34 Years Ago Today….

…Richard M. Nixon, one step ahead of impeachment, resigned from the presidency in utter disgrace.

We never thought we’d see a worse president in our lifetimes, certainly not one whose crimes and misdemeanors were far beyond those of Tricky Dick, but apparently you need a Big Dick to  be a truly corrupt administration.

Back in those days, roiled as the nation was, we still had some semblance of honor left in Congress and a sense of purpose and obligation to the public driving the Washington press corps. Those were rapidly fading attributes as it turned out. America’s bitter future was slowly being born.

Within two years, there came the DUI conviction (long hidden from sight thereafter) of the drunken and drugged up scion of a famed political family. He had joined the Texas Air National Guard 12 days before his student deferment would have expired in May of 1968, the year Nixon was first elected, and was sworn in that very day despite the fact that other candidates were on a waiting list, some of them for years. In 1972, the year of Nixon’s reelection, he moved from Houston to Mobile, Alabama to work on a Senate campaign concurrent with being suspended from flight duty for not taking his annual flight physical. He pretty much went AWOL from that point on to concentrate, as best he could given his addictions, on failing upward with the help of his father’s friends.

George W. Bush failed his way to the very top in 2000, aided in no small part by a press corps that was getting even with his predecessor for having made them look like fools when they bought into the craziness of the Newt Gingrich Republicans and Talk Radio Enablers. For that reason and an ingrained personal dislike, they were determined to make the sitting vice-president and expected winner (actual winner, comes to that, but that’s another story, involving a politicized and disgraced Supreme Court) a national laughing stock. By 2004, that soulless cohort and a moribund Democratic leadership were more than willing to allow yet another Democratic candidate be smeared and attacked with open lies, paving the way to a second Bush “victory.”

Throughout his seven and a half years in the Oval Office and a record of illegal and immoral acts up to and including deliberately causing the nation to go to war on falsified information and outright lies an subverting the U.S. Constitution in a myriad ways (a pattern of evil and mendacity which would make Nixon blush in embarrassment), George W. Bush has, while thoroughly disgraced in the eyes of the nation and the world, escaped prosecution for his crimes and he will almost surely extend massive pardons to all those involved in same, most specifically including eminence grise Karl Rove and puppet master Dick Cheney, the man who is probably the guiltiest of all among a very large number of very guilty true believers and sycophants.

That “Great Escape” lies at the feet of the Congressional Democratic Leadership, which has chosen not to prosecute and not to impeach, fearing failure and the fury of the minority but vicious right wing segment of the populace. Part of this, the inability to seek the impeachment of a most impeachable lame duck is the feeling that the fiasco of the Gingrich-led Clinton impeachment has made that most serious of proceedings into a political joke. Ironically, the one indelible accomplishment of Nasty Newt (aside from setting a record for hypocrisy that even the most ardent GOP congress critter find difficult to live up to) was to lay the groundwork for this failed administration to slide into history without being called to task.

Let us recall the wave of relief that swept across the nation when Mr. Nixon was driven from office with some wonder while we and the the last, terrible months of the Bush Tragedy with anger and dismay.

How did we come to this?