and who made you the judge of what input is great or not?

lets have a proper debate based on the facts please and not abuse from JW

Physican Heal Thyself ?

why blog stuff if you can’t take a discussion afterwards?

and ‘historical inaccuracies’ – you used it at 1.17

perhaps you shouldn’t call people naive, muddled or not caring about other’s input.

You make sure fairly distasteful and frankly nasty comments. when challenged over them, you just can’t take it and resort to abuse. Shame really.

JW

there is no proven evidence of a link between the police and brown over the green affair. the plumbers were nixon’s men.

in terms of briefing oppositions. the democrats, of course, were the majority party in congress in 1972, will total access to security. economic briefings. as mcgoven would have had.

nixon in fact had a relatively liberal domestic policy – go back and check it – of course you can find arguments against this, but overall he was more ted heath than thatcher. nixon vastly increased funding to the great society programmes, improved social welfare and even in areas of foreign policy he was surprisingly liberal, eg china. Nixon also built the coalition between the working classes, unions and ethnic voters which became known as reagan democrats.

as for gchq – well you have to put that in the context of theday, Nixon never had the challenge of international terror. he was though not widely trusted or liked by the pentagon generals or fbi.

the conventional view is that nixon was similar to disraeli, not brown.

also there is no evidence that nixon was a wife beater and equally i guess that brown isn’t.

i don’t really care if you think this is ‘good input’ or not. just some corrections needed to be made. and i could go on

JW

(1) Neither had/has the remotest interest in sex (for reproduction only, in both cases).

(2) Both were/are servants of elites who found/find them gauche and yucky and had no respect for them in private.

Now let’s look at the differences:

(1) Nixon was a drunk. Brown is always sober.

(2) Nixon had a serious perspiration problem. Brown doesn’t.

(3) Nixon was a compromise candidate, acceptable to both the Rockefeller faction and the emerging small town right. Brown was the undisputed heir.

(4) Nixon was a ham actor with a cloyingly oleaginous manner. Brown is totally wooden.

(5) Nixon sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks in order to win the 1968 Presidential Election. Brown hasn’t committed any war crimes – yet.

(6) Nixon made liberal use of terms like “nigger” and “Jew boy” (when talking to his staff). Brown doesn’t.

(7) Nixon beat his wife. Brown doesn’t.

I had great hopes of Richard Nixon when he has won his second term. He was a fundamentally dishonest man, but all he then had to go for was using his unquestioned ability to leave the USA a great legacy. Then we found that his paranoia had got criminally out of hand in the process of getting re-elected.

The difference, and it is important, is that Gordon Brown strikes me as a fundamentally honest man. I had real hope that his paranoia would fade once Blair went; for before then he had a lot to be paranoid about. Instead, his paranoia appears to have worsened. His potential to be a great Prime Minister has, I fear, disappeared in the storms of his anxieties.

His honesty, however, is very like Tony Blair’s. Both combine the subjective feeling of honest virtue with a vast capacity for self deception. (Self-deception was never a Nixon trait). Unlike Blair, I think that Brown has some sense that the does not really know himself. But that is a major feeder to Brown’s sense of being perpetually under threat; it aggravates his paranoia.

Gordon Brown is not Nixon re-born. He will never perpetrate the arrant dishonesty that permeated Watergate. But at least until the general election is over, Gordon Brown is arguably more dangerous than Nixon. He will seek and use his Prime Ministerial powers to find ostensibly legal ways attack his ‘evil’ opponents.

1. In March 2007 I published a ‘psycobabble’ (sic) piece predicting exactly how Brown has behaved since. That was harsh too – but accurate. Simon Jenkins called it ‘uncannily prescient’.
2. It isn’t true that Brown’s eye loss was well-known before he became leader: it was first made widely public during a PPB after bad focus group responses about Brown’s chilly personality.
3. If the comparison is worthless,pray explain today’s ONS statistics following the VAT cut: the only ones anywhere saying sales went up….so,no fiddling there then? And those stats improperly and selectively released last week? And Brown’s use of starving African kids to make political capital three years ago? And his nonstop smearing of Blair when Chancellor? And his attempt to slap a D-notice equivalent on his gold sales in 1998?

In his willingness to subvert, Gordon Brown’s actions speak for themselves: he is Nixon reborn – and as a Nixon student of forty years standing, some help with where the ‘historical inaccuracies’ are would be deemed helpful.

Don’t be naive: be vigilant.

Sincerely

JW

the later part of the article is spot on but slightly disfigred by some of the ad hominem psycobabble.

1. All governments are authoritarian.

2. Governments drawn from authoritiarian political traditions are particulalry authoritarian.

3. Modern technology is fire from the gods for Authoritarian governments.

4. ergo we need vigelence to keep pace with technological change.

Its the reason i remain bewildered about the lack of demanding a quid pro quo for allowing the davis “Liberty” By Election to go ahead.

As far as the Damian Green episode is concerned, I am reminded of what happened to scientists in the original ‘V’ mini-series. It was the scientists who had the ability and knowledge the expose the Visitors’ fraudulent appearance and motives, so they were the natural targets.

It seems to be much the same here, in its own way…