Nixon And The Intensity Gap

Historian and former Nixon tapes archivist Maarja Krusten gets props from OC Weekly's Matt Coker for her recent article about Nixon foundation efforts to get rid of library director Tim Naftali:

Krusten ends her piece not by taking pot shots at the Nixon loyalists--her entire account is pretty matter-of-fact and snark-free--but she does take a swipe at others in her profession.

"Historians need to step up their game," she writes. "They need to embrace continual learning and educate themselves about the National Archives and what it faces in Washington. As it is, there is what Naftali calls an intensity gap. The Nixon side showed intense interest in the Watergate exhibit and used various means in an unsuccessful effort to limit it.

"This time around, knowledgeable Washington insiders such as I had Tim's back. Who will fight for the next Tim Naftali, if complacency among historians on presidential libraries issues continues?"

Commie Girl Acquires Means Of Production

Rebecca Schoenkopf, who wrote the "Commie Girl" column at OC Weekly until 2007, has taken over from Ken Layne as editor, publisher, and owner of the sassy Washington, D.C. blog Wonkette. On Feb. 27 St. John's men's group speaker-turned-law student Frank Mickadeit devoted his Orange County Register column to Schoenkopf and hinted that the deal was in the works:

She's had spotty writing and editing employment over the last three years. She went back for a master's degree, though, and she's negotiating to acquire a very well-branded national blog, which, if she pulls it off, everyone will remark, Oh, this was what she was meant to do! To which I will say: No, this is what she's always done, better than anybody.

Maybe, but while the blog's subtitled "the D.C. gossip," Schoenkopf's first two posts were based on stories that appeared in the LA Times (about Gov. Jerry Brown, pictured here with rock stars, when he was cooler) and LA Weekly. She'd better move to Washington quick! To celebrate one of the nation's reddest county's new toehold in one of its bluest cities (and in the probably misguided hope that the new editor will discontinue her blog's tradition of sometimes putting swear words in headlines), I'm finally adding Wonkette to my blog roll.

If You Want To Be Anonymous, Sign "John Doe"

X's lead singer is starting up an advice column for OC Weekly.

Start Spreading The News

The view at dawn Wednesday morning from our hotel in midtown, looking south along 3rd Ave. We arrived on the redeye from LAX -- a homecoming for Bronx-born Kathy and for me, too, since we both worked in New York for former President Nixon for many years. Both my daughters were born in Manhattan.

Kathy's superior instincts told her that we'd find a diner on 2nd Ave. We bought the papers -- actual printed newspapers, the Times, the Daily News -- and had eggs and coffee and juice. Then Kathy went to St. Patrick's Cathedral and I went looking for a Village Voice, which, I was distressed to find, is now just a flimsy giveaway like its sister paper OC Weekly and no longer the two-section authoritative cultural and political source book that I left behind in 1990. It still carries Michael Musto's column, though. This week he interviewed Joan and Melissa Rivers. He asked Joan about Golden Globe fashions. She said, "Meryl Streep is the best actress alive, but she looked like was wearing the Temple Grandin collection. Meryl, call me."

I'm Willing To Go To The Matt This Time

I've been playing second banana for years to Nixon gags by OC Weekly's deft polemicist, Matt Coker. In 1999 the alternative weekly ran a full page, which I attributed to him, on my attempts to cast a favorable light on President Nixon's White House tapes. My wife and Nixon confederate Kathy O'Connor had it framed.

Now Coker's ended an article about my Nixon-Rebozo post with the indelible image of 37, Bebe Rebozo, and aerosol valve inventor Bob Abplanalp (also not gay, not that it would have mattered if he were) window-shopping on Martha's Vineyard. He writes, "Nope, nothing gay-sounding there." Kathy reminds me that all three of these dudes loved to shop. Why, when we were in Beijing-- But what's the use? It may finally be time for Coker and me to meet man to man and settle our differences over lattes and fistfuls of petite vanilla scones.

Copting Out Of Pluralism

Arab tyrants were often the guarantors of religious tolerance. Carl Moeller, who runs an Orange County nonprofit that advocates for Christians, worries that as the Arab spring wanes, a winter of medievalism is at hand. OC Weekly reports:

In a statement Open Doors USA sent out yesterday, Moeller noted that Westerners believe "the notion of democracy is majority and minority groups working together, each having a voice at the table." But what is unfolding in the lands of the Arab Spring, he said, "is far from Jeffersonian."

"A possible result is the law of mob rule, where Islamists are likely to control governments, exclude minority faiths even from police protection, and Christians live in constant terror from the clear message: There is no place here for Christians," Moeller warns.

"OC Weekly" Closes YL Bureau, Loses Almanac

Orange County's alternative sentinel writes:

When Richard Nixon became president in 1968, the national media rushed to the Podunk city of Yorba Linda, the Dickster's birthplace and a town that had just incorporated a year earlier and was still largely citrus groves and rolling hills instead of the exclusive estates and gated communities that characterize it today.

Nixon became president in 1969. Yorba Linda's orange groves were paved over years ago, and it has few if any gated communities.

