|
|
| Re: Jets Seek Restraining Order Against Kaepernick (1954286) | |||
 |
|||
| Home > OTChat | |||
|
[ Read Responses | Post a New Response | Return to the Index ] |
|
||
|
Re: Jets Seek Restraining Order Against Kaepernick |
|
|
Posted by Stephen Bauman on Fri Sep 15 18:14:51 2023, in response to Re: Jets Seek Restraining Order Against Kaepernick, posted by Fred G on Fri Sep 15 13:01:05 2023. It’s forced humor. Conservatives just don’t have it.Watergate was the conservative imitation of Dick Tuck. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/12/27/magazine/lives-they-lived-dick-tuck.html DICK TUCK HE LIVED TO HARASS RICHARD NIXON — AND HELPED CREATE THE TOPSY-TURVY POLITICAL WORLD WE NOW INHABIT. B. 1924 BY ALEX PAPPADEMAS AN OLD TRIVIAL PURSUIT card asked the question “What Democratic prankster waved the train out of the station while Richard Nixon spoke from the caboose?” The answer: Dick Tuck. The story has been slightly exaggerated — Tuck, the infamous political consultant and campaign-trail chaos agent, tried to give Nixon a premature send-off, but the train stayed put. This did not stop Tuck, a print-the-legend kind of guy, from carrying the game card in his wallet, a trophy of hard-earned infamy. Born in Hayden, Ariz., in 1924, Tuck lived many lives. He disposed of bombs for the United States Marine Corps and served as the politics editor of National Lampoon; he was at Robert F. Kennedy’s side when Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. But he’s best known as a consummate political jokester who lived rent-free, for decades, in the head of Richard Milhous Nixon. The two met for the first time in California in 1950, when Nixon was running a nasty, Red-baiting senatorial campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas and Tuck was a student on the G.I. Bill at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A professor who knew of Tuck’s interest in politics — but didn’t realize he was a Democrat — asked him to serve as advance man for a Nixon appearance on campus. Tuck was happy to oblige. He booked Nixon into the largest lecture hall available and barely publicized the event; the 20-odd people who showed up watched Tuck deliberately fumble his opening remarks before announcing that Nixon was here to say a few words about the International Monetary Fund. When the speech was over, Nixon told him, “Dick Tuck, you’ve done your last advance.” This was not the case at all. Tuck went on to a lively and successful career in Democratic politics, deploying inspired mischief, misinformation and attention-stealing stunts to keep candidates like Barry Goldwater flustered, embarrassed and off-message. But he never missed an opportunity to drop a banana peel in the path of the dour man from Yorba Linda. They were made for each other: the archetypal paranoid politician and the waggish Democratic hit man who really was out to get him. Like his friend Hunter S. Thompson, Tuck made a kind of performance art out of giving the president a hard time. He was known for infiltrating rallies and telling the band that “Mack the Knife,” the Kurt Weill murder ballad, was Nixon’s favorite song. (It wasn’t.) During the 1968 Republican National Convention, when a group of visibly pregnant African-American women marched outside the candidate’s Miami hotel waving “NIXON’S THE ONE” signs, that was Tuck, too, pulling a stunt that would get any present-day campaign staff member fired, possibly into the sun. In 1962, during his ill-fated run for governor of California, Nixon went to Los Angeles and visited Chinatown, where his welcoming committee included two students holding a banner that read “WHAT ABOUT THE HUGE LOAN” in Chinese. It was a reference to $205,000 that Howard Hughes had lent Nixon’s brother F. Donald Nixon, a struggling restaurateur, years earlier. The word “HUGHES” had been mistranslated, but when someone told Nixon what the banner said, he got the point and tore it down in front of TV cameras. Tuck wasn’t out to muddy Nixon by bringing up Hughes. The loan had been widely discussed in 1960, the first time Nixon ran for president. It may have helped sink his candidacy. The point of the stunt was the intemperate reaction Tuck knew it would elicit from Nixon. Rick Perlstein, the author of “Nixonland,” thinks Tuck tapped into deep-seated insecurities that Nixon never outgrew. “Nixon is the only guy in his grade-school photos wearing a tie,” Perlstein says. “He was such a meticulous preparer. A guy who would memorize his press-conference answers. To be thrown off his game like that — who knows what kind of dark, primordial Freudian zones that touched?” Perlstein suggests that Tuck’s benign pranks took root in Nixon’s imagination as “wickedness incarnate, and allowed him to rationalize anything he might do, to respond to Democrats.” Nixon’s camp developed operatives like Donald Segretti specifically to cultivate what H.R. Haldeman would later term “a Dick Tuck capability.” Segretti eventually served four months in prison for his efforts, which included forging politically damaging letters by Edmund Muskie. In early 1973, as the walls closed in, Nixon can be heard on the Oval Office tapes, still muttering about Dick Tuck. He saw little substantive difference between Tuck’s actions and Segretti’s — if one was fair game, so was the other. But even Nixon had to admit his tricksters lacked their forebear’s cleverness. “Shows what a master Dick Tuck is,” he grumbled. “Segretti’s [work] hasn’t been a bit similar.” Most of Tuck’s pranks seem gentle now. They’re stories from a more collegial era in American politics — and one with looser campaign security. But the fact that it’s nearly impossible to imagine present-day Democrats and Republicans playing good-natured tricks on one another also has something to do with Tuck. By demonstrating that political reality could be bent, he suggested the possibility that it could be broken. What Tuck brought into the world, others would weaponize. Segretti inspired Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, who in the ’80s and ’90s would run dirty-tricks-driven campaigns for Republicans that helped birth the bloodthirsty and post-epistemological political moment in which we now find ourselves. What is the Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe — with his pimp suits, his fuzzy handcuffs and his suspiciously edited videos — but a Dick Tuck without the wit? The mistrust and distraction Tuck once sowed on the campaign trail are now constants in American public life. Coincidentally, it’s only Tuck’s party, the Democrats, who seem incapable of cultivating Dick Tuck energy. |
|
(There are no responses to this message.)
|
|