perhaps he should have been water commissoner instead

"is the dog there?"
richard nixon's first query to h r haldeman after his inauguration.

"unfortunately...(he) had a dog that did not like him. that day, like the days before, king timahoe refused to come near the president's desk, even when assistants laid a trail of dog biscuits leading to nixon."
president nixon: alone in the white house p.35

"cool-strong-organized-temperate-exciting...excitement-joy in life-sharing, lift spirtis of people-pithy memorable phrases."
from one of nixon's innumerable notes to himself

pithy phrases like what? " i am not a crook"? forty-two years ago today the great satan narrowly defeated that old ward hack hubert hunphrey, and while he did not change the arrogant and quasi-legal substance of the presidential office, he went quite a way towards changing public perception of it...his loathing of the media and his "enemies list" changed the way the press addressed the presidency and the poster boy for political criminality gave them lots of ammunition... an inherently unlikeable combination of giddy hubris and insecurity his contradictions made his public life a muddle of highs and lows...with a mouth like the sailor he once was and a deep hatred of intellectuals the only joy in life he seemed to take was revenging himself on those he felt had slighted him in some way...unfortunately for old dick he didn't have an efficient organization like stalin's nkvd to wreak his vengance with...he had howard hunt and g. gordon liddy...a washed out cia agent and a political operator whose ineptitude was so blatantly obvious that the republican national committee fobbed him off on the only place they could find that was more gullible than they were...the white house..this left his organization open to excitment that heartened his "enemies"...as far as temperance goes old dick really didn't seem to have much...prone to swilling straight gin from the largest tumblers the white house kitchen could provide and having long converstions with the portraits of past presidents he admired, he routinely collapsed in a welter of tears and vomit and had to be scraped up off the floor of the lincoln bedrooom and poured into bed by his cuban valet manolo...the carpeting was changed many times and mary lincoln's demask beadspread was ripped up into dustrasgs...so as the democrats mourn their loss of the house and the fickle nature of the great unwashed american voter let them remember that the republicans are as big a bunch of fuck-ups as they are...mostly because they are opposing wings of the same big political fraternity more than opposing parties...they agree on where we're going...it is the route to take that divides them...not ideology...leave that to the tea party...they will learn the liabilities of idealism soon enough as they bash their heads against the granire facade of the hamiltonian second republic...they are doomed...fey as nixon ever was...rand paul will be the new everett dirksen.