prevariKate: 1. phr. liar, liar, pants on fire. The day Richard Nixon took the big dirt nap in 1994 was Earth Day, and a minor earthquake rattled Southern California near his burial site. I've always thought it wasn't so much an earthquake as the earth doing "Ptui" to get rid of him. Nixon was buried in San Clemente, French for "without a pardon," near the Nixon Library. Presidents Ford, Carter, Bush, and Clinton made the service look like Four Presidents and a Funeral. I don't remember if Ronald Reagan was there, but neither does he.
The first lady, Pat Nixon, or "Poor Pat" as she was usually referred to, was not there. She had predeceased her husband by five years. Who can blame her? Tricia Nixon Eisenhower was a reminder that we all had gotten older. Henry Kissinger mumbled through his eulogy, sounding like Marlene Dietrich doing "The Man I Love." The funeral was another event in the long Nixon rehabilitation--he got us out of Vietnam (he did not), he started talks with China (it was the only country that would talk to us at the time), and the Watergate break-in was ordered by Hillary Clinton. It was an astounding bit of revisionism. Nixon is dead! Long live Nixon as Newt Gingrich and his band of Republican House majority tricksters. The GOP hired O.
J. Simpson, Kato "Pretty Street, No Cars" Kaelin and Lance "I saved Jay Leno's career" Ito to focus attention out west, away from the right side of the country while they dismantled the government in one hundred days or less, by taking out a "Contract on America." My theory is that Nixon ordered it from the grave. But I get ahead of myself. I began performing stand-up comedy in 1981, the same year that Ronald Reagan began his comedy. The president was known as the master of the one-liner. His gigs were well produced and spun by a professional atmosphere queen, Michael Deaver. Security was a problem, and after the assassination attempt on Reagan, Alexander Haig did not reassure us with "I'm in charge now" from a White House Situation Room/Tanning booth.
After he was shot, Reagan achieved an untouchable quality. Mustn't make fun of him, hush, hush, he was almost assassinated. My theory is that the Republicans did it. I am not so callous as to suggest they shot him, that was Jodie Foster, but I am suggesting when he was in the hospital, Reagan was reconditioned. Same thing happened with the pope the same year. Nancy Reagan was such a piece of work, she should have been on my comedy payroll. She seemed so lifelike. It was her Valium-laced frozen face that launched the War on Drugs with "Just Say No.
" The "thank you" was implied. At one photo op press conference, she toured a crack house and decried how awful it was, yet one suspected that for our Drug Czarina it had something to do with a plaid couch. I never got used to saying "President Ronald Reagan." It was like saying "President Merv Griffin." Reagan wasn't so much a president as the host. He was having such a good time playing president and going on vacation that he decided to run again. The Democrats nominated Walter Mondale as sacrificial lamb and rightly suspected it was going to be a real rout, so they put a woman on the ticket, Geraldine Ferraro. That way they could lose heavily, then say "I told you so," and not try a woman again for another hundred years.
In his second term, Reagan completed the work of his first term--the rich got really rich, everything was deregulated, advocacy programs were quashed, the Savings and Loan program was trashed, the deficit was tripled, unions were busted, Housing and Urban Development was in shambles, banks were closing, the military got lots of new toys, the religious right was stronger, and AIDS was ignored.