by Eric Zuesse<\/p>\n
Richard Nixon\u2019s similarities to Hillary Clinton are remarkable<\/strong>:<\/p>\n 1:<\/strong>\u00a0Both were highly successful politicians who had\u00a0exceptionally negative net-approval ratings from the U.S. public<\/a><\/strong>, but were viewed highly favorably by the voters\u00a0within their own Party.<\/p>\n 2:<\/strong>\u00a0Both were unsuccessful in their first run for the Presidency,<\/strong> but managed to come back and ran considerably more successful campaigns the second time around.<\/p>\n 3:<\/strong>\u00a0Both were\u00a0highly\u00a0distrusted<\/a>,<\/strong> except by the voters within their own Party.<\/p>\n 4:<\/strong>\u00a0Both went into their Presidential campaign years (especially the second time around) as being\u00a0\u201cthe candidate with experience.\u201d<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n 5:<\/strong>\u00a0Both were war-hawks and proponents of a big military, but were also liberals on social policies and regulatory policies <\/strong>(for example,\u00a0Nixon signed into law<\/a>\u00a0the National Environmental Policy\u00a0Act, several\u00a0environmental initiatives including\u00a0the Clean Air and Clean Water\u00a0Acts, the Mammal Marine\u00a0Protection Act, and the creation of\u00a0the Environmental Protection\u00a0Agency; and, he started the Earned-Income Tax Credit, which\u00a0“now lifts more children out of poverty than any\u00a0other government program\u201d<\/a>).<\/p>\n 6:<\/strong>\u00a0Whereas Nixon, running during the Cold War against the sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968,\u00a0lied<\/strong> that he had \u2018a secret plan to end the Vietnam war’<\/a>\u00a0(he actually had \u2014 and applied \u2014\u00a0a secret plan to\u00a0extend\u00a0the Vietnam war<\/a>), and he won the Presidency on the basis of that lie<\/strong>; Hillary Clinton, running against the anti-restoration-of-the-Cold-War progressive Bernie Sanders in 2016, lies <\/strong>by saying that she has a plan to end the war in Russia-allied Syria. Sanders says:\u00a0\u201cOf course Assad is a terrible\u00a0dictator. But I think we have got to get\u00a0our foreign policies and priorities\u00a0right. The immediate \u2014 it is not Assad\u00a0who is attacking the United States. It\u00a0is ISIS. And ISIS is attacking France\u00a0and attacking Russian airliners. The major priority, right now, in\u00a0terms of our foreign and military\u00a0policy should be the destruction of\u00a0ISIS.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Clinton says an emphatic\u00a0no\u00a0to that:\u00a0“Assad has killed, by last count, about\u00a0250,000 Syrians. The reason we are\u00a0in the mess we’re in, that ISIS has the\u00a0territory it has, is because of Assad.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0So, she is promising regime-change in Syria and saying that it\u2019s the\u00a0prerequisite to defeating ISIS\u00a0\u2014 which is an absurd lie<\/strong>, since ISIS, and Al Qaeda, and all the other jihadist groups who have flocked into Syria to overthrow and replace Assad, are certainly\u00a0not\u00a0the way to defeat ISIS, nor to defeat the other jihadist groups there, all of which are\u00a0anti-Assad, as is Clinton herself. Clearly, then, her \u2018plan\u2019 to win the war in Syria is, essentially, to replace Assad with jihadists \u2014\u00a0to whom the U.S. is sending thousands of tons of weapons<\/a>. Her Big Lie <\/strong>there is merely stupider than Nixon\u2019s (it\u2019s\u00a0transparently\u00a0stupid, because both she and ISIS aim, above all, to overthrow Assad), but it\u2019s just as much a lie about war-and-peace as was Nixon\u2019s \u2019secret plan to end the Vietnam war\u2019; and, in that sense, it is remarkably similar and (like Nixon\u2019s lie <\/strong>was) can be believed only by liar<\/strong>-trusting fools, including virtually all members of the candidate\u2019s own Party, plus a large percentage of political independents.<\/p>\n 7:<\/strong>\u00a0Both Richard Nixon and Hillary Clinton were\/are famous for being secretive, and for distrusting everyone except his\/her proven-loyal personal entourage<\/strong> \u2014 loyalty is a higher value to them than is any other. They are paranoid \u2014 very us-versus-\u2018them\u2019 \u2014 and all-too-willing to use unethical means of defeating \u2018them\u2019 (not\u00a0really\u00a0the American people\u2019s foreign \u2018enemy\u2019, but, above all, their\u00a0own domestic\u00a0\u201cenemies-list\u201d).<\/p>\n 8:<\/strong>\u00a0Both Nixon and Clinton famously\u00a0use curse-words profusely in private, and treat their subordinates like trash,<\/strong> and rule them by fear<\/a>.<\/p>\n 9:\u00a0<\/strong>Both of them had\/have established records backing\u00a0coups abroad, in order to impose the will of America\u2019s President<\/a>, no matter how bloody<\/strong> (such as the coups that overthrew Mossadegh in Iran in 1953 and Allende in Chile in 1973, and the coups that overthrew\u00a0Zelaya in Honduras in 2009<\/a>,\u00a0and\u00a0Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014<\/a>).<\/p>\n