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Say something nice about a villain
Posts
GT: batshido Hit me up on ME3.
Tokugawa knew how to take advantage of other people, I'll give him that.
Does no one remember Watergate?
It's kind of a big deal.
But actually somewhat less of a deal than the good he did.
(He's still evil though)
Nixon never ceases to fascinate me. I had to do a report on him in College (pick a President, basically), and I had known next to nothing about him outside of watergate and the bad stuff, and afterwards I was totally blown away by how much of a complex and conflicted person he really was. This isn't to downplay his bad stuff though, because, you know, it was bad. But the point was that I found out that Nixon wasn't some mustache-twirling characature of a villain that most media made (and make) him out to be.
Oh, gotcha. I agree with you there.
The man was his own worst enemy. He would have cruised to victory in 1972 and ended the Vietnam war. His presidency would have been considered a major success. Combined with the Democratic party's internal conflicts, there probably would have been a couple of decades of Republican domination of the presidency and Congress.
So, I guess if you're a Democrat, you should be grateful that Nixon was so paranoid and weird.
Rigorous Scholarship
She's really just as misunderstood as the Witch from the West.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
Maleficent was such a great Disney villain.
Girlish figure?
More like Ghoulish figure, right?
Honestly Watergate looks like nothing today
GWB did shit worse than watergate more or less openly and nobody really gave a shit
He ended the war by abandoning it--which was more or less the right thing to do--but not without bombing the shit out of them first. He may have scaled down troop presence, but he certainly scaled up bombing: 600,000 Cambodians died in his operation Menu. I suppose that what I'm saying here is just that Nixon's end to the war was not a humanitarian one, and his peacemaking consisted in a retreat that was largely forced anyway.
I understand an appreciation for the good things he did. I don't, however, understand the degree of forum love.
I've got some Disney obsessed friends who know I love her, so I've got all kinds of Maleficent stuff.
I've got a dragon that guards my lab bench, and pins on my lab coat.
Purple dragons everywhere.
Not that it wasn't a bad thing, just, the Legend of Watergate kind of outclasses the reality.
Sure the Cambodian bombings sucked, but this is a villain compliment thread, we are suposed to focus on the good things.
With Nixon its this: If he had been self-assured enought to know that he had 72 in the bag. Laid of the watergate/Creep shit. He would be remembered as on of the greatest post-war presidents(maybe in the top 10 overall).
I mean look at JFK. What did he do apart from getting killed in office? Even the Cuba Crisis could be said to have been the result of the bay of pigs(up for debate), meaning his greatest moment was cleaning up his own shit. Yet he gets the love...
Exactly. He was a brilliant but flawed individual who accomplished a lot of great things, but he was brought down by his own paranoia.
Kind of a tragic figure. I love the guy.
I think the Emperor had the right idea. Keep the number of Jedi low, and just concentrate on having maximum centralized military power.
Nixon's post-Presidency PR makeover remains one of the most inexplicably successful rebrandings in modern American history.
There's a lot of debate with actual historians over Nixon's presidency. It's also somewhat too soon to get still the full ramifications of everything.
Andrew Jackson could pull off a mustache unlike most evil jerks in history
I'm not backing the guy or anything, but recently what's annoyed me are the crowd of people who think he was this fire-and-brimstone breathing doomsday device without explaining why.
I can guarantee you that probably 90% of today's young crowd knows nothing of his regime, was trained to memorize that he was "that bad guy president", and i'm lowballing on that statistic.
I can't make fair judgement on the guy because I know nothing about the situation, paranoia and circumstances at that time. I don't think any President during war has ever come out with a clean slate, and i'd bet cash money that Nixon gets the most shit for it cause Vietnam was the first nationally televised war, well, ever. Imagine how WWII would have gone down if this was the case.
Just throwin' some perspective to this mess.
True, but Nixon has had nothing but benefit from revisionist history, plus the fact that the one misdeed that directly contributed to his downfall, the Watergate cover-up, is on the mild end of his crimes and has also been watered down to a punchline.
