Evan Thomas, who thought Obama was 'sort of God,' thinks Hillary is sort of Nixon

I post this mostly for my own amusement, although I have to say that if I didn't know Evan Thomas's history, I'd be mildly impressed by his assessment of Hillary. Only mildly, though, because he doesn't really recognize anything that isn't pretty obvious to anyone paying attention.

This is the guy, after all, who was so smitten with Obama he actually portrayed him as "sort of God," which I guess just serves to remind us of the power of the delusion that got us to where we now regrettably are. Maybe he learned from his own beclowning of himself, but I have to say that his presentation of the Hillary/Tricky Dick parallels is pretty good:

Mrs. Clinton is not, as Nixon was not, a fresh face on the political scene. Voters had some vivid glimpses of Nixon’s basic personality long before they voted to elect him president. Nixon gave his mawkish but effective Checkers speech (to what was at the time the largest ever radio and TV audience, more than 60 million people) in 1952, 16 years before he was elected president. He bitterly told the press, “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around any more” in 1962, after losing the governor’s race in California. Although Nixon ran as the “New Nixon” in 1968, most people hadn’t forgotten the old Nixon. We have now been watching Mrs. Clinton on the national stage for more than two decades, since at least 1992 when her husband first ran for president. If you think that past is prologue, there is every reason to believe that President Hillary Clinton would spend her presidency lashing out at her enemies as she ducks small scandals and possibly large ones. She would be aggrieved and dodgy. That is not to say that she would wind up like Nixon—threatened with impeachment and driven from office—but it does suggest how she would deal with the inevitable rocky times ahead.

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Lately, Mrs. Clinton has shown some Nixonian tendencies to try to stonewall and cover up. Her handling of the Clinton Foundation and email controversies is right out of the Nixon play book: Treat every new revelation as old news, attack the messenger as biased, reveal only what you have to—the old “modified, limited hangout,” in the parlance of Nixon aide John Ehrlichman.

I would offer one major difference between Nixon and Hillary. Nixon actually had a deep understanding of world affairs and geopolitics, and was very skilled as a statesman - such that even after his resignation in disgrace, his successors (including Bill Clinton) called on him for advice in the conduct of foreign policy. Another point: Nixon was absolutely dishonest, paranoid and ruthless in his use of presidential power to achieve political ends. There's no defending him there. But Nixon's motivation wasn't personal enrichment. It was merely the preservation of his own position. As Thomas notes in his piece, Nixon didn't even accept money for speeches after he left office. He did write a lot of books about world affairs - some of them excellent, by the way - and I'm sure he did fine financially through those sales. But for all Nixon's underhanded dealings, there's really no history of his doing any of this for his own financial gain. Hillary, by contrast, is shameless about engaging in corrupt activity both for her own political gain and for her own financial gain. You can argue that none of the Clintons' scandals to date rise to the level of Watergate, but one thing you can't deny is that what we already know about the Clintons demonstrates beyond a shadow of a doubt that they are corrupt and untrustworthy. At least you can defend the electorate that voted for Nixon by saying that we didn't really know what Watergate had to teach us until he had already been elected twice. What we know about Hillary's dishonesty and her other negative traits is already well known in advance of the 2016 election. So if we elect her anyway, we're demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that the America of 1968 and 1972 was much smarter than the America of today. Oh, by the way, it's not as if they two of them never crossed paths.