“Barack Obama is the president that Nixon always wanted to be”

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• "If Bill Clinton is elected president I know this country has truly gone to hell." Richard Nixon quote.

  • Imagine how he would have felt about Obama!

    • It would have killed him if he wasn't already dead.

• Absolute power is the goal of every politician. The only differences are how long it takes to seriously start on the road (i.e., once elected, make the transition from regular person to a true power-hungry politician, understanding completely that in many cases they start on this road in college or even HS, way before any election), how avidly they pursue it, and how successful they are in achieving it.

  It's why James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, et al created the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

  • andre53:"Absolute power is the goal of every politician."

    I think that goes a little too far, andre. I think there are a number of politicians who want to make the world a better place and have no designs on absolute power. Of course, there are quite a number who want "absolute power". I think a politician with a traumatic upbringing and a weak belief or non-belief in a better life after this one can be tempted to make himself into a god, setting up the possibility of a dictatorship. That's what worried me about Bill Clinton and worries me twice as much about Barack Obama. But those two also desire to leave office and make oodles of money, thank God.

    • MDLION:

      Too far? Maybe. Too cynical? Definitely.

      Yes, there are many politicians who want to make the world a better place. It's not a black and white question. The problem always (yes, there I go with absolute words again), that "Better" is defined by them, and usually, the way to get to that "better world" starts involving force. E.g., I don't doubt for one second that Bloomberg honestly wants to make the world a better place. Some try to make the world better in ways that with which we agree, and others in ways with which we disagree. And the agreement/disagreement has many shades of grey. We have to separate the fact that we happen to agree with a politicians goals from the methods used. We may agree with a guy, but force is still force.

      And there are those on the "right" that see things that way too. Pat Buchanan (generally considered to be on the right - I don't personally agree), and Newt Gingrich come to mind off the top of my head. They have a vision of how the world should be (not a crime in itself - we all have a vision of that, clear or limited), and think that it's the gov't's job to engineer that vision.

      "[Political] offices are as acceptable here as elsewhere, and whenever a man cast a longing eye on them, a rottenness begins in his conduct." - Thomas Jefferson

      • andre, this discussion, paticularly in regard to Bloomberg, makes me think of a great C.S. Lewis quote: "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

        Conservatives generally defend natural law truths like the sacredness of human life. Liberals generally move towards tyranny by claiming violations of the natural law are rights, or by making into a big deal minor matters like the size of one's soda. While Bloomberg tells pizza drivers what size sodas they can deliver, New York City has 90,000 abortions per year. Bloomberg is precisely the type Jesus was talking about when he discussed those who strain the gnat and swallow the camel.

    • in all honesty, Barack Obama doesn't have the talent it would take to pull a putsch. He's just not a strong leader. Multiple systems would oppose him and he lacks in strong, loyal allies. Stalin would've drank from his skull

      • Which again begs the question. How the hell did he legally get re-elected. I appreciate some didn't vote for him OR Romney, this splitting the conservative vote (thanks creep) but seriously even the left supposedly is pulling away, so how did he get re-elected? That alone should raise some eyebrows as to the legitimacy of the election. At least when the Bush/Gore debacle, multiple recounts and the inclusion of the military votes showed Bush really did win, and the SCOTUS decision merely sped things up a bit.

      • It would have to originate from beyond the borders. And you are right, Stalin would have roasted him as do most other heads of state. Weak and appeasing are not strong qualities in any leader.

    • Clinton never desired to leave office. He was forced by Consitutional decree. If he could run again right now, Obama would be 6 feet under before he figured out what was happening.

  • and we are paying the bill of the left

• A little history lesson for all those moronic Commiecrats out there. Nixon was a choirboy compared to the crap "Dear Leader" has pulled with Benghazi and Fast and Furious, and resigned because of it.

  • And at least Nixon got a few points for foreign policy, paranoid as he was. What has Dear Leader done? ANYONE? ANYONE?

• Really sad. All the young people of the 60s and 70s protesting abuse of power by Nixon - speaking truth to power - are now just part of the gang of the oversized bully government that does what it wants, freedom and liberty be damned.

  • Having been one of said protesters, I can assure you that abuse of power was not the issue. We were everything you see today - supporting every degenerate, criminal, and social parasite; and against anything that symbolized America.

    It was not gov't abuse of power we detested. It was specifically THOSE people that we wanted out of power. It was not a twist of fate, or some weird irony that the Hilarys and Kerrys suddenly became what they supposedly protested while in college.

    It was the plan all along.

    All of us leftists had every intention right from the start to use all the force we could possibly use to force others to "do the right thing", which needess to say, was to be decided by us.

    When I hear a conservative say "Doesn't Harry Belafonte know how awful Castro is, and how horrible the conditions are in Cuba?", my answer is

    "Yes, of course he knows. And he has no problem with it."

    • Yes I suppose such controlling and dishonest behavior is largly hard-wired in. What made you change, if I might ask?

      • What made me change:

        1. Reading "None Dare Call It Conspiracy"

        I'll wait for you to stop laughing ...

        Seriously, one thing that book taught me was that not everything you hear in the news or learn in history class is necessarily the way it really is. In addition to being a reformed leftist, I am also a reformed conspiratorialist.

        2. Reading "Atlas Shrugged" - my first Ayn Rand book. Speaks for itself.

        3. Observation - I mean that in the fullest sense of the word. Observation like Thomas Sowell does it. Without bias. If your observation forces you to completely change your viewpoint, you're probably doing it right.

        4. Time (+ observation) - I saw where my comrades were going. Not my personal, face-to-face comrades. They were mostly going deeper into a drug haze. I'm talking about my symbolic comrades, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, etc. And I know that Abbie and Jerry ended up in very different worlds, and that is significant too.

        It's pretty much what David Horowitz describes, except that he was older, and much more closely tied to groups like the SDS, Weather Underground, Black Panthers. He saw what was going on and saw that it was really really ugly. I was 16 when the Columbia sit-ins happened, led by my hero at the time, Mark Rudd. I aspired to take that to the next level. Lucky for me, I was younger. Otherwise I would have ended up either in jail or dead from being blown up by a bomb I was making.

      • Trust me, when the next Republican President is elected, and he does the same kind of things Obama is doing, the protester class will be going nuts.

    • Exactly, it never was abuse of power, it was always a left/right struggle.
      Think about it. Bill Ayers was a huge part of it then, and in the middle of it still.