Jun 23rd, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Ronald Reagan’s Lawlessness
Richard Nixon’s racist case for abortion is getting all the play in articles about newly released Nixon tapes, but the same tapes also contain an interesting revelation about Ronald Reagan’s strong support for the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Given that Nixon’s reputation is already in the toilet, while Reagan is becoming the subject of bipartisan reverence, this Reagan factoid is probably more memorable. The massacre was an act of pure lawlessness, undertaken by Nixon for personal gain rather than any broad ideological or policy objective.
41 Responses to “Ronald Reagan’s Lawlessness”
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June 23rd, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Did you mean “undertaken by REAGAN for personal gain…” ?
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:22 pm
I think Nixon considered personal gain (holding on to power) to be a perfectly fine policy objective.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:22 pm
What a charming fellow that Richard Millhouse Nixon was. Really a beautiful human being.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:25 pm
More like abusive lawfulness, really. Do recall that Lawful-Chaotic and Good-Evil are different axes.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:40 pm
I wonder if the revelation of this information during the 1980 election would have changed the outcome. Watergate was still a recent memory then, and tying Reagan to the Saturday Night Massacre would have tarnished his image severely.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Thank goodness Barack Obama would never fire a public official for “personal gain”.
Oh, wait…
Saint Barack would never…
Oh, right, I forgot, Republicans who fire public officials are bad. But when Saint Barack does it, it is all that is good and pure in the world.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Al, once again you are mistaken. Most people here will be glad for any criminal activities by government officials to be fully investigated. If anyone broke the law, let this person face the consequences.
And yes, Reagan was the rightful heir of Nixon, and Bush II followed the proud tradition of those conservative presidents when it came to the rule of law and separation of powers.
June 23rd, 2009 at 4:56 pm
I suppose that people like Mr. Yglesias and Miss Marcotte will now declare the late and unlamented Richard Milohous Nixon to be hero of freedom for his views on abortion rights.
Of course, it has been painfully obvious to many of us for a long time that abortion has been used as a weapon against the African American community. An African American baby is three times as likely to be aborted as a Euro American one. One would think that this would lead professed progressives like Mr. Yglesias to oppose abortion in the name of racial equality. One would suppose so, but one would be wrong. After all, Yglesian late-capitalist postmodernists are not known for their logical concistency or their ability to connect 2 and 2.
Mr. Richard Milhous Nixon’s support for abortion rights was merely a logical extension of the contempt for human life that he demonstrated in his prosecution of the Viet Nam War, his illegal bombing of Cambodia, and his support for the Fascist coup against Allende in Chile.
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
HAHAHAHAHA
Take a logic course.
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Of course, it has been painfully obvious to many of us for a long time that abortion has been used as a weapon against the African American community. An African American baby is three times as likely to be aborted as a Euro American one. One would think that this would lead professed progressives like Mr. Yglesias to oppose abortion in the name of racial equality.
Hector, abortions are the symptoms. It wouldn’t be any better for racial equality if all of those fetuses became babies born into abject poverty in the ghetto.
I know you actually do care about urban black poverty, so I won’t accuse you of hypocrisy by raising this issue (though your conservative allies in the pro-life movement certainly are hypocrites when they raise it). But do something about black poverty and the problems of the underclass and you’ll see the African American abortion rate fall (as well as the number of unplanned and unwanted children who are actually born).
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Shorter Al: The Obama administration fired someone for job-performance issues, and that’s just like the Saturday Night Massacre.
The Spirit of Hoekstra lives!
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:19 pm
…because nothing furthers a community’s advancement like lots and lots of unplanned births. You know, like in sub-Saharan Africa.
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Hector:
You forgot Margaret Sanger if you wanted to get all of the most worthless pro-life talking points about the “racism” of the pro movement.
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:50 pm
“What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up,” Nixon said. At another point he said, “It may be they have a death wish. You know that’s been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries.”
You know, back in the day, I loathed the man with a passion. And in truth, he was a loathsome, evil little toad. But for some reason, the above statement cracked me up. And yes, I’m Jewish. No, Dick, you were never our friend.
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:55 pm
“An African American baby is three times as likely to be aborted as a Euro American one.”
When you consider that the African American father is eight times as likely to be in jail, that three times number seems kind of low. A big reason why women get abortions is because their deadbeat boyfriend won’t support the baby. Probably because he’s either in jail or will be soon. There is also an interesting correlation that rarely gets mentioned. Crime and general bad behavior go way up when there are too many females. This is usually caused by high incarceration rates because women are incarcerated at a much lower rates. The theory is that if there are too many men, they have to behave better or their girlfriends dump them. When there are too many women, men tend to get out of control because they can always find another woman. And they can find a woman who won’t make them use a condom. Which leads to more abortions. Solving the urban crime issue would be probably the best approach to cutting abortion.
