#Vice President Agnew

[deadpresidents]

"I really would have enjoyed serving in the Vice Presidency with Lyndon Johnson, because if anything had gone wrong, probably he himself would have picked up the phone and said, 'Agnew, what the hell are you doing?' Or he would have said, 'I've got a hell of a problem. Come over here. I want to talk to you about this.'

Unfortunately, I could have no such man-to-man talk with President Nixon. Absolutely none. I was never allowed to come close enough to participate with him directly in any decision. Every time I went to see him and raised a subject for discussion, he would begin a rambling, time-consuming monologue. Then finally the phone would ring or [White House Chief of Staff H.R. "Bob"] Haldeman would come in, and there would be no time left for what I really had come to talk about. He successfully avoided any subject he didn't want to be pinned down on. He preferred keeping his decision-making within a very small group. I was not of the inner circle."

-- Former Vice President Spiro Agnew, on his frustration with how far President Richard Nixon would go in order to avoid any sort of uncomfortable discussion or personal confrontation in one-on-one meetings with each other, in Agnew's book, "Go Quietly...or else", 1980

[lil-als]

Inspired by @anteabbie’s telling presidents on characterai that she’s pregnant…. Veeps!

[isawken]

why are all the beautiful women i follow always talking about spiro agnew?

[nodynasty4us]

From the October 28, 2024 opinion piece by Harlan Ullman, a senior advisor at the Atlantic Council and the prime author of the “shock and awe” military doctrine:

Why Donald Trump selected Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) as his running mate is still unknown. What did Trump see in Vance, who once called the former president “America’s Hitler” and unfit for the presidency? And what caused this transformation?

...

Trump of course may have had other motivations for choosing Vance as opposed to a more recognizable ally... That motivation could have been derived from a little history and Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign.

Whom did Nixon choose as his vice president? Most Americans will not recall Spiro Agnew, the disgraced former governor of Maryland. Agnew had a modest resume, serving as a Maryland county executive and governor until he was selected to become the nation’s 39th vice president.

...

One reason Nixon had selected Agnew was as an insurance policy against a potential impeachment and conviction removing him from the presidency.

Simply put, who would accept Agnew as president in the middle of the Cold War and with Vietnam still raging? Had Agnew and not Gerald Ford been vice president in 1974, would Nixon have resigned over Watergate? If he had been impeached, would the Senate have convicted him? Those would have been interesting questions.

...

With Vance as vice president, does the Spiro Agnew model apply?

In the Senate, where Vance was not popular with everyone, is a convicted Trump better in the White House than a young, unpopular vice president? One can wonder. But of all the reasons why Trump picked Vance from a fairly robust bench, an insurance policy makes some sense.

[xtruss]

How Presidential Running Mates Can Make or Break a Campaign! Four Times Candidates’ Second-in-Command Picks Surprised Everyone

— September 18, 2024 | American Experience

Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin on the big screen at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, September 3, 2008. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, Library of Congress.

Every four years, the news media engage in endless speculation about the identities of presidential candidates’ running mates. The process is so enshrined, in fact, that it even has a name: Veepstakes.

Often the choice is predictable. Sometimes, though, there are VP shockers—running mate picks that no one, even the most astute political analysts, saw coming. Those surprise picks can be a huge boon to a campaign, building notoriety and momentum—or they can backfire, sending a candidate’s run into a tailspin. Here are a few of modern history’s most dramatic Veepstakes outcomes.

Sarah Palin (Sarah Louise Palin)

John McCain and Sarah Palin at the Republican National Convention, September 4, 2008. Photo credit Tom LeGro, PBS NewsHour.

John McCain was behind in the polls against fellow Senator Barack Obama in 2008 when he made his surprising VP pick: small town mayor-turned-Alaska governor Sarah Palin, a choice no one predicted.

At first, public perception suggested McCain had made a bold choice with a political outsider whose gender, youth, and more conservative ideology helped balance the Republican ticket. McCain’s campaign raised record amounts and his poll numbers skyrocketed. However, it wasn’t long before Palin’s inexperience and lack of preparation came through in interviews and debates.

As the election season progressed, public opinion of Palin turned increasingly negative, and later analysis showed that she potentially cost the McCain campaign millions of votes—a significant margin in a close race like 2008.

Thomas Eagleton (Thomas Francis Eagleton)

An official portrait of Thomas Eagleton as Missouri’s Lieutenant Governor, 1967. Photo courtesy of Missouri State Archives.

In July 1972, Democratic candidate George McGovern announced his running mate: Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton, a rising young political star whose anti-abortion views balanced McGovern’s ticket—or so the campaign hoped. Only 18 days later, things looked very different.

