!MON NOXIN

Apparently it's Richard Nixon's birthday today, suggesting that Gerry Ford checked out a little early just to avoid the whole issue. Wonkette is running Nixon stories praising him for his surprisingly liberal policies while vilifying him for giving jobs to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumfeld, the two men who would ultimately destroy western civilization.

I'm reminded of Harry Shearer, and why he recommends a visit to the Nixon Memorial Library in Yorba Linda: "It's like a theme park, and the twin themes are paranoia and revenge."

Nixon looks pretty good from this vantage point. Okay, maybe he was sweaty and shifty in that debate with Kennedy but he won on substance, if you weren't watching on TV. Vietnam? He inherited it from Democrats. Paranoid racist who overstepped the limits of his office? Okay, yeah. But it was nothing LIKE the power grab going on in that office nowadays (said to be Cheney's idea, by the way) and you don't get more paranoid/racist than carpet-bombing two countries because they house people who look like the 19 guys who blew up your office buildings.

Then again, it's early to say how GW Bush will be judged. Maybe 40 years from now I'll look back and say yeah, George wasn't as bad as I thought at the time - at least he allowed blogs! Then I'll shuffle back to my cot in the Atheist Internment Camp, gnaw on my boiled potato and wait for my weekly beating at the hands of ruthless guard robots.

(BTW, hat tip to Skot for the title of this post, an allusion to the helvetica medium typeface on the NIXON NOW! buttons, which spelled something else entirely when turned upside down.)