The other day I made a joke about how George (The Animal) Steele would be the next Fed chairman. We continue to trend in that direction.

Dr. Crowley, a renowned scholar who holds a Ph.D. in international relations from Columbia University, is a foreign affairs and political analyst for the Fox News Channel. She is also a New York Times bestselling author and a columnist and online opinion editor of The Washington Times. Previously, Dr. Crowley served as Foreign Policy Assistant and Communications Director to former President Richard Nixon from 1990 until his death in 1994. She was named "Woman of the Year" by the Clare Booth Luce Institute at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2010 and received the "Excellence in Journalism Award" from the Women's National Republican Club in 2014.

Good rule of thumb: Never trust anyone other than an MD who insists on being called "Dr." Anyway, Crowley is notable mainly for having been Richard Nixon's last chump.

When I began working for him immediately after graduation in 1990, I did not expect to have the access to him that I quickly gained. And surprisingly for a man who had been so often damaged by those he trusted, Nixon trusted me immediately. I became a member of his small circle of advisers. I served as an editorial adviser and consultant on his last two books, Seize the Moment (1992) and Beyond Peace (1994). I prepared his briefing materials for his public and private appearances. I traveled with him through Europe and Asia, sitting in on his conversations with heads of state and other government leaders. I listened as he confided his views on international affairs and world leaders, American politics and policy, Watergate, his own political career, and human nature. It was an extraordinary opportunity for me, particularly because it was my first job out of Colgate.

From the beginning, Nixon was my mentor, employer, and guide to American political history. Granted a rare and highly personal view of the thoughts, actions, and persona of Richard Nixon, I kept a daily diary beginning in 1989, of which Nixon was unaware and in which I reconstructed our daily conversations. His professional and personal disclosures were made in confidence but with the implicit understanding that they would be eventually recounted. The result is my first book, Nixon Off the Record (Random House), a volume which details Nixon's thoughts and activities on the American political scene during the four years I worked for him. I am working on a second volume which will relate Nixon's thoughts on foreign policy during this time, his extensive views on scandal, and his own thoughts on his life and career.

She has rolled along through a comfy wingnut welfare career. She has had her moments, though. When Sandra Fluke announced her engagement, the good Doctor Crowley tweeted, "To a man?" (She later apologized if she'd offended, blah, blah, blah...) In the early days of the Obama Administration, she took to her newspaper column to warn militia types that the Kenyan Muslim hit squad might to be out to get them. From HuffPost:

It's mind-blowingly coincidental that these raids on a supposedly "Christian" militia group would come at the exact moment that Democrats were trying to change public opinion on Obamacare by claiming persecution by their opponents. They have cast Tea Partiers, conservatives, independents, Christians and militia members as all cut from the same unstable, volatile cloth. How can anyone take their opposition to the Democrats' agenda seriously when they're toting guns and being raided by Homeland Security and the FBI? They're all nuts, don't you know? The Democrats handle dissent by isolating it, smearing it and delegitimizing it in order to crush it. The warning should be clear: If you have small-government, traditional values, you may be considered by your own leadership to be an enemy of the state.

And then there's this.

[twitter ]https://twitter.com/MonicaCrowley/status/651043858541879296?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw[/twitter]

We are so lost in the deep, dark woods.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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