[Pelham]

That’s a trip down memory lane, those names are all familiar to me. I was growing up in DC at that time and somehow I began following politicians the way that most kids followed baseball. I was carrying a Washington Evening Star newspaper route when I first began to regard Lyndon Johnson with visceral contempt.

Unfortunately things didn’t change much when Nixon took office. He signed a series of domestic bills that most people would imagine had to have been part of the Great Society program. Nixon just added to what LBJ had been doing. The GOP was an opposition party in name only. Meaning that the later Bush crew would be nothing new.

The anomaly was Reagan, but then he was opposed by the GOP establishment. He came in from the outside, not as dramatically as Trump but still against the wishes of the GOP elites.

[chimera]

Nixon was the quintessential GOP insider and could probably be classified as a moderate, but not much more. He had an incredibly weak political base and it only got weaker after the 1970 midterms. The presstitutes hated him and about all he had a free hand in was foreign policy, where he hamstrung himself on the "peace with honor" gambit. The rest was just either blocking or playing the go along to get along game.

It was a terrible time to live through since effectively all control was handed to Johnson and the 'Rats with their supermajorities in Congress. It was like being on board a speeding, out of control train that you know is going to have a disastrous wreck. As the years dragged on it felt like the bubble of contempt for the tyrant Johnson was going to burst, but he bailed out and handed the mess to Humphrey and ultimately Nixon.

Geez, what a string of losers we had there for awhile: Johnson, Nixon, Carter (I omit Ford because of his caretaker status).