Blogging as John +5, I note this:
Robert L. Vesco, the fugitive financier who spent most of his life eluding American justice, might even have managed to die on the sly.
Mr. Vesco, who was sentenced to a long prison term in Cuba in 1996 and was wanted in the United States for crimes ranging from securities fraud and drug trafficking to political bribery, died more than five months ago, on Nov. 23, from lung cancer, say people close to him. If so, it was never reported publicly by the Cuban authorities, who said Friday that they considered him a “nonissue.” American officials said Friday they knew nothing about it.
“We don’t know that it occurred,” an American official said.
If Mr. Vesco indeed eluded the American authorities until his final day, it was the fitting end to his nearly four decades on the run. He was wanted for, among other things, bilking some $200 million from credulous investors in the 1970s, making an illegal contribution to Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 presidential campaign and trying to arrange a deal during the Carter administration to let Libya buy American planes in exchange for bribes to United States officials. .
I don’t know what it is about human nature (or my nature), that has me rooting for “bad guys,” but there are times when I read stories like this that I say “Good for him.” I don’t know what Vesco has done, and he may have been pure evil, but there is still something in me that celebrates people getting one over on “the man.” I am sure people have studied this and can explain it, but I thought it was worth noting.
Obligatory troll- protection: I really know nothing about Vesco, and am just talking about the Hollywood-like allure of someone managing to elude authorities for years.
Genine
Wow, +5! My magic is stronger than I thought.
jake
Only $200 mil? Pffft. These days real crooks go straight Bush, ask for the keys to the Treasury and then get their pet Congress Critters to build them a nifty new tax shelter.
Daniel
Yeah I have that same feeling. Everytime there’s a news story about convicts escaping prison, part of me wants to see them succeed, even though I know that they need to be locked away.
Bob In Pacifica
Rooting for the bad guys is an old American tradition. Didn’t Woody Guthrie write that song about Pretty Boy Floyd. It’s about beating the system, sticking it to the man. John, if you can get out a guitar and write a song…
Garrigus Carraig
God damn America! Just sayin’. GC+7
Ditch Digger
D.B. Cooper for Prez!
isit2009yet
I’m on board…there’s something about a clever bad guy (which does exclude the current administration).
BFR
I like this article on MSNBC:
First dorms were coed, now rooms are, too
“Erik Youngdahl and Michelle Garcia share a dorm room at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University. But they say there’s no funny business going on. Really. They mean it.”
Then I saw the picture – yeah, no kidding there’s not much going on.
Dennis - SGMM
Vesco was given safe haven in a number of Central American and Caribbean countries because they hoped to receive largess from him. He remained his connections with the Nixon family, specifically Nixon’s nephew Donald Nixon, through the Nineties.
I can’t say that I admire Vesco. I can say that he seems a cut above the current lot of thieves and looters who turn to the government to make them whole when their schemes go awry.
Silver Owl
LOL! He sounds like a modern day republican senator or American executive. I’m surprised they didn’t want him to invest or make campaign donations.
empty
John, you really should drink more often! John+ always says things I would have said if I were articulate.
Ross
Hillary Clinton campaign advisor discovered in old video saying naughty things about Indiana back in first Clinton run in 1992…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhea03BibKs
LoveTehMudkips
John, it’s your residual Conservative desire to “make it on your own” by hook or by crook. It’s why we root for Han Solo, but wouldn’t want to live with Han Solo.
Billy K +…um…10?
LoveTehMudkips
I hear that Zapruder guy has the good on Oswald!!!1zomg
Jen
Have y’all missed me? I’ve been trying to get more work done lately.
I just wanted to tell you that I went to the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Raleigh that Clinton and Obama both spoke at. It might as well have been an Obama rally. The Clinton fans tried to get a sort of a cheer going every once in a while using a sort of Darryl-Hannah-in-Splash screech. I do not know why. It was excruciating.
Fired up and ready to go, folks.
kind of an off white
Ross, did you know that Jimi Hendrix came out as gay in “Purple Haze?” Yeah, right in the chorus there.
Genine
Hi, Jen. I was wondering where you’ve been. That’s a good idea, trying to get some work done. I should be working on my book, but I am commenting here instead.
Quite sad, really.
Dennis - SGMM
Welcome back, Jen! The Jefferson-Jackson dinner sounds amazing. Here on the Left Coast our sense of history is severely attenuated. If you told someone hereabouts that you were going to a Jefferson-Jackson dinner the reply would be “You’re going to dinner with George Jefferson and Michael Jackson? Be sure and take pictures!”