Right after the Democratic National Convention ended, news emerged about Eagleton’s medical history: three times during the 1960s he had been hospitalized for depression, and received electroshock treatment. McGovern stood by his choice at first, but political pressure mounted.

Ultimately, McGovern replaced Eagleton with former Peace Corps director Sargeant Shriver. (The only other time in American history that a VP candidate had been removed from the ticket was in 1912, when President William Howard Taft replaced acting vice president James Sherman—and only because Sherman had died six days before the election. Spoiler: that presidential bid lost.)

McGovern’s campaign also never recovered from the last-minute switch, ultimately losing the election by the largest landslide in U.S. history. The scandal also forever changed the way potential VPs were vetted going forward, typically leading campaigns to do far more comprehensive research.

Spiro Agnew (Spiro Theodore Agnew)

Vice President Spiro Agnew and President Richard Nixon at the Republican National Convention, August 23, 1972. Photo courtesy National Archives and Records Administration.

In August 1968, presidential hopeful Richard Nixon made a 1 a.m. announcement about his vice presidential choice. Spiro Agnew was an unknown on no one’s list, a former county elected official in Maryland who had only been governor for two years.

At first, Agnew’s name became a campaign punchline. But Nixon’s choice proved smart. Positioned together on the Republican ticket as law-and-order candidates, Nixon and Agnew won the popular vote by a small margin but took the electoral college by 110 votes.

Once in office, Agnew did such a good job of reinforcing the president’s rhetoric that he became known as “Nixon’s Nixon.” But ultimately, the copycat routine went too far: just before the Watergate scandal ended Nixon’s presidency, Agnew himself stepped down to avoid his own separate charges of bribery, extortion, and tax fraud, becoming only the second U.S. vice president in history to resign.

Al Gore (Albert Arnold Gore Jr.)

President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore disembark from Air Force One, October 20, 1995. Photo by Sharon Farmer, National Archives and Records Administration.

Conventional wisdom says presidential candidates should balance the ticket by choosing VPs who compliment them around various demographics, like age, identity, geography, and ideology. But in 1992, Bill Clinton threw decades of political strategy out the window and chose a running mate who was practically his mirror image.

Senator Al Gore was almost the exact same age as Clinton, also southern, and a centrist Democrat. In fact, Gore was so similar to the presidential candidate that Republicans dubbed him “Clinton’s tax-and-spend brother.” Gore was reportedly selected from a list of 40 potential candidates, with Clinton’s key considerations being that his running mate share his values, be prepared to serve as president immediately, and have the stamina required for a long, hard campaign.

It paid off. Together Clinton and Gore’s youthful energy carried the first all-baby-boomer presidential ticket to a big electoral college win, proving that sometimes doubling down is a savvy strategy.

President Richard Nixon meeting with Rep. Gerald Ford in the Oval Office the day before announcing Ford as his pick for Vice President in 1973. Credit: The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. National Archives and Records Administration

[darshanan-blog]

Bagman: Podcast by Rachael Maddow - Review

Never before is this piece of history so comprehensively narrated. An incredible story of wild crimes, audacious cover-up and spectacular downfall of a brazen crook in the White House. #bagman is must-listen podcast by @Maddow @MSNBC

Bagman, a podcast by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, is not only providing an amazing peek into history during the #Nixon Presidency but is certain to keep the listeners riveted. A film is in the making, written by Adam Pearlman and Mike Yarvitz and with writer, director, producer, Ben Stiller.  Bagman tells a true story of one of the most brazen bribery and extortion scandals ever to happen at the scale…

[literaryvein-reblogs]

How do I write mean insults that's in character for a character to say? I'm personally poor at coming up with insults that don't sound generic or would actually cut deep, being mean in general. I want to write a snarky character with a dry sense of humour when it calls for it but don't know how to go about it.

He's also recovering from a superiority and inferiority complex.

As the writer, you know your character best, and what insults would make sense for them to say (also considering the bigger context of the scene). So, I'll just provide you with a compilation of prompts and notes from different sources, and you can choose which ones are most appropriate to incorporate in your story.

Writing Notes: Insults & Dry Humor

A List of "Sophisticated" Insults

Craven - having or showing a complete lack of courage; very cowardly

Fatuous - silly or stupid; complacently or inanely foolish. From Latin infatuate, which once meant "to make foolish," but which now usually means "to inspire with foolish love or admiration."

Insipid - not interesting or exciting; dull or boring

Obstreperous - difficult to control and often noisy

Obtuse - stupid or unintelligent; not able to think clearly or to understand what is obvious or simple

Pusillanimous - weak and afraid of danger. It's been used by such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson ("It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbours"), and the disgraced Vice-President Spiro Agnew, who called journalists "pusillanimous pussyfooters."

