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| Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States |
09 March 12
mericans
sometimes wonder how the nation’s political process got so unspeakably
nasty with vitriol pouring forth especially from right-wing voices like
Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage, to name just a few. Yet,
whenever called on this ugliness, conservatives insist that they are the
real victims, picked on by the Left.
This destructive and whiny dynamic has existed at
least since the late 1960s when angry passions spilled over from the
Vietnam War and grew worse after Richard Nixon exploited Democratic
dissension on the war to win the White House in 1968 – and then
continued the war for another four nasty years.
As president, Nixon also responded to the fury
splintering American society with wedge issues, appealing to the "silent
majority" and denouncing anti-war protesters as "bums." He rode that
divisive formula to a landslide victory in November 1972 but soon
ensnared himself in the Watergate political spying scandal that drove
him from office in August 1974.
Out of all that anger emerged an American Right that
believed, as an article of faith, that the Democrats and the "liberal
press" had turned Nixon’s run-of-the-mill indiscretions in Watergate
into a constitutional crisis to undo Nixon’s overwhelming electoral
mandate of 1972.
So, over the next two decades – with Nixon in the
background egging on Republican politicians – the Right built an attack
machine that was designed to defend against "another Watergate" but also
was available to destroy the "liberal" enemy. READ MORE
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