Dead Cats: None Dare...pp. 72-75

 "Instead, the liberals have showered the President with dead cats, while most conservatives have maintained a glum silence, and thus the Administration has been 'little credited' for 'much genuine achievement."--Allen quoting Conservative columnist Stewart Aslop regarding Nixon.

I'm not up on my slang, not now, not in the past, not anywhere. My personal slang is usually stuff I lifted from movies or books and is obscure enough where I sometimes have to explain what I meant. I'm familiar with it though, and while I've had friends laugh at me for not quite getting "imma" on the second try, eventually I come around. I mention all of this because I have no idea whether "showered the president with dead cats" is a good thing or a bad thing here. 

What further complicates this is that we've begun Chapter 7 "Pressure From Above and Pressure From Below;" but we are still continuing Allen's rant against the liberal foreign policies of Nixon and Kissinger. He's framing Nixon as being the secret darling of the left, so that means when they shower him with dead cats it's a good thing, but how can it be? I absolutely refuse to look this up because it's the context that matters and Allen is not good at context.  Something else he's not good at, introducing long block quotes and correctly punctuating them. 

I have a Ph.D. in philosophy, I read some pretty dense material, and I had to read this page three times to figure out that Aslop used the phrase "dead cats" and not Allen. On page 72 (if you are following along) 3/4 of the page is him quoting Aslop with one transition sentence in between. Ok, this isn't necessarily bad. I blockquote when I write too, sometimes it's necessary, but you do have to justify the block quote in a way that you do not normally do when you quote a line or two. The point of writing isn't to fill space it's to communicate your ideas, up until now Allen hasn't been that bad, but now he's just letting Aslop do the writing for him. 

What makes this difficult for me is that Aslop is discussing Nixon's withdrawal from Vietnam as a farce and that the liberal democrats kept criticizing him for "'chasing the will-o-the-wisp of military victory.'" but that's a criticism of the "peace with honor" framing of the end of the Vietnam war. I don't get the point here. Is Allen mad about the situation that Aslop is pointing out that Nixon was wrong? Are they supposed to support his framing of the end of the Vietnam war, something liberals had been protesting for years, as being a victory? I don't think Allen knows what he's actually criticizing here.

I'm no expert in American culture in the 1960s, but I'm very aware of the effect Vietnam had on the presidency. It had become, since Eisenhower, a monolithic force of nature. We know from the Pentagon papers that since Kennedy the prevailing view was that the war was essentially unwinnable. There were a number of different assumptions that were made which were false, a number of different fuckups, and fighting that war like they did was never going to work. Ho Chi Minh understood something about the way the West fights a war that the West should have learned after fighting the Japanese--we don't get them enough to win. Take a look at the first major engagement between the US and the Vietnamese--the battle of Ia Drang. Both sides claimed victory but even the N. Vietnamese reported twice as many casualties as the US (the US claimed 4x). The war was unwinnable because there was no limit to how many people the Communist forces were willing to lose. Why am I discussing this? Because Nixon was handed a terrible position by the outgoing Johnson, the war was extremely unpopular. So when he pulls out the last troops and gets shit for it? Well, that's how it was always going to end unless somehow the American flag was raised over Hanoi. 

Yet Allen's problem is that we left Vietnam, and all of the blood of the dead American soldiers is on the hands of the Rockefellers and Nixon. So, according to him, we should have stayed? It's unclear, but my thinking is that it doesn't matter. Allen is going to attack Nixon from the right and anything he does short of imprisoning liberals and nuking the USSR is proof that he's being controlled by COMMUNISM. 

The rant against Nixon continues, and I am assuming that it's the entire chapter, but the real beef Allen has is that the Nixon who ran against Kennedy, the Nixon as VP to Eisenhower, moderated his position once he got into power. That's how one would expect it to work as idealism meets reality. Positions have to be moderated because instead of just saying things the person now has to do things. Doing things requires compromise, that's the system that was supposed to be the case, but instead what Allen wants is democracy in name only. He wants Nixon to, in the words of Sideshow Bob, "lower taxes, brutalize criminals, and rule you like a king." 

The revenue-sharing policy that Nixon proposed with the states is the only thing that keeps some of the most conservative states alive. The liberal states like NY and California (who each have economies that can be measured against countries) provide tax revenue that keeps states like Alabama and Arkansas alive. Is this socialism? Yes, but I have no problem using that word because a little socialism is a good thing. 

Ultimately, Allen is just ignorant of how everything works. He doesn't understand that idealism points you in a direction but pragmatism is the only way things get done. He doesn't understand that a campaign speech does not translate into law, which requires the legislative branch. I've already burned some pixels explaining his utter cluelessness on foreign policy so I won't repeat myself here. Now he's going to confuse the ten federal legal districts with some kind of economic price-fixing zone. For all his doom-saying, none of what Allen predicted came to pass. 

I'll stop here because Allen is going to switch tack toward something he really doesn't understand, inflation and the economy. At least most conspiracy theorists just claim that the federal reserve is a ponzi scheme run by globalists and shy away from details--because they have the humility to not claim that they understand it. Allen isn't going to do so, and this will be his second (third) attempt to convince us that he gets it.