I was thinking about Watergate and the differences between then and now
Being of a certain age, I remember Watergate as it unfolded in real time. My recollection is that, although it was slow to pick up steam, by the time of the hearings the nation was riveted by the spectacle. I certainly watched a great deal of it on television.
The other thing that stands out is the sense of relative unity, not just in the sense of watching together but also in terms of the political parties. Nixon’s conduct was considered egregious enough that both parties wanted him out, and the Republicans told him that they would not support him in an impeachment trial:
The release of the “smoking gun” tape destroyed Nixon politically. The ten congressmen who had voted against all three articles of impeachment in the House Judiciary Committee announced they would all support the impeachment article accusing Nixon of obstructing justice when the articles came up before the full House. Additionally, Rhodes, the House leader of Nixon’s party, announced that he would vote to impeach, stating that “coverup of criminal activity and misuse of federal agencies can neither be condoned nor tolerated”.
On the night of August 7, 1974, Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott and Congressman Rhodes met with Nixon in the Oval Office. Scott and Rhodes were the Republican leaders in the Senate and House, respectively; Goldwater was brought along as an elder statesman. The three lawmakers told Nixon that his support in Congress had all but disappeared. Rhodes told Nixon that he would face certain impeachment when the articles came up for vote in the full House; indeed, by one estimate, no more than 75 representatives were willing to oppose impeachment. Goldwater and Scott told the president that there were enough votes in the Senate to convict him, and that no more than 15 Senators were willing to vote for acquittal–not even half of the 34 votes he needed to stay in office.
And so he resigned.
Now Nixon’s conduct in Watergate seems mild in comparison to what we’ve seen in Russiagate from the Democrats and agencies such as the FBI, conduct that half the nation has either denied or just shrugged off, or perhaps even applauded. The so-called “soft coup” of Russiagate hasn’t been condemned by even a single Democrat, as far as I know. And most newspapers and other media outlets have been engaged in a coverup rather than trying to get to the bottom of it.
That says a lot about where our country is now, and it’s not good.
I sometimes wonder whether, if the parties had been reversed during Watergate – if a Democratic president had done the same things Nixon and company did – would the Democrats in Congress have gone to that president and said they would not support him, suggesting that he resign? There’s no way to know, but I think it more likely than not that the answer is “no.”
Of course, when a president resigns under such circumstances, the vice president takes over. That means that the presidency doesn’t change hands in terms of party. So the damage is less compared to a successful attempt to throw an election, which would result in the other party winning.
Originally, I think Russiagate was designed to prevent Trump from winning. But once he had won, the efforts to frame him were not necessarily engineered to remove him and replace him with Pence, although the Democrats would have been okay with that result. I believe the post-2016 efforts were mostly geared towards hampering Trump’s entire administration and disgracing him, setting the stage for a huge Democratic victory in 2020 (even the impeachment had that goal, because the Democrats knew they would be unable to remove him).
The general effort worked in the 2018 Congressional elections, although not as well as they’d hoped. And the jury is still out for 2020.
Seems that today, insanity, offensiveness and gross dishonesty are all positive character traits as long as they are aimed in the “right” direction:
https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1316829088489893889
One wonders how long that can last.
The Watergate scandal seems almost as innocent as a children’s tea party in comparison to the unprecedented efforts of elected officials and of the permanent bureaucracy to delegitimize an elected president; in addition, while many of the actors in the former drama faced severe consequences, it is increasingly apparent (Barr at DOJ being unwilling or unable to control his agency’s malpractice) that none of the principal miscreants in the anti-Trumpian putsch will ever be held to account.
Russiagate and this new info on the Bidens is 100x worse than Watergate.
And if no one goes to jail, then we are in big, big trouble. FBI people need to go to jail. Hillary needs to go to jail. Joe needs to go to jail.
Hillary and Joe sold out our country to foreigners for CASH. The FBI favored the Dems and used the power of government to try to destroy Trump. This is as serious as it gets. And, of course, the Fake News is protecting the Dems and FBI because they are rank partisans.
Bruce Ohr seems to have suffered from “lack of candor”.
Gets to keep his pension, though. (Maybe he’ll write a book? “Almost” might be a good title…)
Treason and criminality are apparently very well rewarded.
Is America a great country or what?….
https://twitter.com/Techno_Fog/status/1316417491225186306
I, like you Neo, remember Watergate very well. I remember listening to the radio while helping our future best man (first marriage) pack up his apartment and hearing with ecstasy that Nixon had resigned. FYI, somewhere in the mid-1990s I had my red pill moment.
