The left still obsesses about Nixon

Richard M. Nixon made disparaging remarks about Jews, blacks, Italian-Americans and Irish-Americans in a series of extended conversations with top aides and his personal secretary, recorded in the Oval Office 16 months before he resigned as president.

The remarks were contained in 265 hours of recordings, captured by the secret taping system Nixon had installed in the White House and released this week by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

While previous recordings have detailed Nixon's animosity toward Jews, including those who served in his administration like Henry A. Kissinger, his national security adviser, these tapes suggest an added layer of complexity to Nixon's feeling. He and his aides seem to make a distinction between Israeli Jews, whom Nixon admired, and American Jews.

Get that? An "added layer of complexity." In other words, let's milk this for all it's worth because our liberal readership has an attack of apoplexy every time Nixon's name appears in print.

They even admit that this isn't even news since Nixon's views toward Jews and blacks are already on the record. Their obsession with this pathetic man is pathological, bordering on lunacy. It has been that way since Nixon beat Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950. The left always believed Nixon ran a dirty campaign by smearing Douglas with the "fellow traveler" label, but they fail to remember that it was Douglas who questioned Nixon's patriotism first. And Nixon wasn't the first to use the "pinko" charge on Douglas. Her Democratic primary opponent did that.

A crook, a weak and venal man who enriched himself at taxpayer expense, Nixon was perhaps the most unlovely of our presidents. His spying on Americans and electoral shenanigans placed him beyond the pale. Resignation was too good for him. He should have been impeached, tried, and convicted.

But this idiotic, all encompassing obsession by the left over a man who has been dead so long, and out of politics for more than a third of a century is just plain bizarre. Enough already.