When Bad People Do Good Things

Richard Nixon.

Just mentioning his name makes most people think of a villain in a top hat and cape, twirling a mustache. The Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the Plumbers are all dark memories from my teen years, leading to his resignation and political downfall.

Other things I remember are major US cities masked by smog and the Cuyahoga River catching on fire. Pollution created major concerns in the USA of the 1960s. Some states chased environmental regulation seriously, but they couldn't police a neighboring state allowing waste dumping. Rivers and air do not respect state boundaries. This clean-up would require some national attention.

That same Richard Nixon proposed the Environmental Protection Agency during July 1970. In December 1970 he signed it into existence with an executive order, and Congress later ratified it. Today the Cuyahoga and Lake Erie are clean enough to visit and explore, and Los Angeles usually has a visible skyline. The EPA has worked, thanks to the most despised president of the twentieth century.

Anyone who knows me, or follows my Twitter feed, knows that I disagree with our current president on virtually everything. Last week he signed an executive order to improve the management of kidney disease in the United States. This order resulted from more than 10 years of activism on the part of the national kidney disease organizations in the US. The government had not addressed this problem since it added coverage for permanent kidney failure to the Medicare program in the early-1970s. Current regulations provided some perverse incentives to keep patients on less convenient and effective therapies. After 40 years any program needs a tune-up. The kidney disease community finally agreed on a set of actions, helped write the order, and got it signed.

By a POTUS I find despicable.

When I shared articles about the EO for kidneys, a lot of my colleagues were appalled that we "worked with Trump" and possibly made him look good for a moment. First, this project started way before this president. Second, people in the community need these changes and updates; is it moral to wait for another administration to avoid giving Trump credit? I think not.

I love Midnight in Paris. The Pianist moved me. While these movies engage, I can also find their directors, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, deplorable. Bad people can do good things.