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:57 pm
One of the countless invaluable insights one gains from reading Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland is that, from the beginning of his serious political career (1964) onward, Reagan was one of the most viciously opportunistic sons of bitches U.S. politics had seen in quite some time.
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:19 pm
The Obama administration fired someone for job-performance issues
So did Nixon!
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:38 pm
“You know, back in the day, I loathed the man with a passion.”
I know how you feel. It’s good these tapes are still coming out. The younger generations simply don’t understand just how much of a dick Nixon really was. He signed some good environmental legislation, but he was still a truly loathsome man. But at least we will really will “have Dick Nixon to kick around” some more. And this time, he won’t make a comeback.
June 23rd, 2009 at 6:39 pm
“So did Nixon!”
Yeah, but with Nixon, the job performance issue was “failure to break the law.”
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:09 pm
The Obama admin didn’t fire anyone.
Since the real media can’t be bothered to do real reporting those pajama clad hippies over at TPM actually picked up a phone and talked to 2 people on the Americorps oversite comittee who both said that the comittee unanimously voted to fire the guy and asked the White House to do it.
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Yeah, but with Nixon, the job performance issue was “failure to break the law.”
And with Obama, the job performance issue was “investigating an Obama supporter”.
June 23rd, 2009 at 7:58 pm
[...] Matt Y another: Richard Nixon’s racist case for abortion is getting all the play in articles about newly [...]
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:10 pm
I think this might be what Eric K was referring to–the TPM page links to two pieces summarizing the affair.
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Justin,
I was specifically referring to this:
Your link has some more info.
Bottom line is it will come to no one’s surprise that Al is completely full of shit as usual.
June 23rd, 2009 at 11:15 pm
I don’t mean to be the word usage police for the day, but Yglesias has used the word factoid twice today in his posts. It seems that he intends it to mean a small fact or interesting fact. Factoid actually means something presented as fact that is not true. Damned pet peeves of mine. I need some new hobbies.
June 24th, 2009 at 5:22 am
@25 Rob T re: factoid
Thanks. I didn’t know that.
Here is a non-factoid -the word most often used out of context in the English language is factoid.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:15 am
“investigating an Obama supporter”.
Well, given that most Americans were Obama supporters, it’s not so unusual that a person might be one. Show me a quid pro quo, and I’ll take it seriously. As it is, the independent panel voted unanimously to fire this person. Obama took the panel’s recommendation. And you think a president should ignore his advisers and keep an incompetent person for what reason? Please, what is that reason?
June 24th, 2009 at 7:50 am
Re: …because nothing furthers a community’s advancement like lots and lots of unplanned births.
Clearly, Joe. Ever heard of the pill? Or the many other methods of family planning, natural and artificial, that are out there?
Re: It wouldn’t be any better for racial equality if all of those fetuses became babies born into abject poverty in the ghetto.
Dilan,
Those babies and their parents would form a powerful group demanding social justice. And they might be able to force the society to actually do something about poverty rather than just encouraging poor mothers to butcher their children. Abortion has been a perfect solution to the desire shared by Rockefellers and Klansmen alike, to have a society with fewer Black children. After all, how better to rid society of undesirables than to encourage them to kill their own children.
It is simply not permitted to destroy innocent human life in order that society should advance. That is the logic of the cultural revolution. Mr. Esper should be ashamed of himself. Judith Jarvis Thomsen was simply another one in the long and unlamented line of Gobineau, Goebbels and Genghis-Khan.
June 24th, 2009 at 8:12 am
My pet peeve – people who correct other people’s usage without knowing what they are talking about. In my dictionary, the second (out of two) definition of factoid is “a brief and usually trivial news item.” Matt is right, Rob is wrong.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:22 am
@29 buzz79 re: factoid
Yeah, you’re right buzz79. Here is Webster’s definition of factoid.
1 : an invented fact believed to be true because of its appearance in print
2 : a briefly stated and usually trivial fact
I only looked at Wikipedia. Mistake!
June 24th, 2009 at 9:28 am
C’mon Kropotkin
Margaret Sanger was both a bit of a racist and a eugenicist.