Sanctimonious - pretending to be morally better than other people. It once meant "possessing sanctity; holy, sacred." The genuinely holy aspect faded, and William Shakespeare is credited with first using sanctimonious to mean "hypocritically pious or devout."

Twee - sweet or cute in a way that is silly or sentimental. Just as buddy is believed to be a baby talk alteration of "brother", twee is a baby talk alteration of "sweet". Although twee is still considered a chiefly British term, it's increasingly popular in American English.

Unctuous - revealing or marked by a smug, ingratiating, and false earnestness or spirituality. Unction can mean "anointment" or it can name something used to anoint, such as a soothing or lubricating oil. That idea of oiliness led to unctuous, which can describe the slickness of false sincerity.

Vacuous - having or showing a lack of intelligence or serious thought; lacking meaning, importance, or substance

The insult would also depend on which other character it is directed at. Here is a list of "funny" insults for adults from Reader's Digest:

My days of not taking you seriously have come to a middle.

You are the human equivalent of a participation trophy.

If you were a spice, you’d be flour.

You may have a sparsely attended funeral.

I smell something burning. Are you trying to think again?

You’re like a lighthouse in a desert: bright but not very useful.

Don’t worry—the first 30 years of childhood are always the hardest.

May your life be as pleasant as you are.

You’re as useless as the “ueue” in “queue.”

Your face is just fine. It’s your personality that’s the issue.

...and for your character's significant other:

I like you. People say I have no taste, but I like you.

You continue to meet my expectations.

I’ll never forget the first time we met. But I’ll keep trying.

If genius skips a generation, our kids will be brilliant.

We were happily married for a month. Too bad it’s our 10-year anniversary.

I admire the way you try so hard.

You’re entitled to your incorrect opinion.

Have you tried doing it the way I told you to the first time?

The best part of watching a show with you is when you fall asleep because then I can watch my show.

Don’t call me crazy—you’re the one who married me!

You can always alter these to better suit your character. You can read the full list here, which also includes some insults for kids, best friends, and family.

Tips for Better Humor Writing

Humor writing isn’t all about landing a good joke (except for when it is). In creative writing, the effect is usually a bit more nuanced. Here’s a few writing techniques to get you started:

Subvert expectations. Try to undermine the audience’s expectations or reform them with structural elements.

Save the best for last. Humor is often a release of tension, so the sentence builds that tension, and the pay-off—the punchline—happens most naturally at the end. This is also sometimes referred to as the “rule of three,” where two thoughts act as a build-up to the final humorous closer.

Use contrast. Are your characters in a terrifying situation? Add something light, like a man obsessing about his briefcase instead of the T-Rex looming behind him.

Use good wordplay. Sometimes words themselves are funny, and just as often, their placement in a sentence can make a difference. Some words are just funnier than others, so make a list of those that amuse you the most.

Take advantage of cliché. While clichés are something most writers try to avoid, it’s important to recognize them,so you can use them to your advantage. Humor relies in part on twisting a cliché—transforming or undermining it. You do this by setting up an expectation based on the cliché and then providing a surprise outcome. In humor writing, this process is called reforming.

Use humor as a counterbalance. If you just pile on one terrible thing after another, it starts to become ridiculous, and people won’t buy it. Using humor is a great way to achieve the proper balance between fantasy and real life. Remember, if a roller coaster only did twists and turns the whole time, it wouldn’t be as fun to ride.

Level of Intensity

There are people who shrug off an insult (“That’s just the way she is”) and people who commit murder over an insult (“I’m avenging my honor!”). Plus, of course, everything in between. Which is your character?

To be believable, consider the following:

Personality. How hard does your character take events in general? Does s/he get really excited over good fortune and really depressed over setbacks? Then we’ll find it believable that s/he gets really angry and reacts accordingly.

The second cause of an intense reaction is the nature of the specific fight that you’re creating on the page. Lily Owens lets most of her father’s insults go by (“the art of survival”). But when he starts in about her mother, the topic is too important to Lily to gloss over. Lily’s reaction is intense. She runs away. Another type of character might merely have seethed silently. Still another might have fought T. Ray more intensively, setting fire to the house with him inside.

Finally, the strength of fights is culturally determined. Where public or even private scenes are disapproved of (upper-class London, old-money Boston, “well-behaved” families), arguments may be muted, even when the subject matters a great deal. In other cultures, volatility is not frowned on, and people may feel free to scream at each other in public. In extreme cases, murder may even be considered a duty, as in avenging a sister’s sexual assault.

