Dave Bell: my neighbor the cop says the same thing. He said that after one high-profile murder a few years back, they had a dozen people in the station the next day confessing.
They weren't all crazy, either. Some of them just want the attention, some of them feel guilty and want to be punished even if it's for something different than what they really did, some of them are afraid they might really have done it in a blackout or something, and on and on.
He says it's very easy to make somebody believe they did something even if they know they didn't. After that I stopped believing torture was even useful, let alone justified.
This guy -- who knows? He sounds nuttier than a fruitcake and probably doesn't even know what he did.
According to Bauer's website, she received her PhD in 1979 from St. John's. Doesn't say what in, however.
But I still think Bush is much, much worse than Nixon. Nixon wasn't a traitor, which is my opinion of Bush (chiefly because of his administration's revenge-outing of an undercover CIA agent, which probably got or will get many of her associates killed).
Xopher -- I don't disagree with you there. But the overall situation, though serious, doesn't seem quite as dire as some people like to think. When Nixon left office, we'd lost the Vietnam war and gone through years of riots, anti-everything demonstrations, and deficits brought on by trying to have a guns-and-butter economy. Then the oil embargo hit. People honestly weren't sure if the country could survive. But we did. We'll survive this too.
Clark -- thanks for that information and citation. I guess I shouldn't have been so quick to blame my failing memory.
Xopher: True, he didn't state anything like that in public, and W has. I'm not trying to say the two cases are identical. Only that it was way bad before, and our very strong system survived the shock of years of antiwar turmoil, cold war, and disarray. Many people really didn't think it would be able to absorb the pressure of first a VP and then a president going down like that.
The whole thing has an aura of deja vu about it for me. How do you spell Vietnam? I-R-A-Q.
The Nixon resignation (not impeachment) certainly did not bring the country together. Quite a large segment of public opinion felt he had been set up or even framed, or that he was just doing his duty. (Weirdly, the bad language on the tapes had more to do with the defection of many loyal supporters than did any wrongdoing.) Some of the right-wing behavior now in support of Bush seems like it has an element of revenge for betraying Nixon to it.
As I recall it, the situation was far worse then. Political riots, families literally disowning each other, people getting fired for not supporting one side or the other strongly enough. Nixon was accused of the same sorts of heinous intentions with regards to constitutional protections, disregard of election results, etc, but in retrospect there was a lot more panic than there was evidence. He certainly disregarded lots of laws and Constitutional protections, but it's a long way from thinking you're above the law while you're Commander in Chief to thinking that you're entitled to evade the law to hold onto the presidency.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2006 | 8 |
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