I fell asleep last night thinking about Barak Obama. Now I know that isn’t the most interesting or exciting person to fall asleep thinking about, but never the less he was on my mind after watching one so called “news” channel complain about another so called “news” channel, though those thoughts are for a different post all together. The news channels that were having their squabble seemed to agree on one thing, there is a single narrative for the story of Obama, that is, he is either a great leader who is not to be criticized or he is the product of some sort of Stalin/Hitler/Junior hybrid. Either way there isn’t too much room for discussion or interpretation. As counter point to this notion of a single narrative for the President of the United States here is a description of a mystery president, one who was described by Noam Chomsky as “the last liberal president.”
This mystery president was responsible for the following things:
The creation of Occupational and Safety Health Administration (OSHA)
The National Environmental Policy Act
The Clean Air Act
The Creation of the EPA
Opening relations with China
A renewed and more diplomatic relationship with the Soviet Union
Submitted one of the few balanced budgets in recent history, but due to pressure from congress created a deficit to extend unemployment benefits
Was a quaker
Responsible for the successful draw down of the one the worse conflicts in modern American history
A large proponent of Civil Rights and integration
Correlated Social Security with inflation
Created the Consumer Product Safety Commission
Who is this mystery president?
Richard Milhous Nixon
One could easily argue that Richard Nixon did a tremendous amount of good for the American people and that he instituted what would by today’s standards be labeled as “socialist” and “anti-American.” One could as easily argue that he did tremendous harm to both the nation and countries abroad and was nothing short of a dishonest crook. There is some merit to both views and it only goes on to demonstrate that it is intellectually dishonest to create a single narrative to what can only be an incredibly complex position for any man or woman to hold. It’s high time we stop with the editorializing and begin evaluated the actions of a person and not the person themselves while maintaining what can only be described as historical context.
One Comment
First of all i was proud that thanks to watching Futurama i guessed who the mystery president was when you mentioned he opened relations with China.
Also, it’s sad that there is nothing that can be done about the poor outlet of news and information.
This is not an North American problem, it is a developing country problem. It is an issue with media and the ignorant masses being too dumb to understand a true political debate so they get their facts defined in byte sized chunks of black and white fiber.
Real political debates are boring, people quickly change the channel and i can honestly say that i do the same. This is why people without their own analytical capabilities are left with no choice but to put their trust in a person or a few number of persons conveying news to them in their own rating proof way. And that usually is black and white, no compromise, “here’s the bad guy” and “here’s the good guy”.
Also for the same reason i do appreciate when you come across a blog that manages to summarize a compromise about an issue quickly enough for me to not get bored and still objectively enough for me to form my own opinion.
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