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I was quite clear in my statement and maybe should have contemplated using smaller words and easier context for a Nixon fan like you.

I suppose I was so in awe with your brilliant use of the language that I was momentarily thrown off kilter. However, I think I have now recovered.

But to restate: Nixon was a fool for 'opening' China,....

Nixon's trip to China was not as successful as I would have liked but he did attempt to unlock China's isolation that had existed since before the building of the Great Wall, which exemplified it, and later when their mistrust of the outside was exacerbated by the Opium Wars, and finally when FDR, then Truman, abandoned Chiang Kai-shek to the Communists. Mao Tse Tung immediately clamped the lid on things and killed millions of his own people. Nixon made an effort to break that mindset and relieve tensions in the world. That move also drove a wedge, of sorts, between China and the USSR>

.... and if he were not a Republican, no one here--on FR, where you are reading this post--would argue he was right in doing so.

I suspect you are as wrong about that as you are the rest. What happened to that nonsense about Armond Hammer?

Our present situation with China was brought about by our good friends Bill and Hillary, not Nixon. Whether China sees the light of the advantages of freedom and free enterprisae, as envisioned by Nixon, or becomes and idiot Communist Superpower, as envisioned by the Clintons, has yet to be decided.

It's Armand Hammer, oh-so-wise one. You'd prefer to blame our present situation with China on the Clintons, but the sellouts go back far further than you'd like to admit. And that 'wedge' logic is just an excuse because again, Nixon had a -R after his name. That same excuse could have been used with Franco's Spain ("we kept him from aligning with Hitler!"). Never mind that Fascist Spain wasn't about to align with Hitler other than where convenient for Spain. Never mind that the Chinese weren't about to align with the Soviets other than where convenient for China. It was appeasement to deal with the Chinese. It was appeasement to deal with a country that is set against us, no matter how we like to imagine otherwise.

Certainly, Nixon was a better option than McGovern or Humphrey, but he was no conservative. I believe he was only anti-Communist where he believed it would be to his political advantage. He was purely a political animal. I'm sorry that you prefer to play the "mind-numbed robot" to the extent that you blind yourself to history of American involvement in China and Nixon's mistake there, and to the point where you laugably pretend that Nixon was concerned about Mao's butchery, but I'm not about to join you in fantasyland. I suppose I should have been warned by your chosen freeper name.