grim anniversary

[calimac]

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the day, also a Thursday, that President Nixon (as appalling a concept in its day as "President Trump" is today) announced on national tv the invasion of Cambodia. Nixon had promised to wind the Vietnam War down; now he was expanding it to another country.

Unsurprisingly, protests followed. And on Monday the 4th, the National Guard decided it would be a good idea to respond to those protests by shooting random students at Kent State.

Just to remind you that things were rather bad, fifty years ago.

Comments

[cmcmck]

I remember it- I'd have been in my mid teens.

[voidampersand]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkg-bzTHeAk

[sturgeonslawyer]

While I agree that "President Nixon" was as appalling in that day as "President Trump", I must observe that this is because our threshold of appallingness has been significantlyt raised by Reagan and Dubya - and Nixon himself.

Nixon was evil but (mostly) competent, and lied only when it served a purpose (such as covering his own ass).

Trump is not competent, and lies like he breathes. His lying and bumbling has already killed nearly half again as many Americans to Covid-19 (roughly 64) as were killed in the _entire_ Vietnam war (about 47K), including the Kennedy and Johnson years (and, I suppose, Ford...)

Of course I don't suggest that _all_ those deaths are his fault, but I believe that a reasonably competent Administration response would have saved a _lot_ of them.

Oh, there are some definite parallels between the two - most notably, to me, the tendency to throw people under the bus. But I do believe that Trump is an objectively worse CiC than Nixon, Buchanan, and Pierce added up and put into one package.