Nixon & Today’s Radicals Cross(ed) Line Into Insanity?

Peggy Noonan’s “Nixon’s Example of Sanity in Washington” concludes he “did the right thing” by not challenging his paper thin defeat to JFK in 1960, even though he and famed historian Theodore White would later conclude “vote stealing had definitely taken place on a massive scale … in Illinois and Texas.” But she nailed the broader problem … and solution … with the hopelessly divided DC Swamp today by suggesting its selling out to radical agendas, radical mindsets, needs to change pronto. Or else, we’re likely to have more crazy behaviors such as those we saw in the Jan. 6 riot in response to a rumored stealing of the 2020 election despite a 7 million vote margin AND the never-ending investigation of a rumored “insurrection” by a band of rad Trump supporters who had gone bonkers.

“I know [events like these] incited passion on both sides,” Peggy observed at one point, “but this looked to me not like activism, which to achieve anything must have at its core seriousness, maturity and discipline, but like untreated mental illness.” Not that insanity in DC is anything new. As Ms. Noonan recalled the years before and during the Civil War “there was a kind of hysterical intensity among our political class … on all sides … Rep. Preston Brooks caning Sen. Charles Sumner on Senate floor in 1856” is just one of many instances of bizarre behaviors that would not have occurred in normal times.

Yet, in VP Nixon’s case vs Kennedy, he would refuse to defile the system and was the first loosing candidate to preside over the formal certification of his opponent’s election gallantly saying: “In our campaigns, no matter how hard-fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict and support those who win.” Of course, Tricky Dick would “win” the WH 8 years later and later be run out of town in the midst of the Watergate scandal. Still lamented Peggy: “Why can’t self-professed patriots love America like that now – maturely, protectively?” Answer: Radicals and crooks don’t think rationally.

Davd Soul