I seem to get my best reading done now at 2 AM when I wake up and can't get back to sleep. That's my silver linings playbook.

Last night, this morning, I read the following in Rick Perlstein's “Nixonland.” It's about the gathering of power and paranoia by both Nixon and Kissinger during the first 100 days of their time in the White House in 1969:

Senator McGovern, with a former college professor's faith in the power of reason and dialogue, had gone to the White House to meet Henry Kissinger and suggest a plan [to end the war in Vietnam]: since our involvement was a disaster and a mistake, couldn't Nixon just say that his predecessors Kennedy and Johnson had comitted troops in good faith, but events had shown that commitment was no longer consistent with the national interest? Kissinger allowed that the war was a mistake. But he said America couldn't pull out because the right wing would go crazy: “We couldn't govern the country.”

And that, America, is why you can't have nice things. Because the right wing would go crazy.

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