I see you read Silent Coup. Mo "Ho" Dean...

Thanks for the visit and the comment, Kevin!

Silent Coup really hit the nail on the head with "The Golden Boy" (that's the "book within the book" about the Deans, to save reading), but the major groundwork was done by Jim Hougan in "Secret Agenda." There's much more, of course, at http://www.watergate.com/

I wish more people knew about this stuff, and as I keep saying, had there been bloggers back in the 1970s, there wouldn't have been Watergate as we know it. (The whole thing would have been hushed up had it been known.....)

To each of our brave men and women who have given or risked their lives for our freedom and their own, I say: Thank you.

Thanks for saying that, Steven. Enjoy the holiday.

Wonkette. A blogger, the Boi From Troy, a Right-Wing man's man who likes football, has often liked to her and once asked: "Wonkette: Left-Wing Blogress?"

"Wonkette". "Washintonienne" (the state or the Death Star?). "Blogress". I love those feminine endings. Dean Esmay once posted a long list of his favorite blogresses. I also love those old words "Negress" and "Jewess". Hmmm.... "WASPette"? Hmmm.... What would be a word for an Irish Catholic woman? Hmmm....

Thank you for your blog on the Watergate imbroglio. I had not seen it before. I love that period. Extremely fascinating. Brings back such good memories. Our family watched the hearings on TV, and I used to watch those hearings at the abode of my friend David Smith, co-creator of the Smith-Anderson spectrum of ideologies.

The _STYLE!_ of it all! President Nixon, Agnew, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Liddy, MacGruder, Rebozo, etc., etc.. The _STYLE!_ of it all. We have had a number of great Presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, the Adamses, Lincoln, FDR during the War), but, of all our Presidents, Nixon was by far the most INTERESTING. The _STYLE!_

We loved to hate Nixon back then. My grandfather loved to hate him so much that he had whole shelves of books on Nixon and the Watergate imbroglio. My father, a historian, had a lot of books on that epoch too. We had a lot of fun. My father and grandfather were liberals in the old FDR-Truman tradition.

But the spectrumological question I'm now asking is: Why did liberals and/or Leftists (both Old Left and New) _hate_ Nixon so? Why do they hate Bush the way they do? And, conversely, why did and do conservatives and/or Rightists hate Clinton so much? Thing is, their actual policies were not that much different.

Nixon did a lot of things that conservatives hated*: wage and price controls, a proposed guaranteed income, affirmative action, recognition of Communist China and detente with Communist Russia. If anybody else had done those things, the Left, from liberals to Communists, would have deified him.

(*I must mention that the John Birch Society hated his guts. Gary Allen wrote a book that I must read someday, "Nixon: The Man Behind the Mask". Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, once theorized that the goal of the Communist or "Insider" Conspiracy was: "...to make Richard Nixon the absolute dictator of the total population of the earth, in order words, _the first ruler of the world_.")

Bush, likewise, is spending more fedral money on education and other welfare-state programs than any President since LBJ, and yet he is hated by the Left. The very name of that giveaway, "No Child Left Behind", is so schmaltzy and Clintonesque that a "bleeding heart" liberal would be bleeding all over it if Clinton had done it.

I remarked at the time that, if President Kennedy rather than president Reagan had proposed the Star Wars defense program, liberals would have praised it as far-seeing visionary idealism and a humane alternative to nuclear deterrence instead of mocking it as they did.

Clinton ended welfare as we knew it, balanced the federal budget, and cracked down on crime, yet he, along with Hillary and even Chelsea, is the personification of evil to many on the Right.

Is it simple partisanship, Republicans vs. Democrats? New York mayor John Lindsay was a Republican and yet was one of the idols of the liberal Left in my day, up there with George McGovern and "Bobby" Kennedy. Senator Henry ("Scoop") Jackson, a Democrat, was disliked by the Left at the same time for his strong stand against Communism.

I think it's deeper than partisanship. Deeper even than their actual views or policies. It seems to me to be a difference in _style_. Yes, I have for a very long time thought that the difference between the Left and the Right largely comes down to a difference in their opposing _styles_. Nixon had an extremely "square" style, hard and tight. Clinton just the opposite, soft and and loose. I've often thought of the Right vs. the Left as the Yang vs. the Yin, respectively.

Interesting questions about it all.... Hmmm....

"...in order words"? Don't know why I wrote that. Archie Bunker?