Bucking The Comic Book Wisdom

Fielding Buck gets the point about the comic book Richard Nixon in "Watchmen," who talks as though he would be open to launching a nuclear war:

Now that, my friends, is not Nixon speaking. The real president is famous for improving diplomatic relations with China and negotiating nuclear arms control with the Soviet Union.

A Perle Of Little Value To Bush?

Neoconservative Richard Perle chooses "The National Interest," the Nixon Center's journal, to say that it wasn't his fault. Thomas Frank:

Mr. Perle is one of the best-known neoconservative foreign-policy intellectuals in Washington. He was an assistant secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan and the chairman of the Defense Policy Board in the early years of the Bush administration.

Unfortunately, a neoconservative foreign-policy guru is not exactly a respected calling these days. As early and influential cheerleaders for the Iraq war, neocons occupy a level on par with investment bankers and eviction specialists.

But in a remarkable bit of blame evasion, Mr. Perle steps forward to tell us why neocons like him can in no way be held responsible for the Bush administration's failures. In fact, they had nothing to do with it. He, he writes, has "been widely but wrongly depicted as deeply involved in the making of administration policy."