Where is your story taking place? Are your arguers in tune with local or family culture? Maybe not. You can create interesting effects by portraying the rebels against the local mores: the meek child born into a battling family, the furious feminist in polite 19th-century English society.

On Dry Humor

Dry humor - is all about the subtle irony of the facts being stated plainly; it is the contrast between sentiment and reality that makes the situation funny.

The technique is known for its simple, often matter-of-fact declarations that will make the audience laugh or be perplexed (humor is subjective, after all).

With dry humor, delivery and intention create a sort of comedic cognitive dissonance or contrast. Sometimes it is as simple as using a bit of sarcasm, but it can also be more than that.

Dry humor lives and dies on the back of doing less.

Less facial expressions, less props, less setup—less is often more when it comes to landing the joke. You aren’t using a big, dramatic setup or a grandiose vocabulary to make your point.

Essentially, these jokes are derived from saying the opposite of what is meant or delivering them in a way that purposefully counteracts the supposed meaning of what is being said.

Dry Humor in Writing

The function of dry humor has often been to highlight the absurd.

It is effectively executed in moments where satirization of the circumstances at play require little more than noting the facts aloud.

When writing this sort of humor, quick, cutting accuracy is key to making the jokes land.

Simplicity is king, and an honest statement of the facts will always lead the way to finding the funny.

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 ⚜ More: References ⚜ Humour ⚜ Laughter & Humour

Hope this helps with your writing!

[dorothylarouge]

Here at Radio Free Derry, we like to stay engaged with politics. It affects us all - and that’s why we strive to bring you up to date political commentary and analysis. But there comes a time when sober analysis must give way to strongly-held ideals and opinions. With the US presidential election just a week away, we feel it it time to announce our endorsement for the highest office in this country.

Without further ado, and for the third election in a row, Radio Free Derry is proud to endorse Richard Nixon for President and Spiro Agnew for Vice President!

[thebreakfastgenie]

A United States president has left office before completing his term nine times. Four deaths from natural causes, four assassinations, and one resignation.

John Tyler assumed the presidency after William Henry Harrison died shortly after inauguration, but was not re-elected four years later, so he was only elected to the vice presidency.

Millard Fillmore assumed the presidency after Zachary Taylor died, but was not re-elected so he was only elected to the vice presidency.

Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, but was not re-elected so he was only elected to the vice presidency.

Chester Arthur assumed the presidency after James Garfield was assassinated, but was not re-elected so he was only elected to the vice presidency.

Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency after William McKinley was assassinated and was later elected to another term.

Calvin Coolidge assumed the presidency after Warren G. Harding died and was later elected to another term.

Harry Truman assumed the presidency after Franklin D. Roosevelt died and was later elected to another term.

Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency after John F. Kennedy was assassinated and was later elected to another term.

Gerald Ford assumed the presidency after Richard Nixon resigned and was not re-elected. Ford was also never elected vice president, he was appointed to the position after Nixon's previous vice president, Spiro Agnew, resigned.

Four presidents were elected vice president but not president and one was never elected to either.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 8, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 09, 2024

Fifty years ago, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign.

The road to that resignation began in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg, who was at the time an employee of the RAND Corporation and thus had access to a top-secret Pentagon study of the way U.S. leaders had made decisions about the Vietnam War, leaked that study to major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. 

The Pentagon Papers showed that every president from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson had lied to the public about events in Vietnam, and Nixon worried that “enemies” would follow the Pentagon Papers with a leak of information about his own decision-making to destroy his administration and hand the 1972 election to a Democrat. 

The FBI seemed to Nixon reluctant to believe he was being stalked by enemies. So the president organized his own Special Investigations Unit out of the White House to stop leaks. And who stops leaks? Plumbers. 

The plumbers burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in California, hoping to find something to discredit him, then moved on to bigger targets. Together with the Committee to Re-elect the President (fittingly dubbed CREEP as its activities became known), they planted fake letters in newspapers declaring support for Nixon and hatred for his opponents, spied on Democrats, and hired vendors for Democratic rallies and then scarpered on the bills. Finally, they set out to wiretap the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in the fashionable Watergate office complex.

Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, Watergate security guard Frank Wills noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but on his next round, he found the door taped open again. Wills called the police, who arrested five men ransacking the DNC’s files. 

The White House immediately denounced what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and the Watergate break-in gained no traction before the 1972 election, which Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7% of the popular vote. 

But Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two young Washington Post reporters, followed the sloppy money trail back to the White House, and by March 1973 the scheme was unraveling. One of the burglars, James W. McCord Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing claiming he had lied at his trial to protect government officials. Sirica made the letter public, and White House counsel John Dean immediately began cooperating with prosecutors.

