Shorter Kathleen Parker, wouldbe Suthrun Belle, and incidentally WaPo columnist: If only that partyless DFH Nixon hadn’t given the commoners such an excuse to jeer at their betters!
Nixon was a criminal to be sure, even if he never quite saw it that way. He broke the law and was willing to bribe, burgle, wiretap, lie and extort for political gain. Somewhere along his dark path of consuming paranoia, he lost any flicker of light to help him see that he was lost. Woodward and Bernstein say that our allegiance to the adage that the cover-up is always worse than the crime is misplaced in Nixon’s case….
We couldn’t all be Woodwards and Bernsteins, it turned out, but the presumption of corruption and government as the enemy was a pervasive, defining force in newsrooms across the nation. And this force in turn helped shape a relentless cynicism that persists today even as it morphs into something else.
And what is that? Hard to say, but a country without faith or trust in its institutions — from the presidency to Congress to the judiciary and even to the once glorious, swashbuckling, truth-seeking press — is going to have a rough go of things. As seems to be the case…
Charles Pierce is more honest (not a difficult feat):
… [T]he true “lessons” of Watergate were how we could abandon our responsibilities as citizens, and twist the obligations of self-government, so that “the country” would never have to “go through” anything like that again. What was a triumph of self-government in 1974 was reckoned to be such a national trauma by 1986 that our elite institutions formed an iron circle to keep it from happening to Ronald Reagan and his people because the country “couldn’t take another failed presidency.” (As illustrated in On Bended Knee, Mark Hertsgaard’s essential account of the lapdog press under Reagan, even Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, who’d stood all the gaff when her newspaper was alone on an island in its early Watergate coverage, was concerned that the press might go too far.) And the final absurd twist came with the impeachment of Bill Clinton for crimes against the Seventh Commandment, an exercise in Kabuki that really was only the final act in an ongoing campaign of dirty tricks. Kenneth Starr had far more in common with H.R. Haldeman than he did with Archibald Cox, and Henry Hyde had more in common with Gordon Liddy than he did with Peter Rodino. History was thereby turned on its head until its brains fell out its ears.
The lasting “lesson” of Watergate, it appears, is that self-government was too dangerous, that the perils of it outweigh its values, and that the obligations of citizenship, beyond those which are purely ceremonial, are too heavy for citizens to bear.
The Watergate hearings ran aground on the iceberg that threatens all Truth & Reconciliation commissions: Without truth, there can be no reconciliation. Officially labelling Richard Nixon as a paranoid with a drinking problem who misled a carefully circumscribed inner circle of true believers into an unprecedented and unreproducible confluence of “political miscalculation” allowed all the other miscreants to scuttle away unpunished like cockroaches under the appliances. The key figures in every American political disaster over the last forty years — people like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, the Bush criminals, father & sons — took only one “lesson” from Watergate: never get cornered. When truth is the enemy, make lying the default. Keep in mind that a workable percentage of the media can always be purchased, that a pundit class will respond favorably to raw power no matter how such power is directed, and that people remember a narrative (which can be controlled) better than they remember facts (which can’t). Perfect recipe for the creation of a second Gilded Age — aka, a banana republic for our Bananas Republicans.
russell
Kung Fu Monkey pinned the tail on that donkey way back when:
srv
I’d take that if we could have had
ObamaNixonCare 35 years ago.Yutsano
Nixon created the EPA. Therefore total RINO.
Valdivia
But McConnell says Obama is ten times worse than Nixon in criminality, lists of enemies and intimidation.
General Stuck
@srv:
Or we could have srvCare, which is no care at all.
c u n d gulag
In all honesty, Iran-Contra and it’s cover-ups, was worse than Watergate and its cover-ups.
Also too – the pardons of key players as Bush was leaving office, insuring that there’d be NO future prosecutions, was also a “criminal act,” though perfectly legal.
And impeaching Clinton was a jejune tit-for-tat move made by moronic, angry, and rabid children.
And what “Baby Doc” Bush and Cheney did, eclipsed the abominations before them.
