When my fascist Aunt Jan told me history would be kind to Richard Nixon, I thought she was a nut job.
As she’s turned out to be, but that’s for another day.
In the early ’70s, to a left-leaner like me, Nixon was the personification of evil. His crimes seemed clear, his impeachment inevitable.
“It’s the press,” Jan insisted. (Still insists, for that matter. Did you know that if it weren’t for the press, now known as The Media, President McCain and Vice-President Palin would have the economy on track by now? Jan can give you 10 minutes on that if you want. Or if you don’t).
“In 20 years,” she said the day after Nixon left office, “we’ll realize he was one of our great presidents.”
I saw Jan the other day for the first time since 2003, when she was giving speeches around the Senior Center backing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bid to replace California Gov. Grey Davis. She’d worked for Davis years before and didn’t like him, what with him being a socialist Democrat (she uses the terms interchangeably). From Schwarzenegger’s movies, none of which she’d actually seen, she knew he’d be a no-nonsense leader.
Even without that, she would have been a sucker for his promises to root out waste and run government like a business. Except for Social Security, Medicare and the occasional public defender for one of her grandchildren, Jan knows government is shot through with waste.
That was then. Now, with Schwarzenegger coming to the end of his tenure, whatever waste he spotted is still firmly rooted and California is more than $40 billion in the hole. I looked forward to discussing these developments with my aunt.
“How’s your governor doing with his budget, Jan?” I asked Sunday, innocence oozing from every pore. “We don’t get much California news in Reno.”
She hit that ground at a dead run.
“Well, thanks to the Pelosi Recession …”
I held up a hand.
“Aunt J, I say this out of love and concern: A woman your age has to be careful talking like that. People who don’t know you’re crazy will think you’re losing it.”
“You kids think you know everything . . . .”
Jan and I have had these debates since I was in college. She still holds her own as well as any conservative loon could, but her sense of the passage of time may have dulled. I’m a generation older now than she was then, and I’m still one of “you kids.”
I’ve learned when it’s pointless to interrupt, though, and thus I’m able to pass along the following news, reported here for the first time by a sane person:
• Michelle Obama hates whites. Her entire career has been built with the goal of achieving a position of power over them.
• Barack Obama isn’t really president, because he’s not an American citizen. His birth certificate was faked.
“What about the birth announcement in the Honolulu paper, Jan?”
“You think they couldn’t fake THAT?”
• Rush Limbaugh has given proof of all this, but has been ignored by the mainstream media.
• He and Bill O’Reilly are the only two journalists in the country who aren’t afraid to tell the truth. That their views aren’t widely heard is proof of a liberal media conspiracy.
• Keith Overland (sic) on MSNBC is a traitor and shouldn’t be allowed on the air.
• John McCain actually won the election, but the media didn’t care enough to dig out the truth.
Tit for tat, is what I say to that last one.