[sparky]

.
Quinny
Thanks for the praise , much undeserved
I quite like to turn over accepted notions and dig a bit under
as far a Nixon is concerned ,
He
_ Signed the bill for the EPA
_ Had a war on drug with a rehabilitation side , the rehabilitation side got dropped by the Carter administration

_ Negotiated the deepest arm control agreement with the Soviets
which has just expired.... to everybody grief ,
there is as of now ,no substitute

_ Ended the Vietnam war , he did it by squeezing the North Vietnamese until they winced , to let him get the combat troops out in some degree of order ....after that , they could have the place .
it wasn't pretty but it worked more or less
( the last days of Saigon were pretty bad news footage )

_ Made the big opening to China ,
for thirty years this has been a masterstroke ( not so much now ... )

_ Decoupled the U.S. dollar from the Breton Wood agreement
the U.S. government was spending like crazy between the Vietnam war , the space program and Lyndon B. Johnson great society were a huge hole in the budget , inflation was in the 15%

_ Totally stood by Israel during the Yom Kippur war with an air bridge of weapons , then told them to get real and make peace with Egypt
so far that's the only progress ever made in the region
_ got into a war with the FBI which was running out of control under Hoover
when the old bastard died , he pounced on them and got deep troathed
in a weird alliance of FBI hardliners and liberal papers

[Sixstrings]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PrestonSturges', 'M')aybe "grandiose" is code for "uppity?"

[Umber]

After the midterms our American Narcissus, Obummer, might be smoking more but enjoying it less. I predict that trend will accelerate as we head for 2012.


Umber

[Oneaboveall]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Sixstrings', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PrestonSturges', 'M')aybe "grandiose" is code for "uppity?"

[Timo]

Most folks who read regularly the stuff on this website know where i stand on political issues. I'm not going to get into any of that here, but i did want to offer a perception that i think is fundamentally good for the country that presented itself during this past election. Specifically, i'm talking about the issues that were used in all of the campaigns. Gone were nearly all references to homosexual marriage, abortion, and all other social engineering issues that the far right made up to sacre people into voting for them. Instead, what we got out of this last election was a real discussion of legitimate issues, like the national debt, and federal spending, and genuine economic concerns. I'm probably only being naive, but those other made up social issues seem to have lost their relavance compared to the much larger and much more serious issues that easily affect the whole global economy. We haven't gotten to legitimate energy issues, yet, but the mere fact that the right-wing nut jobs gave up on using those phony scare tactics to win this election, i think, bodes well for the future.