Doesn’t mean we need to control women’s reproductive decisions
to compensate for her flaws.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Those babies and their parents would form a powerful group demanding social justice. And they might be able to force the society to actually do something about poverty rather than just encouraging poor mothers to butcher their children. Abortion has been a perfect solution to the desire shared by Rockefellers and Klansmen alike, to have a society with fewer Black children. After all, how better to rid society of undesirables than to encourage them to kill their own children.
Hector, in Marxist theory, “heightening the contradictions” may have its place, but in the real world, it simply causes misery.
The best way to fight poverty is to fight poverty, not to create more and more people until people are so miserable that they act.
You claim to be so interested in morality, but deliberately causing human suffering– to actual sentient human beings– is just as much “using people as a means to an end” as you think abortion is.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:57 am
Most of the time I have a general idea of where an article is going. Even one about Nixon. So when it got to the part about Nixon generally thinking abortion was a bad thing, but finding some reasons it might be acceptable, I expected his reasons to be rape and incest. I spit out the coffee in my mouth when I read the “interracial babies” thing. And how that was his centerpiece and he added rape as an afterthought. Holy what what?
Which is also why the entire conversation above this comment is off-base. I’m clearly not defending Nixon’s whackadoo horrendous belief that babies of one white/one black parentage should be aborted, but he was specifically endorsing that, not the abortion of black babies. Horrific? Yes. Creepy? Yes. [It's Nixon, of course it's creepy]. But it’s creepy/weird/horrific enough to destroy it on it’s “merits” as opposed to claim he said something he did not.
June 24th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Mr. Esper,
Since nobody here brought up Marx but yourself, I’mn not sure just why you felt the need to indulge in a bit of good old American Red-baiting. Of course, it’s always easier to play the Red Card than to substantively engage with the issues. Actually, if anyone here is invoking the logic of the Yezhovshchina, it it is the pro-choicers. Marx would have been horrified by the Yezhovshchina, but I suspect the late and unlamented Harry Blackmun would have fit right in.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Hector: If “abortion is murder”, then forced childbirth is _rape_. ESPECIALLY when there are no resources to provide for a child once it is born.
Q: What is the difference between an “innocent human life” and a “useless welfare parasite”?
A: The “innocent human life” was _conceived_ 10 minutes ago and the “useless welfare parasite” was _born_ 10 minutes ago.
June 24th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Since nobody here brought up Marx but yourself, I’mn not sure just why you felt the need to indulge in a bit of good old American Red-baiting. Of course, it’s always easier to play the Red Card than to substantively engage with the issues. Actually, if anyone here is invoking the logic of the Yezhovshchina, it it is the pro-choicers. Marx would have been horrified by the Yezhovshchina, but I suspect the late and unlamented Harry Blackmun would have fit right in.
Hector, I wasn’t red-baiting. “Heightening the contradictions” is a pretty common term that comes from the argument of some Marxists that sometimes you have to allow governments and elites to screw things up so obviously that the people will revolt and turn to socialism. It’s used all over politics to describe arguments that we need to ensure things get screwed up bad enough to force change. And that was the type of argument you were making.
And I happen to think that arguments in this form are really bad because they try to use humans’ suffering as a means to an end. As I said, the funny thing is that you constantly make references to your Christian faith, and yet not using people as a means to an end is an established strain of Christian philosophy that dates back hundreds of years and is generally accepted in many Christian denominations. Indeed, it is one of the premises of the usual Christian critique of abortion rights.
Look, Hector, if you want your ideas taken seriously, you have to think about how they play in a pluralistic society. However much good you think it might do to increase the number of people living in poverty, you should understand that that sort of argument is not going to persuade folks as to what you believe.
Despite the fact that you are educated and aware of a number of the philosophical premises for your ideas, I don’t think you have taken into account to a great extent the intellectual foundation of ideas that differ from you. You probably aren’t that interested in reading feminist theory, for instance, but you could use some more exposure to those ideas, even if you end up disagreeing with every word and not changing your ideas one bit. Why? Because you assume the worst motives for all your ideological opponents. You think we are all a bunch of Hitlers. And that’s not the case at all. (Ross Douthat– who is much more reasonable than you are but just as pro-life, got into a heap of trouble suggesting that women who aborted fetuses with grave deformities and no hope of living were motivated by eugenics. A bit more exposure to feminist writings on those issues might have disabused them of that notion and given him some idea what it is like to be carrying one of those fetuses. He might still come out pro-life, but he’d understand why the issue was more complex. I suspect he did this to some extent, because his recent abortion column or Dr. Tiller’s death was a lot more sympathetic to women in this position.)
