Yes, we’ve been here before.
I’ll show my age by admitting that I certainly remember Spiro Agnew, the 39th vice-president of the U.S. when Richard Nixon swept into the White House in the 1968 election. Agnew served through the 1972 re-election campaign that spawned the whole Watergate scandal, before himself resigning in disgrace.
One of Agnew’s roles in the Nixon administration was to be out in front in attacking the president’s political opponents and particularly the news media.
According to a history on the U.S. Senate website:
On November 13, 1969, Vice President Spiro Agnew became a household word when he vehemently denounced television news broadcasters as a biased “unelected elite” who subjected President Richard M. Nixon’s speeches to instant analysis. The president had a right to communicate directly with the people, Agnew asserted, without having his words “characterized through the prejudices of hostile critics.” Agnew raised the possibility of greater government regulation of this “virtual monopoly,” a suggestion that the veteran television newscaster Walter Cronkite took as “an implied threat to freedom of speech in this country.” But Agnew’s words rang true to those whom Nixon called the Silent Majority. From then until he resigned in 1973, Agnew remained an outspoken and controversial figure, who played traveling salesman for the administration.
And from another history:
In 1970, he attacks the American media and critics of the Nixon administration alike, telling a San Diego audience that “we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.” Agnew attacks enemies of the administration as “pusillanimous pussyfooters,” “vicars of vacillation,” and “the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Democrats are “radic-libs” and “ideological eunuchs.” In Des Moines, reading a speech written by Buchanan, Agnew slams the US media industry, saying it is dominated by a “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one.” Agnew’s unrelenting attacks on the press raise, reporter Lance Morrow writes in 1996, “issues of media bias, arrogance and unaccountability that are still banging around in the American mind.” Agnew is undone by his own negativity, earning a barrage of critical press coverage for, among other things, calling an Asian-American reporter a “fat Jap,” referring to a group of Polish-Americans as “Polacks,” and dismissing the plight of America’s poor by saying, “To some extent, if you’ve seen one city slum, you’ve seen them all.”
This is all sounding familiar, isn’t it? It didn’t end well for Agnew and Nixon.
Agnew was forced to resign from office after his past caught up with him. He was snared in an investigation into bribery, extortion, and related offenses that allegedly occurred during his earlier years in Maryland, and which some alleged continued after becoming vice president. Agnew resigned his office in 1973 as part of a plea deal in which he entered a “no contest” plea to tax evasion while he was governor of Maryland, but avoided any prison time.
And, of course, his boss, Richard Nixon, resigned in the face of overwhelming public evidence of wrongdoing in what became known as the Watergate scandal.
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Remember Obama?
https://youtu.be/sYKyPGM0mY4
Fondly.
Yes, Obama has a completely mature vocabulary and attitude compared with Donald. Thanks for sharing. Obama was an adult. Trump is a single-minded spoiled brat.
Trump’s a delusional, opportunistic, toxically narcissistic plutocrat! We don’t have to mince words when talking about the liar in chief.
Poor, dear, Mr. Trump. Will he go into a pout if some nasty foreign leader says something unkind about him? For somebody who loves to insult others (Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted, etc.) he sure can’t take it. Time for the bully to get a T.S. chit from the chaplain.
a new alternative-reality TV series has begun:
Efforts to launch an outside group supporting Trump’s agenda have stalled amid fighting between Kushner loyalists, such as the campaign’s data and digital strategist Brad Parscale, and conservative donor Rebekah Mercer, according to people familiar with the tensions. Major disputes include who controls the data the outside group would use, with Mercer advocating for Cambridge Analytica, a firm in which her father is invested, and who controls the lucrative contracts with vendors, these people said.
Two people close to the transition also said a number of Trump’s most loyal campaign aides have been alarmed by Kushner’s efforts to elbow aside anyone he perceives as a possible threat to his role as Trump’s chief consigliere. At one point during the transition, Kushner had argued internally against giving Conway a White House role, these two people said.
Because Conway operates outside of the official communications department, some aides grumble that she can go rogue when she pleases, offering her own message and promoting herself as much as the president. One suggested that Conway’s office on the second floor of the West Wing, as opposed to one closer to the Oval Office, was a sign of her diminished standing. Though Conway took over the workspace previously occupied by Valerie Jarrett, who had been Obama’s closest adviser, the confidant dismissively predicted that Trump would rarely climb a flight of stairs.
— Washington Post
lmfao
— t
I think that Pence, like Agnew, is impeachment/assassination insurance. Just as we couldn’t stomach the thought of “President Agnew,” the thought of a President Pence is equally revolting.
Wasn’t Agnew also the creator of the wonderfully alliterative “nattering nabobs of negativity”? Even the villains in “the old days” had more intelligence and creativity than the alt-prez