As of 2012, more than half of the country was not alive when Nixon resigned. http://t.co/bLE1EMxOWI
— Philip Bump (@pbump) August 8, 2014
Thanks, Gerry Ford, you half-bright tool in the hands of the GOP sociopaths! From the Washington Post story:
Over 40 percent of the country, including more than half of people under the age of 35, think the Watergate scandal was just a symptom of political wrangling and mud-slinging — what we might now call politics as usual. But, why?…
For those under the age of 35, a majority say that Watergate was just politics. For those over 35, it varies a bit — but there’s still a healthy percentage that apparently considers the affair to have been mostly a political maneuver by Democrats….
If you don’t remember Watergate, and if you don’t think Nixon was that bad, and if you think that political parties are all the same and government is broken, and if everything is a something-gate, you can see how one particular scandal might seem more like part of that cynical picture of American history than as something exceptional.
And if you do think politics is broken, there’s a key event that probably helped lead you and your peers down that path: the Watergate scandal.
Elizabelle
The republic survived.
And I’d take RMNixon over most of the refuse the GOP serves up these days. Truly, I would take him over Romney. I think RMN had more of a social conscience, believe it or not.
Eric U.
Watergate involved a break in/burglary planned in the White House with the president’s knowlege. How that isn’t a huge scandal is something I can barely fathom
JW
Don’t change dicks
In the middle of a screw
Vote for Nixon
In ’72!
WereBear
Cripes! I’m not saying you’re wrong… it’s just an index of the human swill that passes as a Republican statesperson these days.
BTW, I’m unable to get into the BJ homepage. I must see who is top of the page, search on their name, and then get in.
All is fine… as long as I don’t go to the homepage…
Jeffro
@efgoldman: Yup, spot on. And I’m sure as time goes on, the Clinton impeachment will look like politics as usual in the good ol’ USA…and the inevitable Obama impeachment, same.
Funny how there was no W impeachment…maybe that could be a future subject for scholars, researchers, or our inevitable alien overlords??
JW
@Eric U.: It was.
KG
Growing up in Yorba Linda, I had a very different view of Nixon… Sort of the one being peddled by the court attendants still on this mortal coil and trying to preserve their legacy: yes, Nixon did some bad things, but it shouldn’t undermine all the good he did. It is basically the view from inside the bubble. My senior year in high school, the AP government classes took a trip to the Nixon Library. That was the first time I understood that the bad was worse than the story being told.
Until the national archives took over, the watergate room was specifically designed for you to not pay attention. It was set up as a hallway, it was dark and the lights shone in a way to create arrows on the floor. Psychologically you wanted to run through the room. If you did stop to read, everything was in a small font, on screens set at different distances (first paragraph at three feet, second at four, third at three again)
Elizabelle
@WereBear:
Sorry to hear that you’re having access issues. That’s been going on for several; sounded like Chrome was the villain.
WereBear
I’m now a month into my new health protocol, and I feel better! Get-through-the-day, no-longer-going-to-bed-after-work, no-terrible-feeling-of-dissolving, better. Not anywhere near well yet, but this is the first relief from my steadily deteriorating condition in three years. Yay!
And our kitten is doing very well: fresh pics!
Mithrandir has supernatural cuteness
KG
@KG: for context here’s a pic of what it use to look like: http://thedailyrecord.com/files/2011/04/onlinetodayNIXON4411.jpg
Davis X. Machina
@Eric U.:
This is precisely when and where ‘both-sides-do-it” was born.
Nixon’s people strong-arming the Post into hiring Safire, eg.
Elizabelle
@WereBear:
That is one appealing cat. I loved the photo of him in the TV looking cat perch with Tristan looking on.
Davis X. Machina
@Jeffro: There were a non-trivial number of town meetings, state Democratic conventions, and various bodies at that level of the food chain who called for investigations with a view towards moving articles of impeachment.
Not higher up.
Elizabelle
@KG:
The Nixon Library had mugs for sale: WWND?
I found it an interesting place, and loved looking over at the pictures of President Barack Obama and VP Joe Biden, hanging in the entrance hall. Reassuring.
WereBear
@Elizabelle: Safari works. But I don’t want to work in Safari! :)
WereBear
@Elizabelle: Tristan now sees what all the fuss was about. Kittens are fun! It only took him a month.
Dog On Porch
“But, why?⊔.
Might as well ask why so many today believe the War in Vietnam could have been “won”.
It boils down to the phrase ‘ignorance abounds’.
Cervantes
@Eric U.:
But what makes you say it “isn’t a huge scandal”?