The point is, abortion isn’t a contested political issue because there’s a bunch of us who really like murder and are a bunch of little Hitlers. Harry Blackmun, whom you malign, didn’t author Roe because he was a misanthrope. He authored Roe because he was a doctor. He’d consulted with women in difficult circumstances. He knew what they went through.
Now does that mean that Roe was necessarily right? Not at all. It just means that understanding actual human suffering, and the lengths people go to in order to alleviate it, rather than seeing it as a tool to reach your ideal utopian society, is really a very important human trait. And for the life of me I don’t understand why you don’t see that. In any event, as I said, in a pluralistic society, if you expect to persuade anyone, you are going to have to.
June 24th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
Among Boomers and Gen X’ers, I would agree. As time goes on, his legacy will be more balanced.
The collapse of Wall Street will certainly has certainly caused a lot of people to re-evaluate his idea that de-regulation is good for everyone.
Similarly, a lot of people now realize that 9/11 happened in part because we helped de-stabilize Afghanistan.
And his avoidance of anything resembling an energy policy helped lead to our current dependence on foreign oil.
In fact, the near godlike popularity Reagan enjoys now will be seen to be an additional detriment by itself — it had a stultifying effect on Bush Sr. and Clinton, whose policies did nothing much to contradict Reagan in these areas.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
Mr. Esper,
Fair enough. I don’t really think that all pro-choicers are the moral equivalent of Nazis, and in part I use deliberately abusive language about you people because you insist on using deliberately abusive language about pro-lifers. But that isn’t really a good excuse, and I agree that it risks poisoning the discourse while accomplishing nothing positive. I do maintain that, ‘hard cases’ aside, the logic behind allowing unrestricted abortion rights is deeply inhuman and evil, but it’s certainly possible to embrace a bad cause out of honest error and not out of evil intent. And their certainly are hard cases in which a strong case can be made for abortion rights. In some such cases I would even agree with you.
I can’t promise to read any works of feminist theory- I have a lot of work this summer, I already waste too much time on this blog, and I have other spare time reading I want to get done anyway. And it’s fair to say that _nothing_ could possibly get me to believe that abortion on demand is OK. (What do you recommend I read by the way? Not your oft-quoted Luker, as that’s a study of attitudes about abortion and not a work of advocacy in itself. I’ve read Ms. Thomsen and made my views about her clear enough.) But I do promise to try to moderate my rhetorical excess, and stop comparing abortion-rights advocates to Yezhov or Goebbels. I invite you to do the same.
By the way, i believe you’re mistaken that Douthat compared people who abort nonviable fetuses with eugenicists. He specifically compared people who aborted _viable and healthy fetuses_ with undesirable traits to eugenicists. That’s quite different and it seems reasonable to me.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Well, on second thought….._some_ abortion rights advocates are certainly as bad as Klansmen or Nazis. Not all, and not the majority though.
June 24th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
actually, no, Dilan, I conceded too much. the most i’ll concede is that I’ll _think_ about what you say. simply put, your idea that suffering is the ultimate evil, to be avoided agt all costs, is one i fundamentally disagree with and consider evil and antihuman.
June 24th, 2009 at 7:50 pm
Did I say suffering is the “ultimate” evil? I don’t think I did.
All I said is that arguments that we should go ahead and deliberately inflict suffering because inflicting suffering is necessary to bring things to a critical mass that will cause real change are arguments that strike me as deeply problematic (and further, as I understand it, go against a longstanding Christian tradition that says that you shouldn’t use people as a means to an end).
I can think of things that are worse than inflicting suffering– for instance, fighting the American Civil War seems to me to be entirely justified despite all the suffering that it caused. So I am not saying it is the “ultimate evil”– only that arguments that rely on ratcheting up the level of suffering until we get real change are morally troublesome.
As for feminism worth reading, you are quite correct that Luker’s work isn’t a work of advocacy. It’s just a book about opinions of people who care about abortion. What I would say is that a book like “The Feminine Mystique”, though not about abortion, is a very good one to read. Not only is Friedan a good writer, but she really describes what the downside was to the sort of society that many religious conservatives idealize (i.e., married domesticity with strictly separated gender roles).
On abortion specifically, Leslie Reagan’s “When Abortion Was a Crime” is very good at outlining the reasons women wanted to have abortions in the pre-Roe era and what happened to those that did not have them.
Look, remember, the point of this is not to change your mind. I know you are pro-life and have a quite different worldview than I do. It’s to understand where pro-choicers are coming from.