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Nixon vs. Obama: Yes, Nixon Was Bad But Obama is Worse

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Forty years ago public outrage about the actions of President Richard Milhous Nixon, lead by his long time liberal critics, forced him to be the first U.S. chief executive to resign the presidency. Critics screamed about Nixon’s extra-legal and extra-constitutional conduct as protestors ringed the White House chanting “Jail to the Chief.”

Nixon’s men had spied on their fellow citizens, allegedly used the IRS to harass their political enemies, waged war without the consent of Congress and used the CIA in an effort to hide their crimes.

No man, Nixon’s critics assured us, was above the law. For his transgressions, Richard Nixon was forced from office, evading prosecution only because of a presidential pardon.

Liberals are silent as Obama shreds the Constitution in ways Richard Nixon would have marveled at.

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Nixon Is Gone, but His Media Strategy Lives On

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Photo Credit: Charles Tasnadi / AP

Photo Credit: Charles Tasnadi / AP

Richard Nixon left the White House in disgrace 40 years ago this month, but the war he launched against journalists has continued under Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and other recent presidents.

Nixon’s resignation is remembered as a great victory for the media. Investigations by Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and other reporters helped expose the White House crime spree that caused the president’s downfall. Even though he lost his battle to remain in power, Nixon’s way of handling the press has prevailed in American politics. Intimidating journalists, avoiding White House reporters, staging events for television—now common presidential practices—were all originally Nixonian tactics.

Nixon would enjoy the frustration many reporters feel toward the Obama White House. This summer 38 news organizations sent Obama a letter protesting his administration’s obstruction of journalists. The news groups complained of officials blackballing reporters, delaying interviews until after deadlines had passed, and preventing staff experts from talking with journalists. For example, they said the Environmental Protection Agency refused to answer questions about the mishandling of hazardous waste despite repeated requests from reporters.

Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, repeated many of Nixon’s arguments—protecting national security and executive privilege—to keep information about his administration secret. Bush bluntly told reporters he did not think they represented the public, echoing the adversarial relationship cultivated by Nixon.

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Pat Buchanan Book Busts 'Myth' Nixon Was Racist, Had Vietnam 'Secret Plan

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Patrick J. Buchanan, setting out to correct the “myths” of his former presidential boss, this week is unleashing a memo-filled memoir that debunks several charges against Richard Nixon, including the most scurrilous: the so-called GOP White House “southern strategy” was racist.

In The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority, Buchanan provides multiple examples of the former president’s “emotional empathy” with African-Americans and reminds readers that Democrats had a strong racist strain 50 years ago, as evidenced by the 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns of segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

“Just about every Klan member between 1865 and 1965 is a Democrat, and we’re charged with all this stuff?” he said mockingly in an interview.

Hired in 1966 as one Nixon’s original and closest aides, Buchanan said, “I know exactly what was done, what happened, where we were, what we said.”

The southern strategy started when he and Nixon wrote a column for the Washington Post on May 8, 1966, that criticized a century of Democratic “racist oratory” in the South and recommended that the GOP “adhere to the principles” of Abraham Lincoln.

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Limbaugh: Nixon Resigned Over a Lie that Was Much Less Damaging in Scope (+video)

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Photo Credit: WND On Friday’s program, radio host Rush Limbaugh put the Obamacare rollout fiasco into historical perspective, declaring that in many ways, the current scandal is worse than Watergate.

“Folks,” Limbaugh told his audience, “Richard Nixon resigned over a lie that was much less damaging in scope than this one.”

“The bottom line,” he said, “is that Obama, the regime, knew that 93 million Americans would be unable to keep their health care plans under Obamacare. … I mean, this is an abject, purposeful lie to the American people for the express purpose of passing legislation.”

The other aim of Obamacare, Limbaugh insisted, was to undermine the private insurance business itself.

He pointed to an “obscure report buried in a June 2010 edition of the Federal Register,” in which White House officials matter-of-factly predicted that Obamacare would create “massive disruption of the private insurance market because that’s what was intended.”

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Report: Obama Administration Most Secretive Since Nixon

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Photo Credit: Washington TimesThe Obama White House’s war against leaks, and its penchant for secrecy and noted lack of transparency, are the worst “since the Nixon administration,” according to a major new study that relied on interviews from leading Washington reporters and news organization chiefs.

The report, released Thursday by the Committee to Project Journalists, found that reporters from many major media outlets consider the Obama administration the most closed-off in recent memory, and that there is not “any precedent” for its often hostile relationship toward the press.

More than 30 veteran reporters were interviewed for the piece, which was written by CPJ’s Leonard Downie Jr., former executive editor of The Washington Post and now a professor at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

The massive study goes into great detail in discussing the administration’s battle against leakers such as Edward Snowden; its “Insider Threat Program” that asks government employees to monitor their colleagues’ behavior; and general lack of transparency, despite repeated promises from Mr. Obama that his White House would be the most open in history.

“This is the most closed, control freak administration I’ve ever covered,” wrote New York Times Washington correspondent David Sanger, one of the journalists interviewed for the report.

