Following the fallout of the Watergate break-in, we learned that Richard Nixon was a crook. Thanks to a documentary by the BBC and the Rachel Maddow Show, we now know that he was also a traitor.
The Thursday before the 1968 presidential election, President Johnson announced that the allies had reached a peace agreement with North Vietnam. But since Nixon had run on a platform promising to end the war, he couldn’t afford to have Johnson end the war a few days before the election.
So Nixon used an intermediary to convince the South Vietnamese to back out of the peace agreement!
Recordings of Johnson’s phone conversations reveal that he knew about Nixon’s treachery, but since he learned of it as the result of illegal FBI wiretaps of the South Vietnam ambassador’s phone, LBJ couldn’t make the information public.
The treason helped Nixon win a close election over Hubert H. Humphrey. It also caused the war to rage on for another 5 years, costing 15,000 more American lives!
Of course, Nixon isn’t the last Republican president to play fast and loose with the Constitution. Reagan created a shadow government to covertly arm Iran in exchange for money to finance the Contras of Nicaragua. George W. Bush led us into war with Iraq on false pretenses. And his administration violated international treaties by torturing captives.
More recently, Teapublicans have used every parliamentary trick in the book and a record number of filibusters in order to block President Obama’s appointments and his attempts to improve our economy.
Yet they have the audacity to wave flags and call themselves patriots!!!