tricky dick and the saturday night debates

Tricky Dick there was a guy.  A man of fearsome social ineptness who wanted to be president.  Always an evil little fucker, always fighting dirty, nobody liked him, and he didn't trust anybody.  Ike looked down on him, treated him very shabbily, tried to dump him from the ticket, but Dick gave the Checkers speech.  Then we didn't have him to kick around anymore and then he was right back and I was too deep into lala land thinking I would vote the Peace and Freedom party too even register to vote.

He said he had a secret plan to end the war.  I don't know if anybody believed him, but he won the election.  His plan was apparently to escalate the war for about four years and then, when that didn't work, bug out, except under the cover of Vietnamization so that when that failed, as anybody with half a brain surely knew it would, it was not his fault, it was their fault.

But in retrospect he did end the war, or our involvement in it, and that whole domino theory looked silly when the surrounding countries didn't tumble into the red sinkhole, but America had lost interest in the whole thing by then. 

Then he went to China.  I think one thing he hoped to get out of that was China reining in the Vietnamese,  but China hated the Vietnamese, they were getting their aid from Russia who China also hated.  The first war the Vietnamese fought once they got their own nation was with China.

But was he all that bad as president?  If he dicked around four four years with our lives and treasure, he did in the end get our boys home, and other politicians have taken longer to end wars.  And everybody except that hard kernel of Bircher types liked the opening to China, though in retrospect I'm not so sure that it did much for us.

The Saturday night debates were fantastic.  My favorite two moments were when Jeb and Donald, and then the boy scout and the bully got into it. 

Jeb attacked Trump on eminent domain from the time he was trying to take away granny's house.  Donald went full in on how if you didn't have eminent domain you could never have like highways or that pipeline the reps used to be so crazy for, and actually he was sounding kind of reasonable and then Jeb uncharacteristically tried to butt in, and Donald shushed him, and then the whole audience erupted in boos.  Trump looked up surprised, he isn't used to being booed, but quick on his feet, he claimed that the audience was full of donors.  The republicans have made attacking the moderators part of their repertoire, but nobody had attacked the audience before and for a moment he looked like Joe Citizen taking on the fat cats until you realized that he is the fattest cat.

Then the bully sniped at the boy scout, and the boy scout stuttered and spit out this strange little speech to the effect that Obama is not merely incompetent but evil incarnate, and when the bully poked again he repeated it, and then again and then again, like a stuck a record.

The speech itself was an odd thing.  I guess he was trying to say that Obama is even more evil then any of the reps thought he was, but so what?  They all hate Obama anyway and in he will be gone in a year, and then on the Sunday shows he doubled down on it.

He was looking to have the 'moderate' lane all to himself, but that is probably done now, and it's hard to say who will get it now.  The Ohio guy and the bully are too yankee to make it in the sunny south, so that gives slumbering Jeb a shot I guess.  Well you just never know.