But that’s what we get when the MSM and DC Villagers decided NOT to try to impeach that nice, senile, old man, and “Papa Doc” Bush – the criminals feel immune from consequences.
And the next Republican Administration will be even more emboldened – and will do far, far, worse.
And you can take that to the deregulated bank!
Linda Featheringill
So why are we still criticizing people who have a cynical distrust of those who govern?
Raven
@c u n d gulag:
And it don’t rain in Indianapolis in the summertime
burnspbesq
@Valdivia:
Between Mitch McConnell and John Calipari, I’d say there’s ample justification for obliterating the entire state of Kentucky and salting the ground so that nothing can ever grow there again.
Zandar, you’ve got 12 hours to get the fuck out. This is your only warning.
jo6pac
If you have time it’s even worse than the others right about and check part one.
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/06/14/admissions-on-nixons-treason/
I’m not a fan of 0 but he’s not even close to this thug.
burnspbesq
@jo6pac:
Far from clear why anyone would consider those folks to be reliable sources, but if that’s the excuse you need to get yer hate on, whatever.
Anne Laurie
@c u n d gulag: Iran-Contra wouldn’t have happened if the Watergate prosecutions hadn’t been short-circuited. Nixon may have been the political equivalent of an AIDS virus, but it’s the subsequent cascade of opportunistic infections — Reagan’s ‘October surprise’, the Iran-Contra web of global criminality, Bush I’s Supreme Court, Bush II’s seizing 9/11 as an excuse to hand the Treasury over to his bankster puppeteers while distracting the compliant press with WMD phantasies — that are crippling us.
Litlebritdifrnt
OT but VEG is back, apparently due to the outrage expressed by millions the council has ruled that she can continue to take photos of her lunches.
http://neverseconds.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/i-think-you-know-why-i-dont-have.html#comment-form
Maude
@Anne Laurie:
Thank you. Ford stabbed the people of this country in the back when he pardoned Nixon.
If Nixon had gone to prison, it would have slowed the corruption of the executive branch.
What an awful bunch of presidents we’ve had.
trollhattan
@burnspbesq:
But, but, but…Teh Creation Museum! Surely that’s reason enough to keep…. Kidding. Bombs away, s’il vous plaît. Make sure Aqua Buddha is a-visitin’ at the time.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’ve always thought of Kathleen Parker as a second-rate Peggy Noonan (which I don’t say to be cruel, it just fits, cruel is just a bonus). The first time I noticed her was an IIRC pre-9/11 column she wrote about Dumbya as a “good man”. SHe imagined this simple phrase to be loaded with great meaning. The epiphany of Dumbya’s goodness had come to her when saw a picture of him driving around his “ranch” in a pick-up truck. The excerpt quoted is so rambling and incoherent, it makes me wonder if Kate has started to imitate Peggy’s fondness for a pre-writing pint of Jameson. Or I guess Bourbon, since she’s a Southern Belle.
Also, too, David Broder– one of the few whose influence stretched from Watergate to the Iraq War– Tom Friedman, Tim Russert, Tom Brokaw, Cokie Boggs Roberts. The Iraq War just kinda happened. Time to move on. Spilled milk and all that.
Valdivia
@burnspbesq:
I could not agree more with you.
Zandar please leave soon :)
jo6pac
@burnspbesq: No hate from me this is just very detailed that’s all. Sorry you feel that way
Yutsano
@Litlebritdifrnt: Almost £46,000?? The girl is a philantropist at 9!
Chris
Reagan also had the benefit of having a more solid political base than Nixon, is my impression. I don’t think any faction in Washington truly saw Nixon as “their guy:” moderate Republicans thought he was too conservative and populist and skeery, conservative Republicans thought he was a Keynesian abomination in the Eisenhower tradition, and mainstream Democrats and Dixiecrats alike didn’t like him either. That’s less incentive to circle the wagons around him and also less incentive to try and save his legacy.
Davis X. Machina
@Maude: I’m still not sure he’d have gone to prison at all.
An American Dreyfus case, more likely.
