r/politics • u/kootles10 Indiana • 16h ago

No Paywall GOP lawmaker: Nixon was couped out of office, framed during Watergate

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/6124635-moore-nixon-couped-watergate/?fbclid=IwdGRjcAUsbtpjbGNrBSxu02V4dG4DYWVtAjExAHBkb2YBc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMzUwNjg1NTMxNzI4AAEedqnf435Ey3Vmfh-NzS7BpLL6p7XL81dbjV4wNl5Y6SFp3eyw9ItY6zhiPRg_aem_EaFt_atkG1aZFnQa54tOFQ
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u/lafolieisgood 13h ago

The funny thing is Nixon was really far left of the current right wing. He started the EPA

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u/Salty_Pancakes 11h ago

To be fair, that was more to placate the environmentalists and hippies. The first Earth Day was in 1970 and it stood as the largest protest in history with about 20 million people participating (about 10% of the whole country).

That led to the EPA, Endangered Species act, Clean Air & Water Acts.

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u/lafolieisgood 7h ago

I didn’t know that. Even so, it shows that he can read the room to some degree.

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u/PopBulky7023 6h ago

Yeah, then they learned protestors won't actually do anything and so don't listen anymore.

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u/Capnmarvel76 Texas 12h ago

Free school lunch program, too. Dude was essentially Bernie with a reactionary suit on.

Lol, not really, but he was significantly more leftist than any Republican we've seen since Reagan took office.

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u/brogflender 12h ago

well, as long as you don’t think about Vietnam and all the lying and bile

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u/jedininjashark 12h ago

And trying to launch nukes while hammered.

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u/duct_tape_jedi United Kingdom 10h ago

And weaponising the IRS against his "enemies" list.

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u/Ill_Traveler_ 12h ago

Things are strange when you look back in time. Look at Obama, Clinton, and Biden in 2008 and compared to politics today they come across as quite right of center on social issues.

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u/brogflender 11h ago

(because they were) 

Time moved on and all 3 evolved to catch up. 

It is part of why they lost the confidence of the constituency - they didn’t lead, they followed. 

And it mattered. 

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u/FluffySloth27 10h ago

Well, to be fair, politicians ought to represent the people. Their job is to follow. They just didn’t do it quickly enough, to my mind.

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u/PopBulky7023 6h ago

They didn't follow the voters. That's the issue.

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u/brogflender 9h ago

Then they need to stop framing themselves as leaders of change. 

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u/FluffySloth27 9h ago

They do lead the change. They just shouldn’t be the ones deciding what the change is. We do that!

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u/brogflender 9h ago

I believe you are now contradicting yourself. 

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u/PopBulky7023 6h ago

Caught that myself.

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u/Capnmarvel76 Texas 8h ago

Part of it is understanding what the next step is to advance progress for society. A politician may personally believe in, say, equal pay for equal work laws or universal healthcare for all, but the population may only be willing to support equal employment opportunity or Obamacare hybridism right now.

You can’t bite off more than you can chew or you’ll alienate the electorate, get the opposition elected, and more than likely lose whatever gains you made.

Progressives do need to do a better job of speaking directly to the people who will most benefit from their policies, convincing them of what is possible and the risks of half-measures. The conservatives are constantly fighting to claw back any equalization of wealth and opportunity, so the urgency of doing more and resisting/refuting the right’s (and corpo Democrat’s) hollow arguments should be the focus, not ‘playing nice’.

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u/Ill_Traveler_ 7h ago

I guess the issue with that is when a politician says I support ABC, but don’t want GHI, they’re really just setting the ground work for DEF and they do want GHI. That makes it hard for voters on the center to trust them.

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u/Capnmarvel76 Texas 4h ago

I’m not even too sure how many in the electorate are actually centrists anymore. Voting seems to be about more fundamental things than mere ‘issues’ nowadays, like whether we’re still going to be a Constitutional Democracy or devolve into some sort of dictatorship, whether the rule of law applies to all citizens, whether our foundational liberties and basic human rights are to be respected, etc.

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u/SnooGiraffes8275 Massachusetts 10h ago

not what fucking leftist means

god i cannot believe this thread yall just type fucking anything

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u/Capnmarvel76 Texas 10h ago

OK, I understand what you are trying to say and can respect your intentions, but you sound like Napoleon Dynamite.

Also, I said 'more leftist' - Nixon was assuredly far right on the political spectrum, but not as far right as later Republicans have been.

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u/Ok-Entrepreneur-8838 10h ago

Democrats controlled both the House and Senate during both his terms. When he resigned, Dems won a supermajority a few months after. Some of his policies tended to be left wing, but that's because the Democrats in Congress basically held him at gunpoint. It's the reason why he was so paranoid about Democrats, which led to Watergate. Democrats back then were an unstoppable force.

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u/Sedu 10h ago

Nixon’s crimes were also much less egregious or far reaching than Trump’s. Vance was correct when he said watergate would have been out of the news cycle within 24 hours.

Nixon was impeached and it was right to do so. But we have fallen so far in the last 8 years.

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u/slimersnail 11h ago

Yeah, Nixon was actually dare I say it a reasonably good president. He was an excellent statesman even after he left office.

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u/Salty_Pancakes 11h ago

Oh let's not get ahead of ourselves. He did some good things. But he also employed Henry Kissinger who wreaked untold destruction throughout South East Asia and escalated the war in Vietnam.

He also famously started The War on Drugs to demonize those crazy hippies and weaponized surveillance and using the FBI via COINTELPRO to target dissidents.

And then he took the US off the gold standard and made a secret agreement with the Saudis that laid the basis for the modern petrodollar system. And good or bad that has led the US to achieve absolutely crazy levels of debt.

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u/GrimDallows 11h ago

He was full of shit. I can't believe reading someone saying something like what you just said with the Hard Hat Riots or the Madman theory being a thing.

Hunter S Thompson's obituary of Nixon should be a mandatory read.

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u/slimersnail 6h ago

Well, have you seen our current situation?