"I wonder sometimes whether the Nixon tapes really will just continue to be the gift that never stops giving. I was in college when Richard Milhous Nixon was first elected president, and I can still remember the profound sense of loathing and disgust that I experienced at the mere sight, let alone the sound, of him and of his most especially repellent sidekick Henry Kissinger. Wiser and older people tell you that the passions of your youth will dry up and that a more sere and autumnal condition will overtake you as maturity advances, but the thought of the Nixon gang in the White House still infuses me with a pure and undiluted hatred and makes me consider throwing up things that I don't even remember having eaten."
Christopher Hitchens (on the most recent harvest from the tapes that the Nixon Presidential Library has released from the early months of 1973, tapes that delineate the obsessive nastiness and criminality from that dark chapter of American history, only to be surpassed, of course, by the utter banality, incompetence and evil of the Bush-Cheney years)
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