Bostondreams
OT, sort of, but I was one of the teachers quoted in the Washington Post piece on how Watergate and Nixon are perceived and taught today.
We certainly do not teach Watergate like we should, honestly. :/
Chris
@c u n d gulag:
When you compare it to the fifty years of J. Edgar Hoover running the FBI for all intents and purposes as America’s secret police – not to mention the foreign policy equivalents like the Dulles brothers’ machinations in the fifties, the Tonkin Gulf resolution, Nixon’s work to sabotage the 1968 peace plan, Nixon and Kissinger’s machinations afterward – as well as all the crimes that came afterward under Reagan and Bush, Watergate really is the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
That was just restoring the balance. In the seventies, between Vietnam and Watergate you had just enough of an outcry from the public against the national security state to have things like the Church Committee hearings and other attempts to bring the “black” parts of the government under some kind of oversight. Iran-contra, politically speaking, was Reagan/Bush trying to bring things back to the way they were in the old days, with the black budget running with pretty much zero oversight, accountability or interference. It worked – the pardons were just making official the national security state’s status as above the law.
People talk about the Chinese PLA, the Pakistani ISI and the Iranian IRGC as being “a state within a state,” but what we’ve got here really isn’t that different when you get down to it.
Kyle
only one “lesson” from Watergate: never get cornered
And finally, that the 27% authoritarian-follower drag on the population will support a right-wing politician no matter how dirty, criminal and disgusting their actions, because he is the head of their tribe and they will follow him like sheep. Bribe, coerce or scare into silence the Village courtiers and you’ve got enough support or non-resistance to block any effective enforcement.
Maude
@Davis X. Machina:
The evidence was there. It’s different in court.
I think he would have been convicted.
tech98
This is how you reconcile Bob “background in naval intelligence” Woodward’s actions over Watergate with his subsequent career as craven court stenographer mainly to Republicans. He wasn’t a liberal crusader for honest government, he was executing an operation against Nixon by a rival faction of the Repuke conservative power elite.
Davis X. Machina
@Maude:By a mostly black jury, drawn from DC, after two or three tries.
Let the healing begin. If Ford didn’t do it, the system would have got to the same end, by other means.
In a polity where the head of state and leader of the government of the day are one and the same, it’d be the equivalent of regicide. You only get that in revolutions.
c u n d gulag
@Anne Laurie:
Anne,
Don’t I know it.
Ford pardoning Nixon was one of the most heinous acts in American history.
If Nixon had been tried, found guilty, and gone to jail, his whole band of ‘not-so-merry pranksters’ might have learned a lesson.
Instead, they’ve been an integral part of every Republican administration since then.
And G. Gordon Liddy is looked upon as a hero, instead of a criminal.
Same for Ollie North, the traitor who sold out his Marine Corps, and his oath.
We Americans are not a forgiving people, we are a short-sighted and stupid people.
People like this have done a ton more damage than the once-feared, but mythical, “Fifth Columnists,” and all of the drug dealers, robbers, murderers, and fellow sociopaths in prison – it’s just that these criminals had better connections, and aimed higher.
c u n d gulag
@Chris:
Sort of a “Regression back to the mean” – and by “mean,” I don’t necessarily mean ‘average.’
Keith G
Watergate seems like a darkened mist that hung over my 8th and 9th grade years. It, and Doonsbury, cemented my love of the study of government which led my to take a poli sci major at university; where, ironically one of my profs was a former assistant to Kissinger on the NSC staff. He held Friday class at a near-campus bar in Columbus for free-wheeling discussions and snacks. Fun times during the Cold War.
I know there are some who want to use Watergate comparisons for current times, but that was 40 years ago. I want to spend my time on the present, making sure everyone who will tolerate three minutes with me hears a positive (policy driven) sales pitch on why they should go and vote, and cast that vote for Democrats.
Valdivia
Good segment on this episode of This American Life about Nixon and how kids learn about him.
ETA be prepared to want to pull your hair out when you hear the Ronaldo Magnus bs in there from his official library tour.
Josie
@c u n d gulag: This
Raven
THE SKY IS FALLING
THE SKY IS FALLING!