You are right in observing that the corruption that we’ve seen from the Obama leftovers and the Deep State makes Watergate look small. I have always thought that the belief that Hillary would win was so pervasive that the Obama administration didn’t bother to cover its tracks. The fix was in. The conspiracy aimed at Trump was truly an insurance policy–but intended to prevent him from contesting the election afterwards because he’d made those kind of noises.
But then Trump unexpectedly won. So the conspiracy was quickly retrofitted to what we now know as Russiagate…and they have been improvising ever since. It’s actually a tribute to the MSM and the Deep State that they have kept it going as long as they have.
After reading this I think that it sounds conspiracy-theory-ish, but I am anything but that. It’s just that when Neo posed Watergate as a counterpoint, it all came home to me that we have moved far, far beyond those boundaries.
Two things:
1. The culture of the Democratic Party is such that from top to bottom (and this applies to every street-level Democrat with which I am acquainted) there is a complete absence of impartial procedural principles in their thinking. They’re hostile to Trump, so everything the Brennan-McCabe-Sztrok-Yates-Weismann crew did must be totes OK, even manufacturing out of whole cloth bogus criminal charges against a retired General. The whole Kavanaugh imbroglio where Democrats were rummaging through every excuse they could to smear him (he’s a rapist, no he lacks judicial temperament, no he perjured himself about his drinking and his high school inside jokes) and were reduced to parsing gag entries in a 35 year old high school yearbook might have been “Saturday Night Live” material a generation ago. I have yet to see a partisan Democrat of my acquaintance acknowledge any of this in the slightest.
2. Elections are decided by a small population of swing voters. See James Neuchterlein on swing voters. They don’t know anything and their motivating opinions can be quite arbitrary and silly (“she reminds me of my first wife”). What you’re talking about is just static to these people.
The evidence proving Joe Biden’s traitorous criminality is now public. In actively protecting him, the Dems, FBI leadership, Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Dorsey become after the fact accomplices to the Biden crime family’s criminality.
So which is it? “Fundamentally transforming” the USA?
Or “slouching toward Bethlehem to be born”?
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/10/15/obama-goes-off-on-the-absurd-and-dangerous-spy-allegations-the-trump-team-keeps-using-984934
H/T Blazingcatfur blog
(Just in case anyone is still wondering why Hunter Biden was invited to address the DNC a short while back…)
“I sometimes wonder whether, if the parties had been reversed during Watergate”
I think the Democrats of the time would have behaved like the GOP, though it probably wouldn’t have gotten to that point since there’s little chance the media even then would go after a Democrat they way they went after Nixon.
And the difference between then and now is that we used to have a Republican Party and a Democratic Party. Now we just have a Money Party. Bill Clinton is in the Money Party. So are Barack Obama and Joe Biden. George W. Bush is in the Money Party too, along with Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney. If you doubt that, remember that the GOP has controlled the U.S. Senate for all of Trump’s administration and then remember how little they’ve ever done to support or defend him. Frankly, if Trump wasn’t as popular as he is with the Republican base, they probably would have removed him from office via impeachment.
Mike
My recollections of the essence of Nixon’s worst misdeeds were that he and his aides intended to give orders to the CIA and the FBI to make false statements which would contribute to the coverup of misdeeds by asserting a national security interest. But the parties at those agencies were most unlikely to act on those orders. The President can tell the agencies what to do, but to no avail if they are unwilling to carry out those distasteful instructions. He could order once and order again, but those orders were never going to be carried out. Just the fact that he would make those orders was sufficient to lose support and ensure impeachment.
The Obama era misdeeds are far worse, because the corruption was so widespread that national security agencies including CIA and FBI did not even require the type of order Nixon and his team thought they were making. They were self-actuating, because the rot has spread that deeply.
Although to me it is clear that Obama and his organization continue to use many underhanded and unconventional tactics to move the country in their intended direction. Alarm bells should have gone off when we prepared to elect a junior Senator whose background was as a “community organizer”.
The “money” party? Which part of the “money” party does Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project, BLM (Inc.), Antifa, and The Green New Deal belong in since it is all one party? Get back to me on that “einstein” Bunge.
Because the GOP senators are all the same:
Collins, Cotton, Romney, McCain (RIP), Hawley, Johnson, Cruz. Yes they are all the same. What insight, what wisdom. We are truly amazed.
“The “money” party? Which part of the “money” party does Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project, BLM (Inc.), Antifa, and The Green New Deal belong in since it is all one party? Get back to me on that “einstein” Bunge.”
Dude, are you going to be butthurt the rest of your life because I slapped you around on a blog comment thread?
