Thursday, February 15, 2007

I Am The Meanest Mom Alive

It's the general consensus; I am the meanest mom alive. My kid thinks so, the neighborhood kids agree, other parents say "Ooooh," with evil glee when they hear how I punish my kid. Even her teacher reacted with shock upon learning my misbehaving daughter's fate. I am mean, and inventive.

I don't spank. I ground my kid when she messes up, but I ground her with no finite sentence. And I ground her from everything. No TV, no toys, no playing with friends, no leaving the house. She's stuck, either in bed or at school or planted firmly in the computer chair researching her paper. Yep, I assign papers. Sometimes they're on random subjects (biographies of the Mythbusters, anyone?), and sometimes they're topical. Nine days ago I got a call from the teacher to inform me that my lovely daughter had gotten caught lying in class. It's a common enough offense, but one I have to teach her not to do. So she was promptly assigned a paper on Richard Nixon, with emphasis on Watergate. I only asked for one page, but that's a lot to a kid who doesn't seem to believe in adjectives.

So now, making its debut on the world wide web, I present Richard Nixon from an eight year old's point of view:

Richard Nixon by XXXX XXXXXXX

Richard Nixon was born on January 9, 1913 in Yorba Linda, California. He died on April 22, 1994 in Park Ridge, New Jersey from a stroke. His great-grandfather was killed in The Battle of Gettysburg in the Civil War. Nixon was a republican. Nixon was vice-president for Eisenhower. His nickname was “tricky dick”. Nixon was president from 1969-1974. He married Thelma Catherine Ryan, but she went by Pat and her grave says Patricia. They had two daughters, Tricia and Julie. Nixon’s religion was Quaker. He was the thirty-seventh president of the United States. He resigned because he didn’t want to be impeached. Watergate was the name of a hotel where the democrats’ office was. Gerald Ford took over when Nixon resigned, in 1974. He took over because he was vice-president when Spiro Agnew resigned, and took over vice-president then president. Nixon is the only president to have resigned. President Ford pardoned him, so he wasn’t put in prison. G. Gordon Liddy isn’t Gordon Gordon Liddy, as my dumb mom said. His real name is George Gordon Liddy. G. Gordon Liddy went to prison for what he did at Watergate. The Watergate scandal happened in 1972. Watergate was a break-in on June 17. They broke in to fix the phone-bugs of the chairman Larry O’Brien that they had put there on May 27 and 28. The plan originated on February 4, 1972. G. Gordon Liddy was the one who made the plan. It was called the GEMSTONE plan. The movie about it was called “All The President’s Men.” Frank Wills discovered the Watergate scandal. There were many people, including John Sirica. There was a group called “the plumbers unit” to “plug leaks”. There was also another group called CREEP: the committee to re-elect the president, also called CRP. Nixon ran for president twice. Two reporters who broke the story were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Watergate made his approval rating even lower than George W. Bush’s is. Nixon got in trouble for lying to Congress. They discovered tapes of conversations between Nixon and his advisors, so that was how they discovered that he lied. I do not want to do a report like this again, so I will not lie!


By the way, I'm sure plenty of people get G. Gordon Liddy's name wrong, and I swear I read that somewhere when E. Howard Hunt died a while back.

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