Via Sam Rosenfeld, Ben Stein's article arguing that Deep Throat somehow brought the Khmer Rouge to power and was thus responsible for a genocide is just about the craziest thing I've ever read. The first portion of the piece is hamfisted hagiography, like:
That is his legacy. He was a peacemaker. He was a lying, conniving, covering up peacemaker. He was not a lying, conniving drug addict like JFK, a lying, conniving war starter like LBJ, a lying, conniving seducer like Clinton -- a lying, conniving peacemaker. That is Nixon's kharma.
The problem with that formulation is you're taking one aspect of his presidency and blowing it into the guy's singular mission. By that standard, Kennedy was a lying, conniving economy-grower, Johnson was a lying, conniving enemy of poverty, and Clinton was a lying, conniving harbinger of the information age. It doesn't even make sense.
I, by the way, am pretty sympathetic to Nixon. His economic policies were stupidly formulated and a major cause of stagflation, and Nixon only let them through because he idolized his Treasury Secretary, John Connally, but other than that he wasn't a particularly bad president. His approach to foreign policy was quite sound and he wasn't so much a Republican as a Whig, he viewed the presidency as a quasi-spiritual institution that could be leveraged to make Americans better themselves morally. Indeed, Democrats would've been far better off if Watergate never happened. Jimmy Carter's ascendance was just about the worst thing that's happened to our party in the last 50 years, and in an alternate universe where it never occurred Democrats wouldn't be seen as nearly so weak, pessimistic, paralyzed in the face of danger, etc. If you want to know why we lose currently, it's because we're viewed as the party of Carter rather than Clinton.