As for your decidedly NON-Einstein question, all of that stuff belongs to the Money Party. That’s what the Money Party uses to make dim-witted Leftists vote for Money Party representatives while thinking their “sticking it to The Man.” It’s like what the Money Party did for decades on immigration and abortion to fool folks on the Right.
Mike
MBunge,
I do doubt that, at least as a definitive assessment of the two parties.
There’s no doubt that money is a prime motivator with both parties but the purpose to what the money is to be put are greatly different. RINO Republicans want the gravy train to continue, they are in favor of the economic status quo. They have no problem with our inalienable rights since they don’t threaten their economic capabilities.
Today’s democrats are a different kettle of fish. Bill Clinton and Biden see their wealth as deserved given the great service they’ve rendered the party. They are the democrat’s fading old school. Pelosi and Schumer too but they tell themselves that they can control the radicals through accommodation.
Obama, Sanders and Hillary are ideologues and while they too see their wealth as deserved, they are determined to overturn the status quo and usher in a Marxist socialism. They are fully on board with AOC and only disagree as to strategy and tactics. For such as them, inalienable rights are a fundamental barrier to the implementation of their agenda.
Put in the simplest of terms; the GOP wants our economic servitude to continue. But they could care less what we believe. Whereas, the leadership of the democrat party wants our body, mind and soul and are quite willing to force it upon us.
PS: you’re kidding yourself if you think that the powers supporting Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project, BLM (Inc.), Antifa, and The Green New Deal will, once they have control, allow any principle in your “money party” to retain power.
“The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Vladimir Lenin
Who slapped who around? Covid fatality numbers from NY will be the same for the entire country? Remember that hair on fire episode you had? Who is “buthurt,” Mr Eloquence?
Your arguments are occasionally flimsy. What part of the far left socialists maps onto Ted Cruz or Tom Cotton. Splain that einstein or drop it in the latrine (a term you might understand).
Mr Money Bunge:
You may not have noticed but some people on the far left have shown a propensity for political assassinations recently. Some in The Money Party are also engaged in digital suppression of speech. Because it’s all one Money Party.
What. A. Tool.
How far we have fallen. Meanwhile, the Journalist heroes Bernstein and Woodward who probably were never quite worthy of the adulation they received much less the glorification of Hollywood with Redford and Hoffman as stand-ins, have fallen below the little virtue they did possess. I actually saw Bernstein in one of those news program roundtables suggesting that President Trump should never be given a platform to speak freely. That all his comments should be managed by the press for public consumption because to permit him to speak thusly without someone to give it context was propaganda and everyone at that roundtable discussion nodded dutifully. I couldn’t believe it. This description was precisely the opposite of what he suggested. Modification or suppression of content and not the permitting of free unhindered content is propaganda. And Bernstein knows that full well. His stupid co-hosts, probably not so much.
I was a grocery-sacking kid when Watergate happened. I liked Nixon’s pluck but always thought that it was a bush league stunt for a Presidential campaign to attempt such a small, sordid affair, and really, really stupid to attempt a cover-up. I lived outside Boston then, in a small town that was liberal-extreme even by the ‘Don’t Blame Me I Voted For McGovern’ standards of the time.
Most everybody there hated Nixon even before Watergate, but in that environment it got really bad up until he resigned. The Face of the Ugly Mob was on display – it was discomforting to behold the joy on faces the day he resigned; the self-righteousness and hubris, and a good bit of ignorant bad-mindedness too.
But as bad as it was even then, that Face had nothing on the scorched earth bloody-mindedness oozing out of the Beltway now. It’s corruption that’s worse then poison, it’s hate so toxic that it has to eventually kill the host in order to be eradicated. I suspect that’s what we’re seeing now.
About the MBunge versus o m dispute, it isn’t just about money. It’s a class war conflict which, as Angelo Codevilla has explained for a decade, reprise Whig country party values against the Royalist urbanites interests.
The Dems hold corrupt precincts in the largest cities for half a century or more. Their ide’ fix is one party rule like California combined with World Government, a fascist top down rule sold as beneficent socialism.
By contrast, Trump want reinvigorated national sovereignty affirming American exceptionalism and a Reaganaut-style economic reinvention.
Obama sold us out into “managed decline.” This is the best that the Ruling Class could do. But John Kerry’s histrionics in 2004 saw the Dems trade the working middle class out for the over-educated and eco-hysterical rich elites of the upper middle class.
What Trump did was to co-opt the working class Dems in Rust Belt states. This was the campaign’s focus as shown by election year chronicles by Joe(?) Pollock at Breitbart and Larry Schweitkert, as well as by outsider Victor David Hanson.
