We are so Dicked!

Look out, Tom Friedman, here comes the centrist candidate of your nightmares, with his own blog and Twitter account. I mean Dick Nixon at Nixon Rising, rested, mean as they come, and contemplating another run:

It’s a new kind of day. We need a new kind of president to bring this country to its rightful place. Richard Nixon has been to hell. Not just through hell—he lived there. He knows hell like he knows China. And now he’s back. It’s Richard Nixon’s time again. The United States is ready for her first Undead-American president. An extraordinary man for extraordinary times.

Richard Nixon is counting on your support. And he’ll get it. One way or another, he’ll get it.

I don't know how long he can keep up the perfect-pitch style, at his age, but here's hoping he lasts a long time!
The good news from Meteor Blades at Kos.

Superheroes

I'm so opposed to political personality cults that it's almost as crazy as belonging to one; I really want my politicians to have feet of clay—give me Danton over Robespierre and over your precious Marquis de Lafayette too, any time.

So when I first started hearing about Cory Booker, the perfect candidate, coming out of Oxford and Yale as a documentary-film hero to get rid of Sharpe James, the wicked old scoundrel mayor of Newark, New Jersey, I was skeptical: there's no way, I told myself, that anybody this precisely configured is not a corporate tool.

But what the hell? When there's a blizzard he's there in person to clear away the snow, when there's a hurricane he  tours the flood-soaked streets, and now he rescues girls from blazing buildings! So I give up.

And then there's the tortured Batman to Booker's sunny Superman, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, a Dark Knight of the noblest aspirations and the most suspect methods; I expect him to be up to no good and he keeps doing things I approve of, absolutely behind my back. Now, unable to persuade the state legislature to set up the health insurance exchange required under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, he's just gone and taken care of it himself. I'll take it!

Ethnic superheroes. From Light-Skinned-ed Girl.