Nixon did accomplish some good things, but they were outweighed by his tragic flaws – particularly his paranoid persecution mania, which drove him to counter-persecute his “enemies,” to demonize the counterculture, and to cheat in the 1972 election which he could have won by a landslide honestly. He also cynically exploited racism (he was the worst kind of racist himself, but his political calculations were cynical regardless); bombed Cambodia; and lied to the people in 1968 when he promised peace in Vietnam, when in fact he had no intention of ending the war on any terms that could not be considered an American victory.
Getting back to Suharto, and along with my apologies for my Nixon comments leading the thread astray… So long as a head of state hasn’t fled the country during a revolution, or had his corpse burned by his enemies at the end of a war, he will be given a glorious funeral. It’s just SOP, it’s like a death benefit for the family and associated toadies.
Later, after the cameras go away, the knives will come out and scores will be settled.
:dubious: Many things about Nixon’s record are debatable. Whether he should have pulled out of Vietnam in his first term as promised is not one of them.
Well, they buried Lyndon B. Johnson with full honors.
A lot of statemen are murderers, and unless they get hanged, they get sent off with a nice funeral. As has been pointed out, who gives a rip? He’ll burn just as hot in hell.
You could have just said “I don’t get it,” if in fact you didn’t get it. Or possibly, “That doesn’t make any sense, even for sarcasm,” if you did get it, but didn’t find it particularly amusing.
The meaning I took from it was a black-humor imitation of lowering the comparison bar of easily-vilified mid-20th century European leaders from Hitler, to Mussolini, to Franco, in response to Captain Amazing’s objection to the use of Hitler (which BrainGlutton had apparently declined to do, as it happens).
My explanation was based on Der Trihs’ response to my earlier comment. He seemed to be suggesting I was praising Mussolini for supposedly keeping the Italian trains running on time (and thus endorsing the efficiency of totalitarian states) when I was doing nothing of the sort. I was instead using the cliché about Mussolini to sarcastically respond to the assertions made in Captain Amazing’s posts about some of the allegedly “good” things that happened under Suharto’s brutal leadership.
In retrospect, it probably wasn’t worth it for such a lame wise ass remark.
Sure hope you don’t get beaten to a pulp when they catch you desecrating his grave.
kaylasdad99: “For Fuck’s Sake.”
NDP: OK. It’s just that, like der trihs pointed out, that is a pretty widely held myth so I was confused about you using it in a sarcastic comment. When a bunch of people are likely to take it at face value, that’s usually a bad time to effectively use sarcasm.
Y’know, Lincoln had something to say about the occupant being the only one who can truly consecrate a grave. Perhaps the converse might also hold true.
“But in a larger sense, we cannot opprobriate, we cannot desecrate, we cannot de-sanctify this ground. The bag of bones lying beneath has already desecrated it far beyond our poor power to add or detract.”
Try placing that in an envelope and leaving it on the headstone.
