45 years too late!

In August, Geoff Shepard wrote in the American Spectator,

Watergate special prosecutors, as well as John Dean, have known all this time that Nixon was driven from office by their secret, but erroneous, allegation of personal wrongdoing. Now, 45 years too late, we do, too.

One can only wonder what is going to come out over the next 45 years about the two-and-a-half year effort to bring down President Trump. The Mueller team records, along with the FBI’s, may be sealed today, but they won’t remain so forever.

Read more here.

Black Lives Matter and much more

Jonah Goldberg notices that Bill Clinton got upset at some Black Lives Matter protesters the other day. Jonah's thoughts on Black Lives Matter:

The Black Lives Matter movement is not without its legitimate complaints and arguments -- I’m in favor of some criminal-justice reforms. But they want to work from the assumption that there are no black bad actors in this story. It’s white supremacy all the way down. The problem with this is that even if white supremacy -- whatever people mean by that -- is the massive problem some lefties imagine, it still doesn’t excuse bad individual moral choices. Excuses don’t become explanations simply because you shout them. It’s a very weird corollary to social-justice logic. If you see everyone simply as representatives of groups -- white oppressors and black victims -- you withdraw the moral agency from individual actors on both sides of the equation (which, technically speaking, is racist). White people become agents of oppression and morally culpable even if they’ve done nothing wrong. Black criminals who prey on innocent black people become victims, about whom no one can say an unkind word.

Jonah further notes about Bill and Hillary,

One fun consequence of all this is that Bill very well could turn out to be a liability for Hillary, which would be kind of hilarious given that Hillary would be just another left-wing activist lawyer were it not for her husband. She rode her Arkansas mule all of the way to the White House gates only to see the sign reading, “No Mules Allowed.”

Besides these comments, Jonah has many insightful things to say about such diverse topics as George W. Bush, Donald Trump, progressivism, Richard Nixon, classical liberalism, statism, and much more here.

He considered service his honor

Did you know that there is a website called Watergate.info? Here is something I found there:

On April 27, 1994 President Nixon's former Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger, spoke at Nixon’s funeral. Here are the remarks he gave that day:

During the final week of Richard Nixon’s life, I often imagined how he would have reacted to the tide of concern, respect, admiration and affection evoked by his last great battle. His gruff pose of never paying attention to media comment would have been contradicted by a warm glow and the ever-so-subtle hint that another recital of the commentary would not be unwelcome. And without quite saying so, he would have conveyed that it would mean a lot to him if Julie and Tricia, David and Ed were told of his friends’ pride in this culmination to an astonishing life.

When I learned the final news, by then so expected, yet so hard to accept, I felt a profound void. In the words of Shakespeare: “He was a man. Take him. For all in all, I shall not look upon his like again.”
In the conduct of foreign policy, Richard Nixon was one of the seminal presidents. He came into office when the forces of history were moving America from a position of dominance to one of leadership. Dominance reflects strength. Leadership must be earned. And Richard Nixon earned that leadership role for his country with courage, dedication and skill.

When Richard Nixon took his Oath of Office, 550,000 Americans were engaged in combat in a place as far away from the United States as it was possible to be. America had no contact with China, the world’s most populous nation. No negotiations with the Soviet Union, the other nuclear superpower. Most Moslem countries had broken diplomatic relations with the United States, and Middle East diplomacy was stalemated. All of this in the midst of the most anguishing domestic crisis since the Civil War.

When Richard Nixon left office, an agreement to end the war in Vietnam had been concluded, and the main lines of all subsequent policy were established: permanent dialogue with China; readiness without illusion to ease tensions with the Soviet Union; a peace process in the Middle East; the beginning, via the European Security Conference, of establishing human rights as an international issue, weakening Soviet hold on Eastern Europe.
Richard Nixon’s foreign policy goals were long-range. And he pursued them without regard to domestic political consequences. When he considered our nation’s interests at stake, he dared confrontations, despite the imminence of elections and also in the midst of the worst crisis of his life. And he bore, if with some pain, the disapproval of longtime friends and allies over relaxing tensions with China and the Soviet Union. He drew strength from a conviction. He often expressed to me the price for doing things halfway is no less than for doing it completely. So we might as well do them properly. That’s Richard Nixon’s greatest accomplishment. It was as much moral as it was political — to lead from strength at a moment of apparent weakness, to husband the nation’s resilience and, thus, to lay the basis for victory in the Cold War.

Shy and withdrawn, Richard Nixon made himself succeed in the most gregarious of professions, and steeled himself to conspicuous acts of extraordinary courage. In the face of wrenching domestic controversy, he held fast to his basic theme that the greatest free nation in the world had a duty to lead, and no right to abdicate.
Richard Nixon would be so proud that President Clinton and all living former Presidents of the United States are here, symbolizing that his long and sometimes bitter journey had concluded in reconciliation.
I wish that in his final hours I could have told him about Brian McDonald who, during the Cambodian crisis, had been fasting on a bench in Lafayette Park, across from the White House until, as he said, “President Nixon redeemed his pledge to withdraw American forces from their anguished country in two months” — a promise which was, in fact, kept.
Across the chasm of the decades, Brian called me the day Richard Nixon fell ill and left a message: “When you talk to President Nixon, tell him that I’m praying for him.”

