Go to your room George

You're probably not old enough to remember the Checkers speech, or the "you won't have Nixon to kick around any more" outburst, but there's something vaguely Nixonian about Bush's rejoinder to Press Corps questioning today while he was cutting a ribbon to officially open the newly renovated briefing room. The condescending implication that the press are just rabble, asking questions just to be annoying and acting like a patient but very sarcastic martyr, had tricky Dick written all over it. I may be imagining it, but I sense that he senses his inevitable helplessness.

"Let's do this. Let me cut the ribbon ... and then why don't you all yell simultaneously. Like, really loudly. And that way, you might get noticed. I'll, like, listen, internalize, play like I'm gonna answer the question, and then smile at you and just say 'got it. Thanks. Thanks for such a solid, sound question."

That's vintage Nixonian martyrdom mixed in with the snottiness and sarcasm of a born loser who knows he's losing again and knows that we know it. There's something in it of Ratso Rizzo banging on the car hood and shouting "I'm walking here."

We're not to the tearful resignation stage yet, and I don't think Boss Cheney will let him declare he's not a crook, but the martyr complex is showing. It showed in Ohio when another caustic reply to a 13 year old girl's simple question about immigration made her break into tears - upstaging his spoiled child act.

Of course it's an act that comes from his nature; he is a spoiled brat with an arrogance that comes from long experience with self contempt over mediocre achievement, multiple business failures, weaseling out of military service and now a Crusade turned to ashes. He's been surrounded with sycophants since daddy became an important public figure and he's employed an army of world renowned yes men to prop up his rickety ego, but it's falling apart. People are leaving. People are standing up to him and so he barks at a little girl.

But he's a spoiled brat with an army and a navy and nuclear weapons and sometimes when you send a naughty kid to his room, he burns the house down.

Cross posted at The Reaction

Some of the people all of the time

Somewhere in the heaps and piles and boxes of things I should have tossed out years ago is a reel of 1/4 inch recording tape with an actor reading from a transcription of Richard Nixon's infamous tapes. It's read by an actor because of the outrage from the Nixon loving Republicans, many of whom are very much with us today. They were able to tell us and convince the media that any direct exposure to the tapes would be misleading and that they had to be read by someone else in a lugubrious robot voice to avoid any "bias" creeping into it. Presumably they also had straight faces when they made this argument. Despite 37 years of ever increasing documentation proving that Nixon was not only a crook, but a bigot, liar, scofflaw and quasi-paranoid binge drinker with a staff of people willing to kill to keep him in office, the hard core still cling to the fiction.

The "don't believe what you see or hear" lobby is still here telling us that nothing is true and nothing can be trusted unless you hear it from them, but at long last the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace Museum in Yorba Linda California is demolishing the Watergate exhibit, not because the public has lost interest but because it's even more of an embarrassing monument to mendacity than the Creation Museum. People who are still convinced that Nixon was the innocent victim of Liberals and the Liberal Jew-Controlled media Tricky Dick liked to speak of with his equally tricky friend Billy Graham, will now have to travel elsewhere to enjoy the rank lies and deceptions they are addicted to.

I read in Connecting.the.Dots ( a site I enthusiastically recommend,) that the fake exhibits with all proof of Nixon's perfidy removed are themselves being removed and that the renovated museum will now offer real transcripts and some 78,000 pages of previously hidden papers.

It's taken some 17 years to replace the Nixon Fiction with something resembling the truth. I wonder how long it will be before the sealed documents of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush will see the light of day. I suspect I won't live to see that happen and that my children and their children may never see the incriminating papers of the Cheney-Bush administration displayed in the shrines that will be built to these men. I hope the United States of America itself lives to see that day and more importantly will learn from it.