The Obama White House looks like it is has taken a page out of the playbook of the late Nixon Press Secretary Ron Ziegler. In a fit of pique, during the 1972 presidential campaign, Ziegler barred Rolling Stone reporter and Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson from flying on the lead campaign press plane, notwithstanding that Thompson had been covering the race, that there was space on the plane, and that Thompson was an accredited reporter. Thompson's problem was that he did not report things the way the Committee to Reelect the President would have liked things to have been reported.

Well, Robert Gibbs,the Obama press secretary, is doing all he can to follow in Ziegler's footsteps. Gibbs is trying to get the news organizations that cover the White House to drop Fox from the White House press pool. Pressed on his efforts to get the press to dump Fox from the pool, Gibbs demurred. Despite repeated questioning by ABC's Jake Tapper, Gibbs would not give a straight answer on where the White House stood on Fox and pool coverage.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2009/10/23/... /

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.
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The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/graffit...