WereBear
@Dog On Porch: Not just ignorance. They seem to think that believing what they want to believe actually shapes reality.
And as long as they don’t admit anything, they can pretend it works.
eemom
I was 12 when Nixon resigned, and staying with a crazy old Greek aunt who thought he was a great guy, just misunderstood. dunno why she thought that.
Mustang Bobby
I followed Watergate all the way through. Listened to the Ervin hearings on the radio while I painted houses in the summer of ’73, watched the live coverage of the Saturday Night Massacre, and worried for six weeks in the summer of ’74 that Nixon would resign while I was on a backpacking expedition and I would miss it. Fortunately I returned the week that the House Panel voted out the articles of impeachment, and watched Nixon resign with unrestrained glee. I thought this would change Washington and finally get rid of the politics of personal destruction and cynicism. What can I say, I was a naive 21-year-old kid. Who knew it would lead to Reagan, Bush, Limbaugh, Palin and the Tea Party.
We humans are by nature optimistic. Otherwise we’d eat our young.
Gin & Tonic
@eemom: Greek? Probably because he picked Spiro Agnew as veep.
Talentless Hack
I’m 51, so I was 11 when this started intruding upon my life of 70s game shows and afternoon cartoons and such. If it weren’t for the fact that I did an 11th grade research paper on the subject, I wouldn’t have had any clue what the whole thing was about. So yeah, our collective memory has faded quite a bit on ol’ Tricky Dick.
Anoniminous
Tricky was the first GOP beneficiary of the shattering of southern support for the Democratic Party due to Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act. The results led directly to the GOP Southern Strategy and thereby the GOP dominance of the presidency over the next 32 years.
Cervantes
@Gin & Tonic: Anagnostopoulos.
drkrick
@efgoldman:
We’re Richard Nixon’s Secret Tapes Club Band …
credit to Garry Trudeau – the Doonesbury Watergate Reunion series was a pretty good week.
Anoniminous
@Cervantes:
gesundheit
Karen in GA
@WereBear: What a lovely kitty!
Iggy, meanwhile, guards our home. Sort of.
drkrick
@Elizabelle:
John Dean would like a word with you. He’s pretty sure Nixon would have been right in line with the Tea Party if he were around today, and most of the reasonable domestic stuff people ascribe to him (like the EPA) was put in place by John Erlichmann because Nixon didn’t care about it.
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/08/john_dean_on_richard_nixon_hes_in_the_middle_of_this_its_for_him_blessed_by_him/
WereBear
@Karen in GA: What could stand against such adorableness!
I remember when you got him. I bet he’s still surprising you.
Eric U.
@Cervantes: it isn’t treated as a huge scandal. I think most people don’t see it as a huge scandal today. The republicans use it as justification for screwing with Democratic presidents. Most Republicans certainly think it was a political hit job designed to take out Nixon, totally ignoring the fact that Nixon was a simple criminal who should have been jailed.
I was always happy that my congressman was the one who went on TV and said negative enough things about Nixon that it apparently convinced him to resign. Probably the only good thing he ever did in Congress.
Gin & Tonic
Today sucked. I posted the other night that my little canine buddy had gotten ill with something called old-dog vestibular syndrome. Sometimes this clears up on its own. His didn’t. He was hospitalized Wednesday evening, and things went down the shitter in a pretty big hurry. Between that and his diabetes, well…
He was suffering, and at the age of 15+… I hope I did the right thing.
Suffern ACE
@Gin & Tonic: you did the right thing . Sorry for your loss.
Villago Delenda Est
Nixon was a criminal.
Jerry Ford was a criminal for pardoning Nixon.
The Rethuglican party is the party of open criminality.
Jeffro
@Davis X. MachinaYour point = mine (although you made yours much more clear)
It is strange how W’s failures leading up to 9/11 allowed him to go on to commit even more serious offenses in its aftermath, often with the complicity/weakness of national Dems (the main reason he didn’t get impeached).
It’s almost heartening and perhaps a sign of progress that but for a few thousand votes in Ohio in 2004, the country almost got past its ‘rally round the leader’ mentality post-9/11 and chose another path. It’s certainly outstanding that Obama won in 2008 and 2012, and time rolls on…
…and yet, W & Cheney should still be sitting in a maximum security facility somewhere for all the lies they told and death they caused. At the very least, they should have had to resign like Nixon did. I think that’s what they learned from Watergate: never resign…you can always brazen it out and call it a ‘partisan witchhunt’.
opiejeanne
@Gin & Tonic: It’s so hard, but it was the right thing. It always is when they’re suffering, but it’s hard.