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Obama’s Unconstitutional Steps Worse than Nixon’s

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Photo Credit: Tom Toles

Photo Credit: Tom Toles

President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.

Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”

He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. . . . It looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”

Serving as props in the scripted charade of White House news conferences, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: “Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the ‘executive authority’ to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?” The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: brevity. Because there is no such authority.

Obama’s explanation began with an irrelevancy. He consulted with businesses before disregarding his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” That duty does not lapse when a president decides Washington’s “political environment” is not “normal.”

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Defunding: The Framers’ Remedy for Presidential Lawlessness
 


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Photo Credit: American Spectator President Obama does not have the authority to choose which parts of the law are enforced. In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously against President Richard Nixon’s inflated claims that he could selectively carry out the law. But going to court to keep presidents in line is slow and necessitates finding litigants to sue the president. The framers gave Congress a more practical way to resist a power-hungry president: defunding. Defunding is precisely what members of Congress are supposed to do when a president breaks the law. It’s checks and balances in action. Two centuries ago, the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution James Madison declared in Federalist No. 58 that Congress’s authority over spending is the “most complete and effectual tool” to stop a president from grabbing more power than the Constitution allows.


Utah Senator Mike Lee is taking a page out of Madison’s playbook. On July 17 Lee urged Congress to vote against any continuing resolution to fund the federal government after September 30 so long as it funds Obamacare. “Laws are supposed to be made by Congress, not…[by] the president, who has now amended Obamacare twice. Once by saying individuals have to comply with the law during their first year but employers don’t. Then in saying we aren’t even going to require people to prove their income.” Lee said that if the administration is not prepared to fully enforce Obamacare as enacted, it should agree to delay the entire law and remove its funding from the budget. Eleven fellow Republican Senators and at least 60 Republican House members have signed on to Lee’s defunding stance.

Lee’s constitutional case is air tight. Yet the Democratic Party and Obama’s supporters in the media are trying to label the defunding strategy “government sabotage,” “radicalism,” and “obstructionism.” They need a refresher course on the Constitution.

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CBS’ Bob Schieffer Unleashes on White House Official: ‘Why Are You Here Today?’

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Photo Credit: APVeteran CBS newsman Bob Schieffer on Sunday morning unloaded on a top White House official, comparing the Obama administration’s handling of the ongoing Internal Revenue Service scandal to former President Richard Nixon’s initial strategy for dealing with Watergate.

The assertion came after White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said the president will continue with his objectives and will not become bogged down by the IRS debacle, the Benghazi affair or other missteps.

“I don’t want to compare this in any way to Watergate … but I have to tell you, that is exactly the approach the Nixon administration took. You’re taking exactly the same line,” Mr. Schieffer said.

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Obama Will Use Nixon-Era Law to Fight Climate Change

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Photo Credit: Daniel Acker

President Barack Obama is preparing to tell all federal agencies for the first time that they should consider the impact on global warming before approving major projects, from pipelines to highways.

The result could be significant delays for natural gas- export facilities, ports for coal sales to Asia, and even new forest roads, industry lobbyists warn.

“It’s got us very freaked out,” said Ross Eisenberg, vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers, a Washington-based group that represents 11,000 companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM) and Southern Co. (SO) The standards, which constitute guidance for agencies and not new regulations, are set to be issued in the coming weeks, according to lawyers briefed by administration officials.

In taking the step, Obama would be fulfilling a vow to act alone in the face of a Republican-run House of Representatives unwilling to pass measures limiting greenhouse gases. He’d expand the scope of a Nixon-era law that was first intended to force agencies to assess the effect of projects on air, water and soil pollution.

“If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” Obama said last month during his State of the Union address. He pledged executive actions “to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”

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US Government Releases Once-Secret Watergate Files

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Watergate Judge John J. Sirica aided the prosecution in pursuing the White House connection to the Democratic headquarters break-in by providing the special prosecutor information from a probation report in which one of the burglars said he was acting under orders from top Nixon administration officials, according to once-secret documents released Friday by the National Archives.

One newly public transcript of an in-chambers meeting between Sirica, the U.S. District Court judge in charge of the case, and then-Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox in July 1973 shows the judge revealed secret probation reports indicating that E. Howard Hunt had cited orders from officials high up in the Nixon administration. Several of Hunt’s co-defendants had previously denied any White House involvement in court testimony, and Sirica told Cox and other prosecutors that he felt the new information “seemed to me significant.”

The government released more than 850 pages from the Watergate political scandal, providing new insights on privileged legal conversations and prison evaluations of several of the burglars in the case. A federal judge had decided earlier this month to unseal some material, but other records still remain off limits.

The files do not appear to provide any significant new revelations in the 40-year-old case that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon and criminal prosecutions of many of his top White House and political aides. But the files provide useful context for historians, revealing behind-the-scenes deliberations by Sirica, the U.S. District Court judge in charge of the case, along with prosecutors and defense lawyers.

The documents stem from the prosecution of five defendants arrested during the June 1972 Watergate break-in and two men, Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who were charged as the burglary team’s supervisors. All seven men were convicted.

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