One Size Serves All The People

OC Weekly's web site is clunky and confusing, and it's not the only one. It was evidently designed by someone at parental unit company Village Voice Media, since the New Times site in Phoenix (a sister paper to the Weekly that broke Sheriff Joe Arpaio's endorsement of Richard Nixon) uses the same template. Reminds me of MLB teams sharing the same basic web design, which is also appalling. You'd expect lefties, at least, to struggle against corporate conformity.

Among the early editors of the Valley of the Sun's venerable alternative rag was a family friend named Daniel Ben-Horin (shown here), referred to in a comment under this 2007 post. Ben-Horin and my mother, Jean Sharley Taylor, worked together at the Arizona Republic in the late 1960s until conservative publisher Eugene Pulliam, Dan Quayle's celebrated relation, pitched a series of fits over the paper's centerward drift during the Nixon era. Daniel was fired, and my mother quit when Pulliam fired her editor, J. Edward Murray, who'd balked when Pulliam requisitioned the front page for a pro-Nixon editorial.

Daniel later founded CompuMentor, a Bay Area organization that distributes software to non-profits. My mother and I moved to LA, where she went to work for the LA Times -- and I ended up going to work for Richard Nixon in San Clemente.

The Heart Of The White House

One of the pleasures of my years at the Nixon library was working with one of our preferred caterers, Bruno Serato, owner of The White House restaurant in Anaheim, and his gracious colleagues. He was too humble ever to mention that since 2005 he's served 250,000 free meals to children at the Boys and Girls Clubs, as revealed in this August 2010 CBS News segment.

Check The White House out here; and make your holiday reservation today.

Hat tip to OC Weekly

Mo And Marty

Special congratulations to two winners of OC Weekly's "Best Of OC 2010" awards: Mo's Fullerton Music Centers (Mo is at left, left), where I got my first guitar on my birthday 15 years ago and my first lessons from Larry Samson (if you honk when you drive by his studio on Harbor Blvd., he'll wave) and novelist and "Orange Coast" magazine editor Martin J. Smith, whom I first met in his native Pittsburgh 25 years ago.

From Fullerton To Everest

Cindy Abbott, hometown fitness hero. Restaurant recommendations included.

Strict Obstructionists?

From Nixon on, says Irvine-based legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, it's been the conservatives vs. the Constitution.

But If They Want To Buy School Bonds...

I didn't quite understand Kai Chen's campaign against Mao Zedong's statue at the Nixon library. His apparently successful effort to keep a southern California school district from taking money from the Beijing regime for classroom projects makes considerably more sense.

If There Were New Bosses, They'd Be The Same

At OC Weekly, Gustavo Arellano didn't like the New York Times article about Orange County's purported political transformation. After questioning its sourcing and findings, Arellano (author of Orange County: A Personal History) added:

[E]ven if Orange County was somehow more liberal than in the past, what good have our so-called liberal leaders have done? The two truest Dem towns, SanTana and Irvine, are paragons of spiteful, wasteful, dirty-tricks political machines (run by friends Larry Agran and Don Papi Pulido, respectfully) that would make Daley's Chicago seem like Mayberry. The Dems spend more time playing footsie with their Republican opposition than cultivating strong candidates--hence, the painful slaughter they experience in nearly every partisan race every two years.

Parked

By 2002, opponents of an international airport in Orange County, to be built on the abandoned Marine base at El Toro, had already tried and failed to get voters to kill it. So they put a new measure on that year's ballot, called measure W, that basically read:

Wouldn't it be cool to have a park right here in Orange County just like Central Park, with lakes and merry-go-rounds, and, like, about a million soccer fields, and places to go hiking, and everything? There'll be hot dogs and cotton candy, and you can ride your skateboard and take your kids there, and no one will ever be sad ever again, instead of an icky old airport?

They even printed posters showing happy people walking through the woods in, evidently, the Sierra Nevada. The measure passed with 54% of the vote. I would've voted for it, but the then-chairman of the Nixon foundation, George Argyros, the airport's biggest booster, was standing in the voting booth behind me.

The problem was that there was no evidence that a "Great Park" was warranted or achievable. No feasibility studies, no nothing. It was a deft if cynical campaign slogan (aren't they all?), and it worked. Now OC Weekly is complaining that there's no Great Park and that politicians and their cronies are getting rich off the fantasy. "I'm shocked," Capt. Renault said. "Shocked!"

Hijablessest Place On Earth

Is Muslim garb on "cast members" unwelcome? What is this, France?

Please Note: Headline Below Is By "OC Weekly"

"Richard Nixon Library is g-a-y Gay!"

Sauce For The Goose-Step

In today's toxic political atmosphere, it's appalling the way critics openly compare our leaders to Hitler and the Nazis. Right-wing Obamaphobes at Glenn Beck's Sept. 12 rally in Washington? Sure. Also OC Weekly, attacking the San Clemente City Council.

Red Zone

Just this once, OC Weekly isn't sure whom to make fun of: The Nixon Library or the single-minded critic of its Mao Zedong statue.

Local Angel

No Doubt comes home. I actually saw the show below in 1995. (Language warning!)