Raven
@Keith G: Cold War huh?
RossInDetroit
She forgot bully, harass and intimidate. Those crimes were important to their many victims, including Jack Anderson.
NobodySpecial
Why exactly would I want to hear Kathleen Parker tut-tut about how no one trusts government anymore when she’s right in the line of sloppy blowjobs for Zombie ‘Government is the problem’ Reagan?
Rich (in name only) in Reno
I alway thought the lesson of Watergate was “Don’t get caught.”
General Stuck
Nah, presidential mischief has been going on at Watergate levels, as well as Bush 2 levels, off and on since the founding. The only thing that changed to make it seem worse, is the invention of teevee and later digital mass media of every sort.
Some of our better presidential historians can probly name bunches of as bad a conduct in our history from chief executives and their version of Nixon’s Plumbers, and ball crushers like the now dead as Caesar, Chuck Colson.
People just didn’t have the means to be informed of larcenous goings on like they do now, beginning post WW2. Hell, JFK ran something like a private brothel in the WH, and Nixon had nothing on LBJ, in the criminal use of government agencies to keep an eye on his enemies. Nixon was just to clownish and full of himself to not over reach past the moon for his skullduggery.
The other thing is, the basic premise that this country is, and always has been two countries only a rifle shot or two from a shooting war, that has probably only been averted, or postponed by some timely national emergencies, as well as economic plentitude. Two countries living under one roof that can break in half at any time, given the right conditions.
It is likely why our founders gave us a blue print of slow change government, and a large helping of minority rights. The reason we don’t jail the scoundrels from either party, is in the backs of our minds, we all know that could probably mean the next civil war, or at least some serious instability. That is not a good reason to walk on by, but it isn’t surprising either. At least to me.
RossInDetroit
Yup. Nixon’s crimes so appalled the American public that they turned away from their duty to punish him. And we’ve been turning away from presidents’ crimes ever since. Most recently in Obama’s unfortunate decision to put Bush’s Iraq lies behind us and look to the future instead of hauling the whole lot of them into the dock and charging them with treason. Nixon proved that a GOP president could get away with murder and they’ve been on a killing spree ever since.
Maude
@General Stuck:
Nixon got caught.
He wasn’t popular when he left and I do think he crossed a line with Watergate.
General Stuck
@General Stuck:
I probably shouldn’t say we, cause I know the idealists don’t agree, and don’t want to lump them in with the rest of us steely eyed realists.
Keith G
@Raven: So it was called. Your experience was vastly different, I know.
By any name it would smell as bad. For my cohort born at the end of the Fifties it was (in order) incomprehensible, confusing, scary, frustrating then by ’76 back to a different type of confusing. I think that was another reason I studied poli sci. I want to figure out what the hell happened. Watergate, the evacuation of Saigon, Mid East wars, and oil embargos – what a way for a bad era to stumble to an end.
General Stuck
@Maude:
Sure he crossed a line. And he did get caught. But I doubt you will find many students of our political history that wouldn’t say, the only reason he was run out of office, was from not destroying the tapes. Why he didn’t do that, is kind of baffling. But the dude was just weird and unpredictable that way. That sealed his fate, and even republicans couldn’t stand by him.
FlipYrWhig
The wheels turn so slowly… All the issues of executive power lately are the echo-image of Watergate. I feel like between Watergate and Iran-contra Congress lost its nerve and its sense of its own nature as a branch of government with interests of its own — which may not always harmonize with those of a president even of the same party. Discord occasionally crops up among executive and legislative Dems, but virtually never among Republicans.
It kind of reminds me of how baseball old-timers say that there used to be a rivalry between the American and National Leagues. Looking at the way things are now, you’d never be able to tell.
FlipYrWhig
BTW, according to family lore, when I was learning to talk, I talked about Watergate, because it completely monopolized the TV.
Maude
@General Stuck:
That was truly strange that only 18 minutes got Rosemary’d.
It was the criminal doings that the Republicans weren’t going be associated with.
I do wonder if the Bush admin destroyed a lot of evidence. Remember the missing emails?