Pb
Jen,
LOL, sweet. I saw Obama speak at the Dean dome in Chapel Hill, and that was pretty impressive, too.
David
‘An Evangelical Manifesto’ criticizes politics of faith
I’m laughing on the inside.
binzinerator
Some thoughts (binz +3):
I don’t buy the Josey Wales outlaw fantasy that guys like him are romantic middle fingers to authority. I’m inclined to think there’s a difference between being anti-authority and being a real dirtbag criminal. Narco trafficking, money laundering, defrauding people on an Enron scale (200 million in 1970s dollars makes Kenny Boy’s ill gotten gains looks like chump change), corruption, scheming to arm up-to-no-good states like Libya. Vesco sounds like a shitbag to me. What’s romantic about a shitbag?
Of course the shitbag wanted to help Nixon. These guys know their own kind.
The people who ought to be admired for outlasting ‘the man’ are people like Ray McGovern or Sibil Edmonds or for chrissake that cameraman for Al Jazeera who just got released after being imprisoned for 6 years without charges in our own state run gulag.
I know, this allure is on an abstract level. (Plus, as you noted, it’s thoughts at +5) But consider this: bin Laden’s an outlaw too, did what the fuck he wanted to whomever he wanted to get what the fuck he wanted while audaciously thumbing his nose at the US from his hideouts. And he’s been at least as successful at eluding ‘the man’. I’d argue he’s the premier poster child in getting one over on the man.
And why doesn’t George W. Bush have this allure? He’s certainly committed a host of audacious crimes, and has successfully put one over on most of the population, Joe Sixpack and the Man included, since much of what he’s done has been outside of legitimate authority. He’s an insider’s insider.
Perhaps that Hollywood allure thing might explain why conservatives cheered him on. He was their Robin Hood, in their twisted bizzaro-world way, and they loved him for it. No one in the modern America of even 10 years ago would have thought someone could have stolen so brazenly from the poor and give it to the rich and get away with it so easily. Let alone be lauded for it. Not even Reagan came close.
Finally, is Genine really that magic? I mean, didn’t you refer to her as a hottie hippie chick or something in another thread? I mean, crikey, she’s got you at +5 and sitting in front of a computer screen, fer Chrissake, alone on a Friday night. The game is over. She owns you. Jebus. You poor wretch. You’d better have another.
On the other hand, she can’t be so magic if she’s sitting in front of a computer screen at 9pm on a Friday night, too. Either she’s way not-magic … or it’s a match made in blogger heaven.
And me? I’m married. Which means the game was over for me some 15 years ago. I’ve been owned for a long long time. Which remindds me. Think I’ll have another. Lots of yard work to do in the morning, good way to work it off.
FS
You’re nearly as old as the D.C. Madam and yet you don’t remember Vesco?
Dennis - SGMM
You young whippersnappers don’t even remember Bebe Rebozo. The crooks and miscreants of the Nixon era were far more brazen than today’s crop. I still fondly remember when Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s VP, tried to deduct returned bribes from his income tax.
binzinerator
Bebe Rebozo. I remember that name now.
Well, at least he kept it in a proper safe-deposit box and not his freezer.
Not sure if that’s points for or against Bebe. (Wonder how they knew it was from Hughes for the Repub party? A huge bundle of hundreds wrapped with a rubber band with a note tucked in it saying ‘To the GOP, from H. Hughes, billionaire. p.s. please wash afer touching.’)
Considering some of the very same players of the Nixon era are members of today’s criminal crop, are you sure Dennis there’s any difference, other than today’s crop are that much more experienced at getting away with it? That could account for any increased subtlety. The fuckers learned how.
cbear
Hey Jen, nice to have you back.
cbear
Bebe Robozo?
Jeebus, I never knew Nixon had a mistress. Was she cute?
The Grand Panjandrum
Heh. Nixon and Kissinger staggering around the White House, drunk as skunks, praying to the portraits of dead Presidents melts my ice cold heart.
Zuzu
Good times. Good times.
binzinerator
Warms mine too, though I was too young to comprehend it all then.
But wouldn’t that episode suggest that those old criminal bastards at least had some reverence for history, some concern for what the giants of American political history might think (if they were alive) and some comprehension — and fear — of the consequences of what they’d gotten themselves into? They had to have a connection with their own political reality and an understanding of history to even have the idea enter their alcohol-soused brains of babbling to portraits of dead presidents to try to exonerate, justify and extirpate their fuckups.
