Agree on China, but I wouldn't characterize that as "peacemaking." We weren't at war with China (despite the original Nixonian fantasy that China and Vietnam were yellow-red soulmates), and the motivating purpose of opening to China was to have another ally against the Soviet Union. The latter was certainly a good thing, but, again, not what I would call "peacemaking."

Nixon's trip to China, however, is further verification of my comment. You think a guy who wasn't stoned would have kept saying "It sure is a Great wall!" over and over again?

On the other hand, I'm sure if Felt had just publicly reported what he knew, say to a local District Attorney, then Nixon would have stood back and let the judicial process function.

He also created the EPA and instituted wage and price controls. His red-baiting of the 50s was obviously just to cover the fact that Nixon was a communist.

Don't get me wrong -- on the merits, a lot of what Nixon did made sense. He did the right thing with China, handled the Mideast as well as could be expected, negotiated the SALT and ABM treaties, etc. His domestic agenda was fairly liberal (other than on "law and order" issues and busing). He was a smart guy with a lot of good instincts.

He was also a deeply flawed person. He had a streak of petty cruelty (read some of the transcripts of the White House tapes), as well as an amoral side that allowed him to justify to himself that his noble ends justified whatever means were necessary.

I have no problem with Nixon apologists who stick to accentuating his positives, but for someone like Ben Stein to say that the only bad thing the man did was to lie about a break-in is simply absurd. And I suspect that there are a few Ben Stein quotes in the Woodward and Bernstein follow-up to All The President's Men (After the Fall? I forget the title) from 1974 that are a bit different than his tune now. Even Pat Buchanan was outraged by his boss back then after the smoking gun tape was released.

Ben desperately wants his life to have been about more than hawking Visine.

and he would have if only Jimmy Kimmel hadn't moved up and out.

Mother of God. This week is inspiring all sorts of nonsense. Joe Scarborough, unable to exhume Nixon's bones in time for an interview, instead decided yesterday to interview G. Gordon Liddy and ask him what he thought about Felt.

Unsurprisingly, Liddy -- who was caught and did jail time for the burglary -- had a dim view of Felt's ethics, and said so. At this shocking revelation, the nation watched and burped contentedly.

This has all the signs of Bad News
 

Pentagon delays release of May Recruiting Data

Recruiting data for May, normally released on the first business day of the succeeding month, will be delayed until June 10.

June 10 is - natch - a Friday.

This has all the signs of Bad News
 

so is the 3rd

This has all the signs of Bad News
 

And the first business day of the month, the normal time for release, is the First (a Wednesday).

Your point is what, again?

This has all the signs of Bad News
 

Too bad they're still discharging decorated vets who are gay.

This ended up being a great thing for Chile and us. Allende had destroyed Chile's economy and may have turned it into another Cuba.

These were all bad and threatened the constitution. Mr. Stein should have mentioned these.

This is liberal B.S. In 72 Kissenger signed a treaty with North Vietnam to end North Vietnams involvement in the war(for which he got the Nobel Peace Prize). At this point South Vietnam held every provincial capital in South Vietnam. Without support from the North Vietnamese regulars the Vietcong started to lose ground. Because of this North Vietnam started to break the treaty, so Nixon did the Christmas bombing of Hanoi. This got the North Vietnamese to back off. Once again the Viet Cong started to lose ground. But once Watergate got really bad the Democrats in Congress cut off all military aid to South Vietnam and prevented Nixon from doing anything in Vietnam. The North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam and there was nothing the US could do about it. Once Nixon left office Congress prevented Ford from doing anything to enforce the Peace Treaty making the fall of Saigon inevitable. South Vietnam did not fall do the Vietcong. It fell to North Vietnam, which would not have happend had Nixon not fallen.

Only a twisted mind could come up with the crazy idea that the communist takeover of Cambodia was caused by Nixon. The Khmer Rouge were support by the North Vietnames. Of course they later lost control of them, but intially they were pawns of the North Vietnam. Nixon bombed Cambodia and got invovled in Cambodia because the North Vietnamese were there. It was when US influence was completely pulled from the region that the Khmer Rouge took over.

This has all the signs of Bad News
 

Perhaps it's not common knowledge the degree to which the administration releases discomforting news on a Friday. For example, last Friday it was the resignation of Windy Hill, the head of the Federal Head Start program. Ms. Hill coincidently is currently being investigated for misappropriation of funds that occurred while she ran her own daycare centers in Texas.

Oh, those were funds from - wait for it, wait for it - yes, the federal Head Start program. You can't make this stuff up.

Great times in Chile:

• In the weeks after the military seized power in a coup Sept. 11, 1973, thousands of Chileans sympathetic to the socialist government were detained. Many were tortured, and several hundred were tried and executed by military war tribunals.
  
  A woman described the corpse of her son, the manager of a state cement plant, who turned himself in after the coup and died in custody five weeks later: "He was missing one eye, his nose was torn off, one ear was separated and hanging, there were marks of deep burns on his neck and face, his mouth was very swollen."
  
  In the next stage, the army's secret police squads waged a "systematic campaign to exterminate" leftist dissidents from 1974 to 1977, the report states. Inside clandestine prisons, people were tortured with electric shocks, choking, confinement and even animal rape. There were 957 victims who never reappeared and are presumed dead.

link

• Among its dramatic findings, the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture appointed by Chilean President Ricardo Lagos found that 94 percent of the people detained in the aftermath of the coup reported having been tortured. One of the most common methods of torture, reported in more than a third of the cases, was the application of electrical shocks.
  
  Of the 3,400 women who testified, nearly all said that they had suffered sexual torture. More than 300 said that they were raped, including 11 who were pregnant when detained. Many of these women said they had never reported their experiences before.
  
  The worst period of torture was immediately after the military coup in September 1973. More than 18,000 people — two-thirds of the total number — were tortured during the four months after the coup, the commission said. Detentions were indiscriminate, and most of the victims were innocent civilians. The commission identified more than 1,000 sites used to torture prisoners, including schools and hospitals as well as police stations and military installations.
  
  Another 5,266 people were tortured from January 1974 until August 1977, a period during which secret military intelligence agencies, such as the Directorate of National Intelligence (Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia, or DINA) and the Combined Command (Comando Conjunto) took over the repression of left-wing dissidents from other military units.

link

That's just the tip of the greatness.

That still does not change the fact that Chile now has the strongest economy in Latin America, and has the highest standard of living (maybe number 2) in South America. When the coup occured, Chile was close to the bottom, its standard of living was declining rapidly, there was massive inflation, and incredible capital flight from the country. Pinochet may have been a nasty dude, but the country has kept his economic policies in place making Chile the economic miracle of Latin America.