Addington would have known how to destroy an entire paper trail.
Cacti
Nixon was a criminal by any definition of the word. However, the criminality of Reagan during Iran Contra was much worse, and the “librul media” let him skate on it.
Nixon was arranging break-ins and thefts concerning his political enemies.
Reagan was selling arms to a hostile foreign nation, and using it to fund a dirty war in Central America.
The former is remembered as a disgrace, the latter as an icon. Way to go, librul media.
Raven
@Keith G: There was plenty of good shit.
General Stuck
@Maude:
Watergate, even after all these years, remains stuck in the wingnut craw, and you can bet the ranch they will never let such a thing happen again if at all possible, of one of their presidents getting run out of office for whatever reason. I believe it was Henry Hyde, who admitted his pursuit of Clinton, had a lot to do with Nixon. In their twisted minds, not getting caught with iron clad proof of a crime, is the same thing as being innocent. Of which they are always innocent, no matter what they do
Keith G
@General Stuck:
This is the lead that always get buried. Nothing special about us as human critters. Evolution and DNA has seen to that. was have all the strengths and the infinitude of weaknesses that all other groups of humans share.
It’s just that this current society was founded on a sub-continental sized huge of land that was geologically and meteorologically like no other, your plenitude. It would have taken a long-term and committed set of actions to screw up living here since this place was so bountiful. We really could grow out of any problem or internal conflict that our screwed up human thinking could get us into.
The worm seems to have turned. It will be interesting to see how we do now.
jefft452
@RossInDetroit: “Nixon’s crimes so appalled the American public that they turned away from their duty to punish him”
Bullshit
The public didn’t let Nixon off the hook – Ford did
And even though Broder et al sung hosannas to Ford for “healing the nation”, the public hated him for it and tossed the accidental president out of office the first chance they got
Cacti
And Nixon’s legacy lives with us still.
Romneybot’s advisor on future judicial selections will be none other than Robert Bork, the only man in the Nixon DOJ with the requisite lack of ethics necessary to fire Archibald Cox.
Raven
@jefft452: A Michigan Man through and through!
Maude
@General Stuck:
Their concern was for the GOP and not anything or anyone else.
Iran Contra was covered up. The hearings were limited and they made sure no big guy paid a price.
In a way, the impeachment of Clinton was both sides do it.
It may have been meant as a warning to Democrats not to go after a GOP prez in the future, but it didn’t carry a lot of weight.
The Dems were excellent at framing the Clinton impeachment as sex on the side.
It holds up, even now.
I was thinking that if the Gitmo detainees had been tried in Federal Court in the US, both the Dems and Repubs would have been found to be complicit in torture and all the hideous human rights violations.
For the same reason, those detainees weren’t going to be in an US prison. Information might have gotten out and the goose would be cooked.
General Stuck
@efgoldman:
pretty well, at the moment. The gargantuan fire north of here is still burning, buy is considerably under control from what it was. Some smoke, but not much. And we are approaching our moonsoon season starting in July. And today there is some rain in the mountains. The nearby fire a week ago was put out, thankfully, by our Firefighting Hot Shot crews and flying machines dumping water. Thanks for asking.
Keith G
@Raven: Yes there really was. For me, that was best experienced at the local and personal level. While the national community was having fits and starts and panic attacks, life for a small town farm kid in the hinterlands of Toledo were awesome. The summers seemed endless and the swimming at the Whitehouse (our town’s name) quarry was joyful.
It amazes me that as early teenager in the early 70s, I roamed the small towns and farmland with few real cares. It’s just that as evening gathered and we sat done to watch Walter Cronkite, there was a bit of apprehension about the greater world.
Edit
Whatever.
Raven
@Keith G: We fought the power as much as we could, partied like a motherfucker and turned elsewhere when changing national politics seemed useless.
Maude
@Raven:
I doubt we could have imagined a black man being elected president.
I had such a sense of hopelessness back them about anything ever getting any better.
Raven
@Maude: You said it. One step up two steps back. .
