Originally published at: Enemies Lists, Then And Now - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation. The Nixon administration’s enemies list inspired bipartisan revulsion. Its purpose was, in the immortal words of President Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” The revelation of…
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There’s something so inherently childish about maintaining an enemies list. In addition to being the billionaire administration, Trump II really turbocharged the man-baby quality of its season one counterpart.
Also entirely predictable that the president “religious” reactionaries love the most is the one least capable of forgiving.
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Nixon was impeached and run out of office partly because he had a secret enemies list of people whom he was trying illegally to persecute.
Kash Patel’s enemies list is not only not secret, it’s the top item on his application to become Trump’s FBI director. He has publicly promised to use the FBI, illegally, to persecute the people on the list.
The Post, the Times, and other major legacy media institutions played a leading role in discovering Nixon’s secret crimes and running him out of office. Now they publish Patel’s corrupt promises with barely a comment.
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As a measure of how extreme Trump &Co are, even the godfather of modern conservatism would label him a “f-worder” and at least a proto-fascist.
“The revelation of the list’s existence during the Watergate hearings of 1973 provoked conservative columnist and Nixon supporter William F. Buckley Jr. to use the f-word in print. Yes, Buckley called the enemies list “an act of proto-fascism. It is altogether ruthless in its dismissal of human rights. It is fascist in its reliance on the state as the instrument of harassment.”
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Yes and it nicely encapsulates Trumps quasi-gangster MO: explicit threat but at least one step removed from himself; he is not the proximal danger, it is those who serve him and those under them.
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Good thing these days the GQP can be trusted to protect democracy.
Oh wait…
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“We’ll make a list! A long list! I’ll open Rome’s bowels! The city will run like a sewer, as surely as she had gorged herself on pigs for a year!” Start at 36:58. You can figure out the rest. You’re welcome. Any further questions on this series, just ask.
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But Sen. DINO Fetterman (D - North West Virginia) trusts that he would not act on his list.
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From the album- Songs For a Nervous Planet.
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“The reason that Matt Gaetz is such an exciting pick to so many people is because he will go in and reform the DOJ”— Pope of the House protecting sexual abuse of minors by his KKKlergy the same way real Popes do.
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Thanks for sharing. I have been waiting to see something similar here in AZ - hard to imagine there aren’t 1000s of angry MAGAs chomping at the bit to start turning people in that they suspect of being undocumented. Not to mention trying to devastate your business competition by getting rid of half their work force.
We have an extremely volatile situation here and our economy, much as people do not understand it, is dependent upon these workers.
It is going to get ugly.
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Or people who they know are citizens or “have papers” but who they want to torment and intimidate with a knowingly false report so that they “go through some things”. We’ll be hearing a lot of “I no longer feel safe living in my neighborhood”…which is the intent.
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Todays Paul Krugman
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Been hearing that since the election - from people who are mixed families with the parents undocumented and the children native born Americans. I have a friend who has been here 24 years and has spent thousands, including going for DACA status, attempting to get citizenship. There are many thousands here just like him.
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Again…we did not deserve him…and in oh so many ways, he did not deserve us.
Fuck the MAGAt KKKult, Zombie Fourth Estate and every angry far left Unicornshoed purity punk for how they treated him. Fuck them all.
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Was anything easier to predict than the disaster of enabling people to gamble their entire life away on their phones in our worship of “capitalism” and “free enterprise”?
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Dopamine is a helluva drug.
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“trusts” Jesus wept.
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“You expect an idiot to surround himself with idiots,”
said my aunt, who is in her eighties, when I called Trump the Windsock-in-Chief.
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