Let me make this perfectly clear -- Arlen Specter didn't jump; he got pushed. And by forcing Pennsylvania's long-time moderate senator to change party affiliation, today's Republicans continue their perversely self-destructive trashing of Richard Nixon's most enduring legacy to the party.

In the 1960 presidential election, Nixon...

In 1962, he promised that we wouldn't have him "to kick around anymore." But Richard Nixon refused to disappear. And, for that crime, some of us on the left haven't stopped kicking. Not after his resignation in disgrace. Not after his death in 1994. And, as the film Frost/Nixon indicates,...

Can Barack Obama succeed in laying Richard Nixon's ghost to rest? As Obama pledges bipartisanship and reaches across the aisle to John McCain, many of us can't help but hope that we've seen the end of the politics of denigration.

For five decades, the Republican party has taken its lessons...