In April, three of Nixon’s top advisors resigned, and in May the president was forced to appoint former solicitor general of the United States Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor to investigate the affair. That same month, the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, informally known as the Senate Watergate Committee, began nationally televised hearings. The committee’s chair was Sam Ervin (D-NC), a conservative Democrat who would not run for reelection in 1974 and thus was expected to be able to do the job without political grandstanding.

The hearings turned up the explosive testimony of John Dean, who said he had talked to Nixon about covering up the burglary more than 30 times, but there the investigation sat during the hot summer of 1973 as the committee churned through witnesses. And then, on July 13, 1973, deputy assistant to the president Alexander Butterfield revealed the bombshell news that conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office had been taped since 1971.

Nixon refused to provide copies of the tapes either to Cox or to the Senate committee. When Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In the October 20, 1973, “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department—Solicitor General Robert Bork—who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.

Popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people that “I am not a crook.”

Like Cox before him, Jaworski was determined to hear the Oval Office tapes. He subpoenaed a number of them. Nixon fought the subpoenas on the grounds of executive privilege. On July 24, 1974, in U.S. v. Nixon, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with the prosecutor, saying that executive privilege “must be considered in light of our historic commitment to the rule of law. This is nowhere more profoundly manifest than in our view that 'the twofold aim (of criminal justice) is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.'... The very integrity of the judicial system and public confidence in the system depend on full disclosure of all the facts….”

Their hand forced, Nixon’s people released transcripts of the tapes. They were damning, not just in content but also in style. Nixon had cultivated an image of himself as a clean family man, but the tapes revealed a mean-spirited, foul-mouthed bully. Aware that the tapes would damage his image, Nixon had his swearing redacted. “[Expletive deleted]” trended.

In late July 1974, the House Committee on the Judiciary passed articles of impeachment, charging the president with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. Each article ended with the same statement: “In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”

And then, on August 5, in response to a subpoena, the White House released a tape recorded on June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, that showed Nixon and his aide H.R. Haldeman plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Even Republican senators, who had not wanted to convict their president, knew the game was over. A delegation went to the White House to deliver the news to the president that he must resign or be impeached by the full House and convicted by the Senate.

In his resignation speech, Nixon refused to acknowledge that he had done anything wrong. Instead, he told the American people he had to step down because he no longer had the support he needed in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed the press, whose “leaks and accusations and innuendo” had been designed to destroy him. His disappointed supporters embraced the idea that there was a “liberal” conspiracy, spearheaded by the press, to bring down any Republican president.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[deadpresidents]

sticking to pre-2000: why were incompetent oafs, e.g. Agnew, chosen for the tail of the ticket?

Agnew was a top-notch hatchet man who was perfectly willing to attack anybody and blow every dog whistle, so he came in handy during the 1968 campaign and early years of the Nixon Administration. He actually was quite popular with Nixon supporters. Nixon also recognized that, comparatively, Agnew made him look like a statesman. Nixon and his top aides saw Vice President Agnew as impeachment insurance -- even if Nixon screwed up, they realized that Congress had no interest in seeing Agnew assume the Presidency.

Unfortunately for Nixon, Agnew was a literal criminal, so when the Vice President was indicted and facing potential prison time there was no way for him to remain in the Administration and he had to resign. So, when Nixon did screw up, he no longer had his impeachment insurance and instead had a Vice President (Gerald Ford) who was practically universally respected in Washington.

Not all Vice Presidents before 2000 were "incompetent oafs", but the job sucked until the last half of the 20th Century when Presidents started giving VPs some real responsibilities within their Administrations. Most of the VPs after World War II have been respected politicians with extensive experience in government. The exceptions, in my opinion, would be Agnew (even though he was Governor of Maryland, it was only for two years) and Dan Quayle (who had served in both the House and Senate but was considered a joke even when he was first nominated for VP in 1988). But the Vice Presidency has been a more influential position over the last 50 years, so present-day VPs usually aren't stiffs who have no relationship with the President they serving under. In the past, Vice Presidential nominees were frequently chosen to help balance the ticket regionally or ideologically, or to placate certain wings of the respective political parties. Fortunately, recent VP nominees are thoroughly vetted and usually chosen because they are seen as being fully capable of assuming the Presidency at a moment's notice, if necessary. Of course, there are still recent exceptions to that rule, as well.

[lil-als]

Assorted modernish veeps in the home improvement store meme

[beep-boop-still-not-a-bot]

Skylanders Academy Six

(You guys have no idea how much self restraint I needed to not use the latin number again. I am also not responsible if you decide to look up what latin six is.)