The real vehemence backing the Marxism of these classes and the depth and breadth of their singular commitment to their Red Diaper Baby Obama is now shown to be seditious, traitorous, rooted in the rancid corruption spawned by the GWOT and the Great Recession emergencies was obvious only our years ago.
But with the Corporate Marxist media happy to cheerlead and gaslight the young constituency into the evils of a “White Supremacy” waged by less than 0.00003% of the US (as estimated for over a decade by the ADL and SPLC until November 2016), and vilify Trump’s team and constituency of deplorable fascist populists, yet ready to chase a race war for invented ‘justice,’ is breathtakingly scary.
The new term to help explain this last phenomenon might be post-modern politics. This is an anti-American critique that rejects neoliberalism and neoconservatism for its greed and capitalism, reviving a war-mongering critique of foreign policy quite reminiscent of the original New Left. Post-modernist politics means a PoMo nihilism that embraces a “perspectival” epistemic subjectivism to “advance” their cause.
Bottomline, our elite betters offer a race war revival in place of economic class war. This is deemed easier for the Ruling Class to control, and their foot soldiers don’t have the power to threaten their domination.
The Veritas Project has an undercover report of this type of Antifa radical lusting for violence, complaining about traitorous Democrats, who nonetheless serves on the Colorado state Democrat Party Executive Committee.
Now, this breaking story has gotten lost with the Biden corruption story. It is still disturbing:
James O’Keefe has the video, too, in his trademark multipart investigative story (perhaps interrupted and embargoed by the Biden story?).
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/guillotines-motherfcker-colorado-democratic-committee-member-caught-hidden-camera
TJ:
To make my opinion clear I do not think “The Money Party” (containing Republicans and Democrats) is a serious analysis. There are profound differences in the goals and philosophies of the Democrats/Leftists and the Republicans. Marxists/socialists/communists don’t coexist peacefully with private property, individual autonomy, or liberty. The marxists/socialists/communists have a home in today’s Democratic party.
Republicans, though corrupted at times by money, do not welcome the marxists/socialists/communists.
I remember Watergate, too – and was often reminded of it on Saturdays at the midnight movie showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show … “I have never been a quitter” almost a minute of Nixon’s resignation speech as the car gets a flat.
When a transvestite could be sweet, and transexuals were from Transylvania. (Late 70s it became big, made in ’75).
On the elites in ’73 and ’74 (Nixon resigned Aug 8, 1974; I had graduated from high school and was in plebe summer at the US Naval Academy)
“Most everybody there hated Nixon even before Watergate,” And I was an elite wannabee from the lower middle class (South Gate, next to Watts in SE LA).
The Vietnam war, against communism, was widely popular at first. And activated by Democrats, tho anti-commie Nixon and ’56 Ike (Eisenhower) refused to allow N. Viet commie Ho Chi Minh to win the unheld 1956 Viet elections.
https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/57528/060.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (from quick google, 1966)
The bi-partisan anti-communism of Dems Kennedy and Johnson change after Nixon’s first election win in ’68. The Dems became the anti-war, anti-anti-communist party. (Not quite pro-commie, but very critical of those who were anti-commie.
The Harvard-Yale-Princeton elites hated Whittier College grad Nixon, and his Archie Bunker like normal pro-American views. The Nixon-Agnew YUUUGE win in ’72 confirmed that the elites had reason to hate him – non-elites liked him. My parents were for Humphrey in ’68, but my grandparents very strongly for Nixon and against the flag-burning anti-American anti-war Dems in ’72.
Then Spiro Agnew had to resign for corruption in ’73. The very very usual corrupt kickbacks from contractors (like Trump!) to decision making gov’t folk – the media hated Agnew, too. Agnew was clearly against the “nattering nabobs of negativity” – politicians who were critical. He was also against journalists, who sort of claim to be the targets.
The selective investigations against the guilty Agnew, resulting in his resignation, set the stage for such investigations and power of the investigators. But most normal folk just got the feeling the “rich Republicans were corrupt”.
No surprise that I was kind of disgusted that Nixon could be “bad”, as was displayed in the Watergate trial. And the media truths, half-truths, and perhaps some lies. It was a more objective Dem media then, but they mostly hated Nixon. I don’t remember such lies as the media now spreads, tho I didn’t follow it quite so closely.
Didn’t know that “Deep Throat” was the FBI against Nixon. Selective Dem outrage.
Clinton was more corrupt than Agnew, both in her Clinton “Bribery” Foundation and in her illegal server (which likely had emails about her Foundation bribery, as well as gov’t Secret info).
The Dems are demonstrating the power of the institutions, and the selective investigation power. None of them are innocent – tho probably Trump is the most law-abiding politician since ineffective Carter.