Stooping To Be President

I swear I'll stop doing this, but since I have to get the Hunter Thompson book back to the library before Mr. Bookman shows up at my door in some sort of Ibogaine frenzy, here's one last highly relevant excerpt from FEAR AND LOATHING; right before the 1972 election was to end in a Nixon landslide, Thompson wrote:

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it--that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

The tragedy of this is that George Mc Govern, for all his mistakes and all of his imprecise talk about "new politics" and "honesty in government," is really one of the few men who've run for president of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

Mc Govern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?

We may just get a chance to find out, assuming that Mitt Romney gets the GOP nomination; a taller, better looking, and more polished hustler than Nixon, not a used-car salesman so much as the owner of a string of luxury auto dealerships inherited from his daddy (say this for Nixon, he was at least a self-made "greedy little hustler"; these days, Republicans prefer the dynastic types), Romney is just the man to show us how low you have to be willing to stoop to reach the White House. He's been stooping for the last twenty years or so, and all that stooping may be about to pay off...

Comments

[Jack Shifflett]

And just who referred to my blog as "dribble," by which I can only assume they meant "drivel"? In any case, yes, it's my contention that Romney incarnates the soul, if not the style, of Richard Nixon--both openly and obviously desperate to succeed, both perplexed and even angered by why they aren't liked (much less loved), both resentful of the effortless success of undeserving upstarts like Jack Kennedy and Barack Obama,and both displaying, in their clumsy attempts to seem like "real people," all the humanity of a simulacrum.
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[Mike Kincaid]

Who says no one read this dribble? The spirit of Nixon lives in Romney, Inc. ? What are the shares trading at? Mike