My May post about Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez's wishy-washy support of undocumented college students considering her Aztlanista tendencies unleashed quite a Democratic flurry against me, but it also sparked outrage among college administrators, professors, and counselors who work with DREAM Act students. From those ranks comes a Loretta flub of Rohrbacher-esque proportions.
October 1999–I accompanied my oldest daughter and a group of about 15 [high school] students as a chaperone on a Model United Nations (MUN) trip to
Washington, D.C., and a competition at the U.S. Naval Academy in
Annapolis. One of the parents, who didn't go on the trip, made
arrangements for us to visit Loretta in her office. We go there late in
the afternoon about 4 p.m. or so, I am expecting the usual grip and grin type
of event of 5 minutes of pictures and chit chat and out of the office. Loretta has the whole group of about 15 students, 2 teachers and 2 chaperones
sit down in her office and we spend almost 90 minutes talking with her lots of
back and forth, good questions and answers. One of the kids in the group
is – Devon Nixon – the great grand nephew of Richard Nixon.
As we are leaving the office Loretta says directly to him “One of the
worse things I ever did is vote for your uncle.”
]
Later as I was
talking with the teachers we were reflecting that was a fairly rude thing to
say given that Devon was born in 1982 and had only met Tricky Dick a couple of
times. I started thinking about it and remembered that when Nixon ran in
1972 and I was in Mr. Butterfield's government class at Magnolia High
School in Anaheim and while we talked quite a bit about the election that year
and the fact that one of the reasons it was significant is that it was that the
first time 18 year olds could vote for president since the passage of the 26th
amendment to the constitution. I was then saying to myself “Hey,
Loretta is a lot younger than me and if I couldn't vote how could she?”
She had handed out baseball cards with her info and sure enough she was like 12
when Nixon was re-elected. I wrote her two letters saying how could
she reconcile being so rude to young Mr. Nixon and lying at the same time, but
never heard back from her.
Too outrageous to believe, ¿quN no?
Besides the fact my source is impeccable, I also confirmed it with
Devon Nixon himself, currently in Shanghai since America needs a Nixon
to deal with Red China. The only wiggle room I can see for Loretta is that she meant to say she voted for Nixon in a mock school election (that's how I was able to vote for George H.W. Bush in fourth grade–don't ask), but she sure didn't make that distinction that day…too funny!