Season 1 Episode 6 - Space Invaders

-Weird to me that in this episode, Golden Queen and Kaossandra seem to be on good terms, but in a few episodes, they're only allies of convince, and nothing more. I suppose Golden Queen would stab any back to get what she wants, but shouldn't Kaossandra know enough of that to keep her at an further distance? I'll explain why I think they're closer than just people who see each other at 'Soulless Cycle' (an evil clothing store if I had to guess) occasionally around... geez, all the way in near the end of Season 2 in Sheep(ball) Dreams.

-This might be a long shot, but I think Spyro's middle name being Agnew (or at least Eruptor thinking it is) is a reference to Spiro Agnew, a former USA vice president, and also the first result when I looked up what the hell Agnew is.

-Kaos meditating seems practically inconceivable, but his floating head illusion was a staple of Skylanders Spyro's Adventure! Too bad he doesn't have the Evil Skylanders (well, they're actually called Kaos's Minions, but nobody would know what I'm talking about if I just said that) to go along with it.

-Weird that Jet Vac is so... carefree during their camping trip. He's usually the one policing all the fun and trying to stick exactly to the word of the mission. Maybe with Eon around he feels he doesn't have to be so uptight?

-Eruptor cooks his marshmallow... like a normal person? You'd think that he'd burn it, being made of fire and all. Wait, how is he even holding that stick?

-After 314... 318... loses, Kaos finally gets a win, and kills a Skylander! I wish my persistence was that good. Then again, it's not like this victory lasts.

-It might seem callous that Jet Vac immediately sought to replace Stealth Elf, but considering that the entire fate of the Skylands is up to the Skylanders, it may have been completely necessary for him to do so in past teams. He definitely takes a bit too far here by trying to get someone who acts just like her.

-I can't believe Glumshanks believes in alpha males. He really is just as evil as his boss. Wolfgang isn't even the leader of the group! If anyone is the 'alpha' of the 'pack', it's the Golden Queen. No amount of toxic masculinity is going to beat her.

-Too bad that once Elf takes control, we don't get anything else out of Kaos until she's freed. Could've had him fight for control, or something.

-Given that Eon's beard holds much of his powers, something mentioned in Beard Science, it's a very good thing he didn't shave it. It's also quite a drastic act, as I'm sure Stealth Elf is far from the first Skylander to die on duty.

[vintage-tech]

AGNEW: (verb) To bounce back into your face. -- MAD magazine, 1978

There's something genuinely ironic about Spiro Agnew, the vice president to the formerly most corrupt president, having a boardgame about American history.

In 1968, Richard M. Nixon selected Agnew to be his vice presidential running mate. Agnew quickly developed a reputation for strong polemical speeches critical of the antiwar movement, the media, and liberals. On October 10, 1973, after pleading “no contest” to a charge of income tax evasion connected with kickbacks he received during his tenure as Maryland’s governor, Agnew resigned as Vice President – only the second vice president ever to resign and the first to leave office because of legal problems. Agnew was disbarred in 1974.

The game out in 1971, two years before the shit hit the fan.

[richardnixonlibrary]

#OTD 10/10/1973 Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned from office. He was the second United States Vice President to resign. His resignation came as part of a plea deal reached with the Department of Justice in which he received no prison time for a plea of no contest to one felony count of tax evasion. He was also fined $10,000 and given three years of unsupervised probation.

(Image: WHPO-2509-01)

[posttexasstressdisorder]

Subscriptions

PLAY GAMES. RAW WORD DAILY

SUBSCRIBE FOR $1

About usGamesUS NEWSInvestigationsOpinionvideoHELPget the newsletter

RawStory+ Login

PLAY RAW WORD DAILY.

SUBSCRIBE FOR $1

Home

Shop to Support Independent Journalism

Trump

U.S. News

World

Science

Video

Investigations

Ethics Policy

RawStory+ Login

Why has America tolerated 6 illegitimate Republican presidents?

Thom Hartmann

April 15, 2024 9:11AM ET

"Ronald and Nancy Reagan, 1964” image showing The Reagans aboard an unidentified boat in this 1964 photo released on June 1, 2016. Courtesy The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation/Handout via REUTERS

As we watch the Trump campaign prepare to replace 50,000 civil servants with fascist toadies if he wins the White House, it’s important to remember that Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican president who believed in democracy, the rule of law, and that government should prioritize what the people want.

From 1960 to today a series of leaders within the Republican Party have abandoned the democracy that American soldiers fought the Revolutionary War to secure, the Civil War to defend here at home, and World War II in Europe and the Pacific to defend around the world.

