This from Monica Crowley “PhD” (the italics are mine, she has a real degree from Columbia but with statements like the following it should be revoked). About Nixon on his 100th birthday she wrote:
How we could use his wise counsel today on Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and al Qaeda. He was, after all, the first president to order a top-secret analysis of Islamic terror (in 1973). We could also use his realism on Russia and China. The world has always been a complicated and dangerous place, but Nixon was one of the rare presidents who could see it functioning as a whole as well as seeing its individual parts. He could also see what the world was going to look like 20 years down the road and dare to make American policy to prepare for that world.
He was once asked how history will remember him, and he replied, “The judgment of history depends on who writes it.” I believe history will be far kinder to Nixon than his contemporaries were, and he will ultimately be considered one of the great modern presidents. Flawed, yes. But he was a tremendously influential leader possessing that rarest of intellectual gifts—vision—and the extraordinary courage to carry it out. This cannot be said for all presidents: Nixon mattered.
Happy 100th birthday, Mr. President! We were lucky to have your leadership, wisdom, and vision—-and I was lucky to have your friendship. Godspeed, sir.I never thought of courage as a descriptor of the former President. Fear and paranoia, which are the opposite of courage, but not courage. She is correct about one thing, Nixon was very influential in every negative way possible. (By the way, this seems to be something of a crusade on the right, the attempt to rehabilitate disgraced former crusaders. A few years ago the shrill Ann Coulter tried this with McCarthy without much luck thankfully).
Of course Monica is a Fox News contributor, contributor on Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze” among other things. Apparently she learned the art of the lie well from her time spent with Mr. Nixon.
There is a determined, willful ignorance about the political right in this country that I find very disturbing. It’s most significant manifestation recently was Karl Rove’s meltdown on Fox News. In spite of all the polling, in spite of the numbers coming in from their own experts on Fox, there was a determined willingness to believe that everyone else is wrong, that everyone else is fudging the numbers because well, that’s what they would do. This weird Freudian Projection might be the most self-reparatory aspect of the conservative movement. They proceed with the assumption that their political foes are up to something underhanded because well, that’s what they would do in that situation and then they proceed to do it. In the late 90s they had this obsession with democrats voting in republican primaries to tilt the election to get a more favorable outcome. Democrats were in fact not doing this, it was purely a paranoid political fantasy until the right started doing it themselves. You see this over and over. If they aren’t manifesting in themselves the sins they project on their enemies they are pilfering wholesale their tactics. Last night I heard Glenn Beck Speaking of Five Year Plans. It’s Loony.
To tie this altogether, almost 20 years ago I heard the right in this county screaming about the “murder” of Vince Foster.That the Clinton administration was engaging in massive cover up and had him killed. The leader of all of this shrillness was G. Gordon Liddy a real convict of real crimes committed by a really corrupt administration. Mr. Liddy never demonstrated an ounce of regret or sign of repentance. He was more than happy to point out the crimes of others however fantastical and imaginary those crimes were. The Real Crimes of Richard Nixon, who Monica Crowley seems so intent on rehabilitating, are nothing compared to these paranoid fantasies.
I have a book by Monica Crowley I thought I remembered but it's been a long time since I've read it. It was published in 1996 after his death. The title is, Nixon Off the Record: His Candid Commentary on People and Politics. She had been a research assistant (ghost writer?) for him in his last days. I think she was an adoring devotee even if she would zing with a minor failing to maintain credibility as a historian. But apparently she may have been trying to ingratiate herself with the conservative movement and the Nixon legacy. He still has lots of fans - I mean more than just his henchmen like Liddy.
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