now baby boomers have come to terms with Watergate?

Notice these parallels:

Not even Clinton’s harshest critics could claim that Servergate (or Chappaquadata, or whatever it may come to be called) constitutes a high crime or misdemeanor. But it does connote a reflexive wariness about her enemies – a wariness that sometimes seems to border on paranoia – that has long dogged Clinton, and that struck at least a few old Nixon hands as familiar.

“This is like the Nixon tapes, in a sense,” said Ken Khachigian, who was a young speechwriter on Nixon’s White House staff and is now a grizzled veteran of California’s Republican political wars. “Everybody wanted access. We resisted, and then they were eked out in death by a thousand cuts. Finally they were expropriated and now belong to the archives.”

And that doesn’t even capture the hi-jinks that went into Hillary’s recent physical collapse.

Which also is reminiscent of Nixon:

It was 1960, and Nixon was preparing for the nation’s first televised presidential debate. The debate became a case study in political image-making, with Kennedy looking healthy and vital while Nixon was waxen, sweaty and haggard.

“He was sick during the debate,” Scalettar said.

Only the doctor and Nixon’s advisers knew that Nixon was suffering from a serious infection — the result of a knee injury on a campaign trip to Greensboro, N.C. …

Nixon had a staph infection, which brought on septic (poisonous) arthritis. And he refused to take time off from the trail because he had promised to campaign in every state.

Scalettar wrote that the illness, Nixon’s failure to rest and recuperate normally, his loss of time due to illness and his appearance “seriously impaired his effectiveness as a campaigner.”

He’s convinced that Nixon’s medical secret contributed to his narrow loss to Kennedy — by slightly more than 100,000 votes — that November 56 years ago. Coming clean about how sick he was right before that debate may have severely altered the course of American history.

It doesn’t add up to support for Trump. But are Americans ready for another constitutional crisis?

11 thoughts on “Would Ron Sider Trust Richard Nixon?”

  1. Peggy Noonan brings up a good point out of the archives: It all started with Travelgate.

    It comes to this: Which arm do you want to cut off? T**** (He who shall not be named) projects a persona of instability and egoism; C***** (structural parallelism) channels the spirit of Borgia.

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  3. ‘Basket of deplorables’. Where’s the Mitt reaction? And then the NYT thinks it has to be HRC because the glass ceiling needs to be broken and it takes the familiarity level(of the citizenry) with someone like HRC to get it done. Ummm, right, because Sarah Palin was roundly rejected because she came out of nowhere. I still think there’s a battery charger and an insulin pump underneath those neck to ankle latch hook rug outfits.

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  4. This is why Sider endorsed Bush I over Clinton right? Does anyone take this clown seriously? Why not just be honest and admit he prefers the open borders and larger welfare state favored by Clinton over more restricted borders and more limited welfare stste likely under Trump. If Condoleezza Rice espoused Trumps basic policy outline would he really endorse her over Clinton? Of course not. No more than Dobson, Falwell, or Kenedy would have endorsed a prolife, antissm, social democrat for the presidency.

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  7. @mboss, I’m thinking DGH should embrace the opportunity to sit at the feet of renowned historian and 1k-transformationalist Tim Barton….and in an OPC church no less!

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  9. Isn’t Chuck Colson deceased?

    Hello all- I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file. Basically, they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out.

    I am not sure if something like this is possible with PowerShell, or exporting all of the emails to MSG and doing find/replaces with a batch processing program of some sort.

    Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Rick Perlstein sees parallels between Nixon and Trump (surprise):

    Donald Trump and Richard Nixon have at least one thing in common: They are the two most paranoid and vindictive men ever to win the presidency.

    I guess Perlstein ignored Hillary because she is a she and lost. But come on. Imagine all the headaches Nixon and Clinton would have saved themselves without worrying about people out to get them.

    Perlstein doubles down and says that President Obama’s surveillance is the good kind compared to Nixon’s:

    Today the government can monitor virtually every form of communication, including the contents of emails, phone calls, online searches, and a host of personal data. Barack Obama, of course, has the same tools at his disposal; indeed, he presided over their construction and expansion.

    But Obama is good; Nixon and Trump, bad:

    it’s no wonder that there’s been no public uprising against this new surveillance state; it’s been in the hands of a president who is about as far removed from obsessive score-settling as anyone could conceivably be. (“He’s Making a List,” New Republic, Jan./Feb. 2017)

    Hey, Rick, how do you interpret the vote?

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  11. Missing the obvious:

    Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton touted her qualifications, which only reinforced the fact that she was the candidate of the establishment and the status quo. . . .

    Hillary Clinton, especially, seemed to have absorbed the norms of “media training” a little too much. Media training teaches you to stay on message, refuse to answer questions you do not want to answer, to keep from making a major blunder on tape. Over time, the dodging slides into an obvious lack of candor. Voters noticed and became far more willing to forgive Trump his frequent verbal missteps and deepen their distrust of Clinton.

    She had as many skeletons as Trump. She had political skeletons. Trump had vulgar skeletons. And now we know the Moral Majority was right. Morality matters more than politics.

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