> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://herr-klamm.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Sunday Morning Coming Down, Featuring Nixon & Agnew - URL: https://herr-klamm.ghost.io/sunday-morning-coming-down-featuring-nixon-agnew/ - Published: 2026-08-23T11:56:59.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-23T12:55:47.000Z - Author: Stephen Bender So, I always thought Johnny Cash wrote that song. But no. He just covered it very well. It was Kris Kristofferson. I guess it's supposed to be a lament. It just seems like some real shit that describes reality. Oh, well. So some reflections that are meant to be funny, because what's the point in dwelling too much on the negative? Even that gets boring after while, like an old possession you've tried to give away or lose but couldn't quite part with somehow. Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon's first Vice President – and the only one ever tried, convicted and jailed – was the Greek Governor of Maryland, until Nixon plucked him out of obscurity in something of a masterstroke. Noam Chomsky referred to Nixon as "the last liberal president" and that is very true. Nixon's principal dictum – one of many that are valuable – when it came to politics was as follows. Run to the right in the primary, run to the middle in the general, and govern from the left. That remains true today in this sense. The American people are such shits that you can't raise taxes on them anymore. So, you put everthing on that great temporal credit card, or the one up there in the sky. It's pitiful shit. Maybe these FDR liberals running as social democrats will get something done in the next decade. Over 100 years ago William James wrote of "the moral equivalent of war" as a social reform device. Haven't figured it out yet, and probably never will. Even if you were to soak the rich, a la Bernie and Zoran, not enough people actually believe that it could ever happen. But it did happen. Before. With FDR: 91% top income tax rate. It went to shit 40 years ago, since Reagan's 1986 "tax reform", which dropped the rate on top earners from 50% to 28%. Kennedy dropped it from 91% to 70%. Oh yeah, the pigs killed him, for what, cutting their taxes? JFK was fucking an East German spy, Ellen Rometsch. That's why they killed him, whoever "they" were. Or he was going to suspend the oil man's depreciation tax break? He escalated in Vietnam, that's for sure. In the end, why people give a fuck is beyond me. Speaking of which, The first Pretenders record is also out of sight. So, now we have $40 trillion in debt. We pay $1 trillion in interest every year. Then $1 trillon for the empire. Another $1 for seniors and poor people. And maybe $1 billion or so for everything else. That's why nothing works. It 3/4 of our spending is on bullshit consumption. 1/4 on investment. It's so polluted. The Chinese probably have the inverse proportion. No "entitlement" programs in China – they do something non-bureaucratic like a UBI payment or some such. But that's a higher culture now than this one. This one is lower than Iran. It sucks. I love how orthodox Marxist-Leninist cadre are way better at capitalism now than we are. Put together all the Jews in finance, Texans in oil, Californians in tech, and every WASP in Masshole-pharma. What do you get? A bunch of losers. They just take it all for themselves. The Bolsheviks knew what Lincoln didn't, to our everlasting detriment. Don Rickles, to bring it back around, once reflected on the Italians in front of Dino and Frank at one of those gawdy 70's Vegas "roasts" that I love. He said: "We need the Italian people... To fine out where the mail goes." This was a much better country – certainly in terms of political economy, too – when people could just insult one another on the basis of race and religion, with a wink and a nod. Political correctness sucks dick. All the normal people I know agree, across the political spectrum. My favorite video, currently – a long-time fave. Finally, somebody expresses the same raging self-criticism and negativity in plain language! It's also an implicit acknowledgment that most of life is just bullshit. I just love the transgressiveness of it! Thanks again liberal academics and politicians and their holier than thou acolytes! You suck, too. That's what people do. They make jokes, to stop from crying fer Chrissakes. In grad school I used the term "stewardess" and some busy body chick had to raise her hand – in a Graduate Seminar! – to correct me with: "Uh, I believe the term is 'flight attendant'". Thank you for your imput, San Francisco girly girl. But getting back to Agnew. He was famous for his turns of phrase, which I always admired about him. It was overdone – and probably all written by Pat Buchanan – but nevertheless, he delivered the lines. He was a "white ethnic", even if only barely. Stavros Halkias claims that the Greeks are little more than glorified Arabs. Still better than the Turkish menace, mind you, but a realistic enough assessment. Some of his back and forth with Hasan is pretty funny. A now dead family friend of Northern Italian heritage from Philly once referred to her southern brethern offhandedly as "mongrels". And when challenged on it, elaborated with a host of historical evidence going back to the Punic Wars. You can't help some literary-minded helpless women in wheelchairs. Maybe they are mongrels? Maybe we all are. I will not write down what she said about you know who down in Philly. She got menaced once too often on public transportation. An old lost friend of mine was from New Jersey. He referred to it as "a war of all against all". He hated it and was much happier in San Francisco. Not happy, mind you. At all. Just happier. As a rural outsider to these internecine east coast resentments, I find them amusing. They're really stupid, but funny as hell. Don't even get me started on the "Guidos" and worse things than that. Real greaseball Masshole shit, that anecdote. It's a PG-13 website. And that out of the mouth of an Irish-American mother who escaped into suburbia and relative affluence. Never forget. Never forgive. Ha! ... \[Back to the Greeks\] Just don't call them Slavs, which they pronounce "slaves". Macedonia Remains Greek! Consensus Greek view, from fascist to communist: "3,000 year history of Greece. Not Slave!!!" said Panos an otherwise serene Greek engineer with whom I climbed Mount Olympus back in the day. Alrighty then, fuck dem slavs, I guess. Agnew, again. He had two one-liners to shit on the urban swells, the limousine liberals. The "cultural elite" in Dan Quayle's formulation. It means Jews and it isn't pretty. That part of it, I don't like. But that is pretty well-buried anti-Semitism, especially when compared to today, what with "Great Replacement" rhetoric gaining steam. The part I liked was the vulgar overdone aliteration. "The puscillanimous pussyfooters". And "the nattering nabobs of negativism". So he took bribes in the wrong way. Everybody else was doing it the right way, alas. With receipts. And they pick on this poor if hard-charging immigrant from Greece? Those sonsabitches! He wasn't in "the big club". An arriviste who was not just outre, but even worse: declasse. Bebe Rebozo. Ever heard of this motherfucker. Florida biznezman. I like that Nixon never turned his back on being a working class thug at heart. Bebe Rebozo was said to be Nixon's best friend. As with Bill Clinton, as Christopher Hitchens observed: "this many has only cronies, not friends". Bebe Rebozo and Tricky Dick would go out on his yacht. Just the fellas. No wives, obvi. Just the fellas out there in the great shimmering blue. A meeting of the minds over some bourbon. And so on. Pat wouldn't have understood, to say nothing of Tricia. And let's not forget that sweet little dog, Checkers. When men were men... A line in John Cassavates 1968 'Faces' gave a line of dialogue to one the drunken women, speaking of their husbands reaction to the counterculture. "They're scared. They're scared men. They're scared of you. And your build". It goes on. Conservative men today are again afraid and feeling militant consequently. I have sympathy for the emotion, perhaps even empathy. Thank Christ Trump appears to be discredited in some of those circles. He just wants to rob the joint. Purifying the race is a side issue. They're terrified of transgenders, socialists and all of the rest of it. This is a volatile cocktail. This sort of thing, if it gets too much momentum, seldom ends well. The below speech has been a favorite of mine for decades. It is a frank skeleton key into the conservative mind. It makes me sad. It's actually kind of poignant at the end. I feel the same way. It is "gettin' to be re-goddamned-diculous", Duke.