So let us now say goodbye to our gallant friend. He stood on pinnacles that dissolved in the precipice. He achieved greatly and he suffered deeply. But he never gave up. In his solitude, he envisaged a new international order that would reduce lingering enmities, strengthen historic friendships, and give new hope to mankind — a vision where dreams and possibilities conjoined.

Richard Nixon ended the war. And he advanced the vision of peace of his Quaker youth. He was devoted to his family. He loved his country. And he considered service his honor. It was a privilege to have been allowed to help him.

Ted Cruz's candidacy

Since Ted Cruz is leading in Iowa, the first state to vote in 2016, National Review's Rich Lowry decides to analyze Cruz's candidacy:

...Certainly, Cruz isn’t ascending on the basis of warm feelings from his colleagues. Cruz portrays his unpopularity within the Senate as establishment distaste for him as a lonely man of principle. But it’s a genuine personal dislike. Not that Cruz cares. In fact, a key to what he has been able to achieve is his apparent immunity to the reflexive desire to be liked by people around you, a weakness to which almost all of us fall prey. Cruz is free of the peer pressure that typically makes all senators, at some level, team players.

...Is all the effort on Cruz’s part only in the cause of a 1964-style ideological blowout? No. The country’s too evenly divided for another Goldwater-style landslide loss, and Hillary Clinton is a deeply flawed candidate. But Cruz has major vulnerabilities. He’s more ideologically defined than George W. Bush in 2000 or Barack Obama in 2008, and his current theory of the general election — that he need turn out only conservatives — is a comforting fable.

...Cruz penned an op-ed with Paul Ryan last April that was a ringingly stalwart argument for trade-promotion authority. Two months later, when a brush fire erupted on the right over “Obamatrade,” Cruz abruptly reversed course and came out against trade-promotion authority — he cited procedural reasons — and then opposed the underlying trade agreement as well. The country’s too evenly divided for another Goldwater-style landslide loss. Or consider immigration. Cruz used to make stirring professions of his support for legal immigration, demonstrated by his advocacy for drastic increases in the H-1B visa program. As soon as Trump attacked H-1Bs last August, the odds of Cruz’s changing on the issue were quite high. Sure enough, he now opposes greater legal immigration and wants a moratorium on H-1Bs. The way insiders and the primary electorate view Cruz is vastly different. Where political insiders can see the gears whirring and hear the practiced lines in each Cruz speech, the average voter sees and hears only a smooth, pitch-perfect performance.

But Cruz has major vulnerabilities. He’s more ideologically defined than George W. Bush in 2000 or Barack Obama in 2008, and his current theory of the general election — that he need turn out only conservatives — is a comforting fable. Marco Rubio and Chris Christie are both, in their own ways, more winsome, and it’s easier to see how each of them could pick off Obama states. But Cruz has always understood that you have to win the primary to win the general. He has set about to do it in truly impressive fashion. Whoever is going to beat him better know what he’s doing — because Cruz certainly does.

Read more here.

What difference does it make?

The best book thread on the internet

The best post I have read today is the Sunday morning book thread by Oregon Muse at Ace of Spades. First he writes about

As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl by John Colapinto is the account of the tragic case of David Reimer, whose penis was destroyed in a botched circumcision and whose parents followed the advice of psychologist Dr. John Money, who assigned their son a new gender.

...Colapinto's book is credited with helping to accelerate the decline in gender reassignment surgeries performed on infants with congenital malformations or penile loss.

Next the Muse looks at a number of Barry Goldwater books. Remember this ad by the creepy "smug, arrogant, sanctimonious liberal hypocrite" Bill Moyers?.

...back in the day, he was in fact, LBJ's hatchet man, and he took dirty politics and the smear campaign to a whole 'nother level.

Finally, the Muse tells us about Evan Thomas's new book on Richard Nixon, Being Nixon: A Man Divided. which portrays Nixon as

much less the evil mastermind of 1970s caricature - and much more a Jekyll-and-Hyde character constantly at war with himself.

Muse sums up,

Everything has become so politicized, it's going to take many years before honest histories will be able to be written about our time. It will be many years before we get historians who are interested merely in facts and objective analysis without grinding their favorite political axes. If a writer from the liberal tabloid "Newsweak" can publish a book about Richard Nixon without casting him as The Worst Villain In The Universe, maybe that's a start.

Finally, Oregon Muse tells us about a "libertarian noire" book entitled Hard Bite,which is

a novel about a paraplegic vigilante with a hooker girlfriend and a bad attitude who has made it his life's mission to track down hit-and-run drivers and kill them with the help of his capuchin monkey.

Read more here.