Villago Delenda Est
@Gin & Tonic: What Suffern Ace said @ 36
He’s in the realm of eternal bacon now.
satby
@Gin & Tonic: You did. Condolences on the loss of your buddy.
Cervantes
@Elizabelle:
That’s not self-evident.
eemom
@Gin & Tonic:
Thirding/fourthing you did the right thing, and very sorry for your loss.
Went through this twice in the last year. It sucks, sucks, sucks.
SectionH
@Gin & Tonic: I’m so sorry for your loss. ETA, of course you did the right thing.
Pogonip
@Elizabelle: Likewise. He was also one of the better foreign policy presidents.
And these days he couldn’t get elected dog catcher as a Republican. The party’s gone mad. I’m so old I remember when Relublicans were considered the sober, businesslike party.
Avery Greynold
Richard Nixon was the scowling ugly hateful paranoid guy who distrusted the upper class and gave us some progressive programs. Ronald Reagan was the grinning handsome heartless senile guy who was a tool of the upper class and sabotaged progressive programs.
Cacti
@Anoniminous:
This.
Nixon’s brazen criminality only put off the ascendancy of national white resentment politics by a few years. But for Watergate, Jimmy Carter likely never wins the Presidency. Even with the stench of Nixon hanging over him, Ford still won 48% of the popular vote and 240 EV in ’76.
Gin & Tonic
Thanks to those who commented. 15 years is a good run.
Abstemiousness may be the new fashion on this blog, but will not be in fashion here tonight.
Gin & Tonic
@Pogonip: He was also one of the better foreign policy presidents.
I’m sure the dead 25% of Cambodia’s population would agree with this sentiment.
TaMara (BHF)
@Gin & Tonic: I am so sorry. And it’s perfectly normal to question the decision. It’s probably the hardest one we make as pet owners. I think no matter what stage they are at when we make the decision we all question it at one point or another. You did the right thing, you did it out of love and compassion. Big hugs to you.
different-church-lady
I was alive during Watergate (as much as I hate to admit it) and yet somehow I have not drawn the conclusion that every politician is a crook.
Cacti
Gerald Ford is an interesting historical anomaly for the fact that he’s the only man to serve both as VPOTUS and POTUS without being elected to either office.
SectionH
I watched news summaries of the hearings – we still had some actual straight news reporting then – but the day-to-day progress kind of got ignored by my having a 9–month-old and taking a full load of summer school courses so I could start graduate school the next month. My mother, who’d hated Nixon from the ’50s, was glued to her TV and kept me informed of “breaking news.” My husband and I did buy a bottle of champagne and take it to my mom’s when it was announced that he was going to resign.
Mr S was in school at Hopkins then, and tells me they wanted to buy some champers too, but all the stores were already sold out when they went shopping.
different-church-lady
@drkrick: “You sit right down here, tell me what you’ve been up to lately.”
“I’ve been in jail.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Look, Mrs. Dean, I’ll just come back later, okay?”
“No, no, don’t be silly… here, have some onion dip!”
Cervantes
@Pogonip:
You must be aware that in 1968 Nixon and his campaign interfered with negotiations meant to end the war in Vietnam so that the Democrats could not take the credit for any settlement. Can you estimate the number of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and American lives that might have been spared if Nixon hadn’t decided to exercise his impressive foreign-policy “skills” before he was even elected?
You must be aware, too, of what the Nixon Administration did to Salvador Allende and his government in Chile.
And I’m sure you’re aware that Nixon, McCarthy, and their right-wing colleagues made it virtually impossible â the height of treason â for any American statesman to attempt a rapprochement with China â that is, until Nixon could do it (in his own cramped way) and take the credit?
I could go on but instead let me just ask: “One of the better foreign policy presidents”?
I don’t see it that way. He was an evil man and we are well rid of him. If only his influence had died with his presidency.
Senyordave
@Gin & Tonic: We had a terrier mix who got vestibular syndrome at age 10. Until then she was 10 going on 6, the most energetic, sweet, friendly dog you ever saw (our vet used to say if you didn’t like our dog, you probably didn’t like dogs). After vestibular syndrome she changed. Lost a lot of her energy, became withdrawn around most people. Still loving, but seemed to age her overnight. About 6 months later she got tongue cancer and went very quickly. I don’t know your situation, but I’m guessing it would have been very painful and you truly ended the dog’s suffering. BTW, I was told vestibular syndrome was somewhat like a mild stroke.