Linda
@tech98:
Woodward, at that point in his career, was a city desk reporter, and the only reason he and Berstein went after Watergate was because, in the words of one WPoster, they were “city desk guys who had nothing to lose and worked their asses off.” Real political reporters of the time were too mired in defeatism and whipped into submission to try the same thing.
FWIW, I’m amused at the sudden outpouring of the Little People Need to Respect Their Betters from the likes of Parker and Brooks. Much of the contempt towards the elite betters was deliberately ignited by conservatives (“The government IS the problem.” Not to mention the common putdown of Obama as one of the elite). Since when did conservatives wake up and understand themselves AS the ruling class, rather than opposed to it?
Chris
@Maude:
Given the number of Democrats who went along with the Iraq war, I suspect this applies to virtually all the crimes committed during the Bush era: even if the will to prosecute was there in theory, so many Democrats were involved that you’d just never get the Congressional support necessary.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
If the Republic is to survive, the GOP must cease to exist.
kay
@Linda:
Brooks and Parker are apparently unaware that Mitt Romney spent the entire day saying the federal government is “hostile and remote” and “smothers small town dreams”
He said this while standing on a “family farm” that received almost a million dollars in federal subsidies and grants.
What I love most about media personalities is they’re too lazy to read the news section of their own papers. Forget independent thought or research. Brooks and Parker don’t even read the newspapers they work for, judging by their columns.
Chris
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
Yeah, I’ve been there myself for a while. I just don’t know how to make it happen.
I mean, if the Great Depression couldn’t kill the GOP, and an outright war couldn’t kill the Confederate Party, I don’t know what the hell it’s going to take. I’ve got an idea that they’re heading for a fall in the not-so-distant future, but they’ll recover from that in time just like they’re recovered from their other ones.
JGabriel
__
__
Anne Laurie @ Top:
I’ve never understood why the message most people took from Watergate was, “Don’t trust the government.”
I was eight years old when Nixon resigned, and even I knew, at eight, that the message was “Never trust a Republican again.” What the hell is wrong with us as a people that we couldn’t figure out something that was obvious to an eight year old?
.
JGabriel
__
__
Linda:
Since the Revolutionary War, when Conservatives were all Tories betraying us for the King.
Conservatives are not, and have never been, opposed to a ruling class; Conservatives are opposed to democracy and the ruling class being anyone but themselves.
.
mclaren
Nixon showed the perps you could get caught and get away without real consequences. Reagan shows the perps you could avoid getting caught. And Dubya showed the wannabe-smash-and-grabbers that if you never got caught and never took the consequences, even if the entire country heaved up at the bow and started to slide down into the briny North Atlantic stern-first as a result of your colossal incompetence and manifest criminality, you’d still wind up a millionaire, scot free, famous, and set for life.
Glidwrith
@Linda: Actually, it may be more along the lines of reacting against the teatards. They aren’t listening to their so-called betters and have taken over the asylum in many cases. Even worse, us progressives and the Occupiers, women, gays and just about every other “out” group have been dissing the establishment and winning some pretty serious battles.
JGabriel
@mclaren: Seconded.
Joey Giraud
I remember being 15 and disgusted by the Ford pardon and the lame excuses for it. It seems the citizens of America had a weak heart and the poor things just couldn’t stand the strain of justice being served.
But this is a glorious sentence:
Hunter Thompson would approve.
Joey Giraud
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
Perhaps, but what to do with it’s vast army of zombies?
The Fat Kate Middleton
@Cacti: Yup.
And furthermore … I was in a kind of remarkable situation during that time where, as part of my job, I read every major newspaper every day, and learned what an amazing criminal Nixon was. I was so amazed and … the only word is happy … when Nixon was forced to leave office. And then, to hear that Ford allowed him to get away with it, nauseated me. And, although I will certainly vote for Obama, I felt exactly the same way when O made it clear that there would be nothing done to hold C Plus Augustus held accountable for what he did, not just to our polity, but to those who died.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@General Stuck: And the Midwest. Husband and I drove through much of the so-called heartland today and yesterday … the only word to describe it is parched. Which is remarkable for June.