Portland Man: No Nixon Presidency, no Bill Rehnquist, no Roger Stone, no Ed Meese, no Dick Cheney, no Nino Scalia, no John Roberts researching how to overturn the voting rights act. Gods, the list of bad people who got their start with that man in power....

The most consequential moment may well have been asirhan Sirhan killing RFKSr. in Los Angeles in '68. I think RFK could have beat Nixon.

No Nixon Presidency, no Bill Rehnquist, no Roger Stone, no Ed Meese, no Dick Cheney, no Nino Scalia, no John Roberts researching how to overturn the voting rights act. Gods, the list of bad people who got their start with that man in power....

Not that Republicans would have been aced out of power forever, of course. Or that RFKSr would have been immune from fumbles and free from fault. But even Reagan was just a mile post on the racetrack set by Nixon. (Paging @rufus-hickok.bsky.social )

And it's a supreme irony that now we have RFKJr in the race and he's a fvcking joke.

Yeah, it's entirely possible that my memory is limited to my own lifetime, where Trump feels like the real life version of the character Reagan played. I've also heard the case that everything in the Powell Memorandum (1971) came to pass, although that was mostly about destroying higher ed.

'Course if I'm right that means we've been slouching down this road for literally my entire lifetime. Which is depressing in a different way.

This is my assumption. 50 years of back room deals.

No Fox News. Roger Ailes was Nixon's media guy. Fox News was founded in order to make it so no Republican would ever be held accountable like that again.

Or If they’d listened to McGovern in ‘72…

From McGovern’s autobiography, “Grassroots” McG was talking about the corruption of the Nixon administration for months, culminating in the third of his 30-minute broadcast ads in late October, which expanded on the topics of his speech to the UPI editors early in the month.

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