George W. Bush doesn’t even get that far on the scale of humanity. You can’t leak out the babblings of your tormented inner self if you’ve got no inner self.
It’s that disconnect that makes Bush seem like a sociopath compared to Nixon. Nixon, thoroughly criminal that he was, still had some wires of humanity connected. Bush is off the grid.
myiq2xu
I hope D.B. Cooper is alive and well on some tropical beach, along with Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers.
binzinerator
Three comments since 9pm and all are still awaiting moderation — and nary a ‘fuck’ among them! Seriously, a problem with the e-mail address? I’ll know if this one gets through.
myiq2xu
Let’s not forget C.R.E.E.P. either.
Ross
Hold me closer, Tony Danza
Person of Choler
Jefferson and Jackson, eh? One an impregnator of his own slaves and the other an enthusiastic slaughterer of Native Americans. Quite a pair to celebrate.
I did hear that the dinner ran short of wine and Obama transformed a bottle of Evian into three cases of a passable chardonnay.
myiq2xu
The Obamamessiah can’t turn water into wine. He can, however, turn waffles into whine.
John Cole
I am John +** right now, and I am housing a pizza and watching Bob Saget on my HBO, and he is funny as fuck.
Plus, if Genine really is female, I am marrying her sight unseen. Because she is cool, and I dig her vibe.
That is all. And if my email does not work, IM me, Genine.
popsukket
I drink tap water. I hate white wine, I prefer Leinenkugels. And I voted for Obama.
So fuck you with your Evian and chardonnay and fish and loaves multiplied.
Person of Choler
Dear Popsukket,
I agree with your taste for Leinenkugel’s. In years past my friends and I washed down many a fine proletarian meal at Manning’s in Minneapolis with pitchers of Jake’s best. Indeed if you pencil a scraggly beard on the image of Mr. L on a Leinie’s-advertising placemat, you will have me to the life.
As to Biblical references, at the J/J Day Dinner, Obama replicated the wine miracle performed during the wedding feast at Cana. He will be doing the loaves and fishes thing next week when he ends world hunger by waving his hands over an artisanal baguette and a piece of farm raised Chilean sea bass.
To your suggestion of pursuing a carnal relationship, we really have nothing in common save an interest in Leinenkugel’s and I am already in more amatory tangles than a man of my age and state of decrepitude needs. I’ll keep your name in mind should things slow up.
All the best.
Helena Montana
Myself, I always though Vesco was just another Nixon crony thug, like Bebe Rebozo. However, I am old enough to recall both Vesco’s and Rebozo’s heydays vividly–perhaps that’s why I was not enchanted with either of them.
grandpajohn
Hmm sounds like some clergy and lay leaders went back and read what the New Testament and Jesus teachings were actually saying
JGabriel
Binzinerator:
They’re both sociopaths. The only thing that makes Nixon seem remotely more human than Bush was Nixon’s capacity for self-pity – which Bush replaces with petulance.
The other major difference between Bush and Nixon is that Nixon was actually not an idiot. Atrios summed up Bush quite well yesterday: “a really dumb person who thinks everyone in the room is even dumber than he is.”
.
Notorious P.A.T.
Hello, the Guy Who Misses Everything here. What is this “+ 5” stuff?
Krista
Go for it, Genine. John’s one of the good ones.
Krista
‘Tis how John refers to himself when he imbibes. So if he’s had one drink, he’s John Cole +1. And so on and so forth.
The “John +**” bit? I haven’t seen that, so I’m guessing that John was utterly shitfaced, and am sad to have missed it. That’s the pain in the ass about living on the East Coast. All of the best blog conversations tend to take place long after I’ve gone to bed.
Genine
Oh, Binz, if you knew what I’ve been thinking about John for a while now…
You’d realize I’m more magic than you think. I like his vibe, too.
Genine
;-) Thanks, Krista!
Krista
Hey, that’s what I’m here for. :)
Genine
Well, you’re here for that and to impart your wonderful wit!
Anyway, I’m off. Got things to do, it’s a beautiful day!
dmbeaster
The bad guy has to have something redeeming about him, which Vesco did not.
Recast the story as Ken Lay or other Enron scum going free for 40 years (or why stop there with a financial criminal — why not nazis like Josef Mengele?) and see if that reins in your cheerleading instinct.
Notorious P.A.T.
Thanks Krista )