Nixon and Obama: Two Peas in Similar, Sleazey Pods

Nixon and Obama: Two Peas in Similar, Sleazey Pods

The same day the president suffered the indignity of having a book thrown at him and a streaker streak him in Phladelphia and just a few days after the presidential seal fell off the rostrum in D.C., Obama was accused of underhanded Nixonesque tactics. It’s almost as if the sky–and his facade–were falling all around Barack.

President Richard Milhaus Nixon, widely castigated and justifiably shamed out of office but now regarded as one of the better presidents of the twentieth century by objective observers had some things in common with President Barack Hussein Obama.

Oceans if not galaxies separated their political philosophies but, as men and policians, there were more similarities between them than our current leader and his supporters and idolators would dare admit.

Last week Obama visited the great state of Maryland, a state he carried two years ago but which in 2010 is somewhat less than a Democrat sure thing. His audience in Bowie, MD consisted mainly of ”thousands of African Americans who came to see the man they voted for two years ago.” His message ”was simple: Get out and vote for the Democratic ticket in next month’s mid-term elections, even though he’s not on the ballot:” http://tiny.cc/1w6vs

Nixon, a white man, never had an extrordinarily great appeal to African Americans, (he received a piddling 18% of the black vote in his ’72 landslide) but Obama garnered a whopping 93% of that vote in 2008 so, very reasonably, he said to his mostly black audience in Bowie, feigning levity, “Don’t make me look bad, now,” now being the midterm election on November 2nd.

Obama is fully aware that the election in three weeks has the potential of sinking his leaking ship and will determine the fate of his agenda over his last two years in office. He needs his black constituency to support his fellow Democrats as much this year as he did two years ago.

Nixon won election in 1968 primarily on a divisive strategy. He appealed to what came to be called “the silent majority,” that multi-million mass of Americans who were fed up with the war in Viet Nam that we were losing for political, not military, reasons, and fed up with the overall condition of the country under the less than conscientious care of a war-distracted LBJ and a disunited Democrat Party.

Likewise, Mr. Obama, who campaigned to a war-divided nation on the basis of some undefined change ostensibly planned to unite the country, to end our wars which still rage, and to launch us on an as yet undetectable economic recovery, essentially plotted just the opposite. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=2171)

Frost/Nixon: An Excursion into Revisionist Fantasy

Frost/Nixon, An Excursion into Revisionist Fantasy

I freely concede I’m no movie critic with no pretense of being a Siskel, an Ebert, or a Roeper. I like movies with some action, a shot of titilating romance, involving mixed genders, preferably devoid of leftist propaganda and homosexual themes. Unlike television sitcoms, locating such films is still possible, if increasingly difficult, to find. Despite many reviews to the contrary, Frost/Nixon isn’t one of them.

I have no clue as to why it was honored with 5 Golden Globes and 5 Academy Award nominations except that those tributes were more reflective of Hollywood’s sharp liberal, leftist bent than the merits of the film. Frost/Nixon’s one saving grace was that it was devoid of homosexual characters, attributable to its 1977 setting, when most homosexuals were still in closets as opposed to their current infestation of American society and entertainment venues. Politically, it reeked and oozed liberal propaganda.

The absence of quality in the disjointed Frost/Nixon, which nevertheless was accorded accolades, was superseded by a blatant revisionistic interpretation of history. On top of all that, it was just plain boring, except for Frank Langella’s excellent rendition of the brooding yet brilliant figure of Richard Nixon. As for Michael Sheen, he should have stayed on his own side of the Pond.

Perhaps a swisher or two would have made the difference in Frost/Nixon, as comic figures, and it might have finished ahead of Milk as best picture of 2008. It sure worked for Brokeback Mountain, anointed the 2005 best picture winner because it “broke new ground” with its two homosexual cowboys. Frost/Nixon didn’t break any ground at all since Nixon has been trashed for half a century and usually with more historical accuracy.

David Paradine Frost was essentially a nonentity with a career circling the toilet when he conceived the idea of cashing in on the disgraced and almost-impeached Nixon. His project and the movie featured a series of one-on-one interviews with the former president, the plan being to get him to fess up that he was responsible for the loss of thousands of American lives and many more thousands of Vietnamese in the Viet Nam War and to admit complicity in the Watergate coverup.

The plan failed but you would never know it from Frost/Nixon which presents Frost as scoring a dramatic coup d’etat, which never really happened, although it’s hard to tell that from the reviews.

Google “Frost/Nixon” . . .

(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com/.)