This has brought us a series of criminal Republican presidents and corrupt Republican Supreme Court justices, who’ve legalized political bribery while devastating voting and civil rights.

None of this was a mistake or an accident, because none of these people truly believed in democracy.

This rejection of democracy and turn toward criminality and it’s logical end-point, fascism, started in the modern GOP with Richard Nixon.

He took millions in now-well-documented bribes both while Vice President to Eisenhower and as President (his VP, Spiro Agnew, resigned rather than go to prison for taking bribes). Nixon saw public service as a way to bathe himself in money, power, and adulation.

He didn’t care a bit about democracy.

As Lamar Waldron and I point out in detail in Legacy of Secrecy: The Long Shadow of the JFK Assassination, then-President Eisenhower’s then-Vice President, Richard Nixon, was getting beat up badly in the 1960 election by his opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy.

Most of it had to do with Cuba, where mobsters affiliated with Nixon for decades had just lost fortunes, millions and millions of dollars in annual revenue.

After the Cuban revolution of 1959, Castro came to the US to seek military and economic aid for his island nation; Eisenhower left town, forcing Castro to meet instead with VP Nixon.

Given that Castro had just overthrown the dictator Batista, a friend of both Nixon and Nixon’s mafia patrons, the Vice President essentially blew off Castro, sending him into the welcoming arms of Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union.

Thus, throughout the 1960 presidential race, Senator Kennedy pounded on Vice President Nixon for having “let Cuba go communist” on his watch. In response, Vice President Nixon put together a series of CIA and Mafia plots to assassinate Castro, timed to happen before the November 1960 election.

His hope was that if the Eisenhower/Nixon administration could be seen as having successfully overthrown Castro in 1960 it would de-fang JFK’s attacks and make Nixon — who Eisenhower had put in charge of Cuba policy — a national hero just in time for the election.

Nixon figured that would be enough to help him beat JFK at the polls. It was going to be his “October Surprise.” (The remnant of this scheme was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.)

For Nixon democracy was just an inconvenience, an obstacle to be conquered. He never really believed in it.

You can imagine Nixon’s frustration when plot after plot was bungled or foiled and, by election day, Castro was still happily ensconced in the Havana presidential palace. This appears to be the moment Nixon decided that, if he had a chance to run for president again, he’d not just consider a CIA-Mafia plot but would embrace far more extreme measures.

Thus began the first Republican plot to commit full-out treason to win a presidential election.

It started in the summer of 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon.

Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they’d both sign that fall.

But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill VP Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election. So, Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris.

The bribe was straightforward: Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.

The FBI had been wiretapping these international communications and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, President Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here):

President Johnson: “Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.” Sen. Dirksen: “I know.”

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was way down in the polls because the war was ongoing.

Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.

In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly announced that LBJ’s efforts were ���in shambles.”

But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.

An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers, and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate the American soldiers.

Nixon appointed Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court, pushing it hard to the right and setting up the predecessors of Citizens United.

Rehnquist, we later learned, didn’t believe any more in democracy than did Nixon. He’d made his chops in the GOP with Operation Eagle Eye, standing outside polling places in Hispanic and Native American precincts in Arizona challenging every voter who showed up there’s right to cast a ballot.

Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.

Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason.

Ford pardoned Nixon and appointed John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court.

Next up was Ronald Reagan. He not only didn’t believe in democracy, he didn’t even believe in the American government.

Like Trump, he ridiculed public service like joining the military or getting a job with a government agency; he joked that there were no smart or competent people in government because if there had been, private industry would have already hired them away.

So, if you don’t believe in democracy and you think the US government is a joke, it’s not a big deal to betray your country to get the wealth, power, and fame that goes with the presidency.

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President that summer on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979.

But, like Nixon, behind Carter’s back the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the head of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and the Reagan campaign was happy to promise them.

This was the second act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president.

The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called 1980 “Iran/Contra Scandal” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages. As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

And Reagan’s treason — just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly, putting a third Republican president in office after Nixon and Ford. Neither Nixon nor Reagan believed in or held up democracy and the rule of law that underpins it as a value.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal — the American hostages in Iran were released.

Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981 (and using the money to illegally fund rightwing neofascist death squad “Contras” in Nicaragua) and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called “Iran Contra” scandal.

Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court, solidifying its rightwing tilt. We’d learn, in the Bush v Gore case in 2000 when they awarded the White House to the son of Reagan’s VP, that none of the three of them valued democracy.

And, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office.

After Reagan, Bush senior was elected but, like Jerry Ford, Bush was only President because he’d served as Vice President under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped keep him in office.

