Nixon's Paranoia Now Seen to have been Cutting Edge

Recently released documents reveal that Richard Nixon eerily presaged today's shameless fear mongering by several decades.

"Unless governments take basic precautions, we will continue to stand at the edge of an awful abyss," said Nixon-era bureaucrat Robert Kupperman in a report given to the president some thirty years ago. Nixon was said to have trusted Kupperman, who, as chief scientist for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, couldn't possibly have had a vested interest in perpetuating a state of low-level panic in order, say, to avoid rendering his own position obsolete and thus putting himself out of a job.

In Nixon's dark imaginings, egged on by the likes of Kupperman and then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, terrorists used airplanes as guided missiles and took entire elementary schools hostage in a "world gone mad", according to just one of the thousands of tapes Nixon secretly made of proceedings in the Oval Office. "Why, they might even still be releasing Barbara Streisand albums in thirty years, who knows... I wouldn't put anything past those Commie Ruskies."

The Fraternal Order of Fearmongerers and Hysteria Inducers quickly reacted to today's news by recognizing Nixon's long-underrecognized contributions to the field, adding in a written statement released to the press that "this latest revelation will probably cause horrific diseases in most of the population, but none of that will really matter since al Qaeda is now within three days of detonating an Earth-destroying bomb. The only defense is to buy more weapons. Please make checks payable to 'R. Kupperman.' That is all, thank you. No, we mean it, that is all forever."