NIXON DEBUNKERED

With back-to-back trips to Sacramento and Las Vegas recently, I haven't really had much time to blog. Plus, I was tired of talking about the crappiness that is Tim Geithner anyway.

So, on a completely different note, my passions for politics and television merged recently with this little gem from a March 24 Studio Briefing entry ...

The liberal online news magazine Truthdig has uncovered a recording among the infamous White House tapes of former President Richard Nixon in which he denounces a 1970s' episode of Norman Lear's All in the Family that dealt with gay issues. Speaking to presidential assistant John Ehrlichman, Nixon remarks that he became so enraged by the episode that "I turned the goddamned thing off. I couldn't listen any more." But it is clear that he must have seen the entire show since he mentions some of its final scenes. In the recording, which includes an unexplained 14-second bleep, Nixon remarks, "The point that I make is that goddamnit, I do not think that you glorify on public television homosexuality. The reason you don't glorify it, John, anymore than you glorify whores. ... We all have weaknesses and so forth and so on, but goddamnit, what do you think that does to kids ... when they see that?" Later, Nixon says that he was angered by the show not on moral grounds. "Why it outrages me because I don't want to see this country go that way. ... You know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure Aristotle was a homo, we all know that. So was Socrates, but he never had the influence that television had."

And here you thought you already had enough reasons to dislike Nixon.