The criminal investigation into Iran/Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George HW Bush after having already obtained convictions for Weinberger, Ollie North and others.

For the first time in history, the President of the United States could go to jail for criminal conspiracy. Bush was sweating.

George HW Bush’s attorney general, Bill Barr (yes, the same guy Trump hired), suggested he pardon all six co-conspirators — who could point a finger at Bush — to kill the investigation. Bush did it on Christmas Eve, hoping to avoid the news cycle because of the holiday.

Nonetheless, the screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all: “THE PARDONS: BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, ABORTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS 'COVER-UP’”

If the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988.

That’s four illegitimate Republican presidents.

President GHW Bush appointed Clarence Thomas and David Souter to the Supreme Court. We learned quickly that Thomas doesn’t value democracy. We now know his wife actively worked to subvert it, in fact.

Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency, Justice Antonin Scalia (appointed by Bush’s father’s boss) wrote in his opinion:

“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn’t important that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team — before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida — and was busy accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did. There was no Thomas recusal, either.

None of them believed in democracy.

More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida — manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year — and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible, because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and the publishers of the big newspapers feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.

To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s voter rolls just before the election.

Tens of thousands of African Americans showed up to vote and were turned away from the polls in that election in Florida. BBC covered it extensively, although the American media didn’t seem interested.

So, for the third time in 4 decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.*

President George W. Bush appointed Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Alito not only doesn’t believe in democracy, he also doesn’t believe in a woman’s right to get an abortion. He’d put a judge like himself between a woman and her doctor, with a police officer and a prison to enforce his decree.

Most recently, in 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters — most people of color — from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.

Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs and the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.

And on top of that, we learned in 2020 that Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Russian spy and oligarch Konstantin Kilimnik by Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.

Even with all that treasonous help from Russia, Donald Trump still lost the national vote by nearly 3 million votes but came to power in 2016 through the electoral college, an artifact of the Founding era designed to keep slavery safe in colonial America.**

And then, in 2021, after losing to Joe Biden by 7 million votes, Trump mounted a seditious effort to overturn the election he’d just lost.

Trump didn’t believe in democracy in the least; he openly fawned over autocratic and fascistic states and their leaders.

After Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans blocked President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump filled Garland’s spot with Neil Gorsuch, the son of Reagan’s disgraced former EPA administrator, Anne Gorsuch.

For reasons that are still unclear, shortly after Trump mentioned Kennedy’s son to him publicly at the Gorsuch ceremony, Justice Kennedy decided to resign. Whether it had anything to do with young Justin Kennedy — then working at Deutsche Bank and having signed off on over a billion dollars in corrupt loans to Trump — is still unknown, and Kennedy, still in good health, isn’t talking.

Kennedy was replaced by “Blackout” Brett Kavanaugh, who had previously worked in the Bush White House. Republicans refused to turn over 95 percent of Kavanaugh’s papers to the Senate Judiciary Committee and jammed through his nomination after an epic meltdown on live television.

When Ruth Bader Ginsberg died just before the 2020 election, McConnell decided his “Garland Rule” was irrelevant and jammed through Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett in about six weeks; she was sworn in on October 27, 2020. When Democrats raised questions about Barrett’s role as a “Handmaid” (what she called herself) in a bizarre Catholic cult they were brushed aside.

Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanuagh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. We now know none of the three of them believe in democracy, either.

Fifty-four years of Republican presidents using treason to achieve the White House (or inheriting it from one who did) has transformed America and dramatically weakened our democracy.

Those presidents have contributed their own damages to the rule of law and democracy in America, but their cynical Supreme Court appointments have arguably done the most lasting damage.

Republican appointees on the Court during this time have gutted the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, union rights, the Affordable Care Act, and legalized Republican voter purges. They legalized the bribery of politicians by billionaires and corporations.

In short, they’ve done everything they can to weaken democracy and enforce minority rule in America.

One of their wives appears to have been involved in the January 6th attempted overthrow of our electoral process and thus our republic. Republican justices and judges openly flaunt the judicial code of ethics and routinely hand decisions to the GOP’s largest donors.

Today’s fascistic behavior by elected Republicans and their appointees on the courts has a long history, deeply rooted in multiple acts of treachery and treason. “Power at any cost” has been their slogan ever since Nixon’s attempts to assassinate Castro in 1960 to beat JFK in that year’s election.

Democracy? They laugh.

Which is why it’s time to call the Republican Party what it is: a criminal enterprise embracing fascism to hang onto power, a threat to our republic, and a danger to all life on Earth.

*For more detail, this is extensively documented and footnoted in my book The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

**This is covered in depth in my book The Hidden History of the War On Voting.