Your vote in the 1960 presidential election

[Mr. Illini]

Blue avatars stanning a disgraced former President who was nearly removed from office after it came to light that he had illegally used his position of power to target his political enemies.

Some things never change!

Kennedy with and without hindsight. Nixon was a bad President, the author of the war on drugs, and also an effing crook.

[Mr. Illini]

Nixon.

What is it with you and Richard Nixon?

Better question, what's with everyone else here and JFK?

Dodging! Tsk tsk.

Doesn't change the point at all.

Nixon, even as a criminal or a bit of plastic, just keeps being the least evil or least incompetent option in most of the half century he had power, and once he was out, the New Gilded Age was beginning. Both sides governed to the right of him by default, and his own party went off the ethical deep end.

JFK was just under camp incompetent for the time, propped up by riches and telegeny. While he did end up better, that would be hard to gauge without hindsight.

And that's not even going into The Butterfly Effects.

Nixon being the least evil option? Who are you comparing him to? Both sides governing to his right? If you seriously think Kennedy, Johnson, Stevenson, Kefauver, and Humphrey governed to the right of Nixon I've got beachfront property in Kansas to sell you. His party went off the ethical deep end? I guarantee you that did not start with Ronnie Raygun. Nixon, who sabotaged the 1968 peace talks, Nixon who was involved in a corrupt funds scandal in the 50s, Nixon who expanded the war without telling congress, and Nixon who lied lied about almost everything. Have you read the Ehrlichman quote about the catastrophic drug war?

"We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Sure JFK was a incompetent with a fat ego propped up by television, but this is Richard Nixon we're talking about. Who even by 1960 had put himself on the wrong side of the issues of the day and was a staunch McCarthyist, and was already ethically compromised.

 

"The only place where you and I disagree is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about civilians, and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care."

"I still think we ought to take the North Vietnamese dikes out now. Will that drown people? [Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.] No, no, no, I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry? ... The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?. I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes."

"I have the greatest affection for them [blacks] but I know they're not going to make it for 500 years. They aren't. You know it, too. The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest, but they do have some concept of family life. They don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like."

"As long as I'm sitting in the chair, there's not going to be any Jew appointed to that court. [No Jew] can be right on the criminal-law issue."

“I don't think a woman should be in any government job whatever. I mean, I really don't. The reason why I do is mainly because they are erratic and emotional.“