For example, when Nixon ordered the round-the-clock carpet bombing of Cambodia and Laos? That was illegal. He had to keep it a secret from the Congress. Plus the main result of those bombings was a groundswell in popular support for the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Not to mention that Nixon gets credit for leaving Vietnam in 1973 but as a candidate in 1968 he actively sabotaged the Paris peace talks between the Johnson administration and North Vietnam.
And that Nixon felt that, as President, he had the "inherent authority" to order the warrantless surveillance of domestic anti-war groups, something he only stopped when the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.
It baffles me that the same folks who disparage GWB for his delusions of an Imperial Presidency are more than willing to forgive and forget Nixon for originating the concept.
Watergate boiled down to two things:
First, the sitting President using the power of the United States government to actively and illegally subvert the democratic process.
Second, the sitting President using the power of his office to cover-up those illegal actions, including destroying evidence and refusing to co-operate with Congress.
If you really equate that to cheating on an exam, then I really don't know what to say.
Nixon is remembered as a crook. While there is a movement to kick Grant of the 50$ bill in favour of Reagan.
The initial crime was hiring people to break into the opposing party's headquarters, and I assume that's what you're going for with the schoolyard analogy. Suffice it to say, I don't think they're the same. But in any case, the "smoking gun" tape was the one that revealed Nixon and his cadre using the CIA to try to block the FBI's investigation by claiming national security concerns. That is itself an additional and quite serious crime, over and above paying criminals for a break-in.
I did not know about this at all. Can you elaborate?
They should have gone with development rather than blowing shit up.
Yeah.
Cheney supports gay marriage.
Also, I don't see any glaring problems during his time as Bush Sr's Sec of Defense. He actually argued for (and got) cuts to defense spending, which I can't imagine any Republican not named Paul arguing for today. Desert Shield/Storm went pretty well, except that requesting, and getting, US bases in Saudi Arabia pissed off bin Laden.
Nixon had developed contacts with the South Vietnamese government during his years as Eisenhower's VP (where he was pretty much the "globe-trotting foreign policy guy").
In 1968, folks in Nixon's campaign reached out to those contacts and urged them to walk away from the Paris peace talks, claiming that South Vietnam would get a better deal from peace agreement brokered by a Nixon administration than they would from a Johnson administration. This caused South Vietnam to boycott the peace talks, causing them to collapse.
I guess OJ Simpson was pretty fun in the Naked Gun movies.
Saddam Hussein was able to keep the peace in Iraq and occupied Iran's attention for decades.
Bin Laden and the other insurgents that eventually would form Al Qaeda did a good job of forcing the Soviets to waste money in Afghanistan.
Dunno if that counts as a "good thing", so much as common sense, from an Earth history standpoint. Compare the number of clerical armies/warrior cults that exist now, versus a hundred years ago, and versus five hundred years ago. The Jedi seem like kind of an anachronism--self-policing, above the authority of the law the rest of the Senate is at least expected to obey, above the sovereignty of member worlds (seeing how they can basically take children at their leisure), yet still funded by the Republican Government, and basically exercising almost complete control of the officers corps. All the power, none of the responsibility. They bring back a time before the idea of written constitutions, checks of government, and professional civil service/bureaucracy, and professional military academies. The purge just seems like Star Wars catching up with modernity, taken by itself. The Knights Templar and the pre-Revolutionary Russian Orthodox Church (essentially its own arm of Imperial Russia) wouldn't survive either.
I was gonna go with him being awesome at hide-and-seek but whatever.
My Backloggery PSN: Bigisy24
Well, he's really good at it. He was good at making the Soviets (in Afghanistan) run around in circles, and he's good at making the Americans (there too) run back and forth.
All this while being unusually tall (or so I've heard).
Jesus christ.
He's also on dialysis. Well, was. Probably dead now.
My Backloggery PSN: Bigisy24