Karen in GA
@Gin & Tonic: I’m so sorry. But I agree with everyone else — you did right by him. He was lucky to have you.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
If you really think that Ford’s pardon affects contemporary politics in any way, all I can say is that the faith you place in your fellow humans is touching, if dead wrong. The pardon may or may not have been the right thing to do but it’s consequences in terms of how many people think Watergate was a real scandal are zero. Nada. Zip.
We have all of the facts necessary to conclude that it was a big deal and those involved were deeply criminal. If people choose to ignore all of that, an actual trial wouldn’t impede them in the slightest. They’d just think that was trumped up nonsense.
Elizabelle
@Gin & Tonic:
You did the right thing. Old dogs are the sweetest, but he could not get better.
Tipping a glass of Malbec to you and the late pup.
The pups and kittehs and hamsters: they just do not live long enough. But they make our lives worth living.
Suffern ACE
On a happier note, at least in some parts in the world, it is believed that in a democracy, incompetent officials are more easily removed. Perhaps that is the lesson others took from Watergate.
(Ok. It’s not related to watergate at all, but I liked the story anyway)
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Oh man I’m sorry to hear that. It’s been a while since I’ve posted this:
We who choose to surround ourselves
with lives even more temporary than our
own, live within a fragile circle;
easily and often breached.
Unable to accept its awful gaps,
we would still live no other way.
We cherish memory as the only
certain immortality, never fully
understanding the necessary plan.
â Irving Townsend
Hobbes
Maybe its not considered such a scandal because in far more recent history we’ve had the Whitehouse openly order prisoners tortured. A break-in seems positively quaint compared.
raven
@Pogonip: You can’t be fucking serious.
Elizabelle
James Brady’s death ruled a homicide, 30-plus years later. That does not seem a stretch to me — his injuries were grievous and life-changing, even though he lived to 73. Mostly gives prosecutors some leverage over John Hinckley.
Also: government takes over Malaysian Air. That’s good.
Andrew
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
Ford’s pardon did set the precedent that the Presidency and other high officials were above the law. Which had serious implications for every President since. Except Carter.
Reagan had Iran-Contra, Bush I had covering up and pardoning Iran-Contra, Clinton did commit perjury no matter how stupid the investigation that put him on the stand was, Bush committed about a thousand felonies, and Obama’s willfully ignored prosecuting those felonies. Ultimately that’s my problem. Every President (again, except Carter) since 1968 has either committed a felony or actively assisted in preventing those felonies from being prosecuted. This is a problem for me. Justice inequality is an even large problem than income inequality as far as I’m concerned, though the two are of course related.
? Martin
There goes one link in the chain.
Higher education in this country will change profoundly (one way or another) if NCAA sports stop being profitable for universities.
Suffern ACE
@Elizabelle: what leverage do the prosecutors need over John Hinckley? Has he been covering up
Some larger conspiracy?
Joy in FL
I was on a tour bus somewhere in Europe when the radio news came over the bus’s speakers that Nixon had resigned. That bus full of American high school students erupted in cheering. I will never forget that. The following school year I was a senior, and we had the opportunity on campus to register to vote. I remember not really caring about politics, but I could not even consider registering as a Republican. I had only a shred of a clue about Watergate, but I knew Nixon was bad, and I wanted nothing to do with his party. I registered as a Democrat. I think I even told the person registering my why I chose Democrat.
@Gin & Tonic– so sorry about your sweet dog. Yes, you did the right, loving thing.
raven
@Joy in FL: I was pulling in the driveway of a house in the country in East Central Illinois. We were high as a the cost of living and the news accelerated things!
raven
Both James Brady and Tim McCarthy, the secret service agent shot that day, were Illini. Odd conicidinc.
Suffern ACE
I wonder if there is an ActBlue for Scots independence. I would have thought the race would be closer than it is. I think I’m in favor of it, for no good reason except that Liam Neeson movie from many years ago.
Cervantes
@Avery Greynold: Succinct.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: Remember what state Reagan was born in.
Elizabelle
@Suffern ACE:
No, but he’s had lengthy unsupervised visits to family in Virginia for some time. It’s been controversial among some.
I’m more interested in the Robert and Maureen McDonnell corruption trial than anything to do with Hinckley.
John Revolta
I dunno why, but this business of charging someone with a crime 30 years later bothers me a bit. Is there precedent for this? How do statutes of limitations apply?
El Caganer
Totally off any topic here, but I was looking for an open thread to share an interesting article with Mr. Cole:
http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/the-aa-is-out-of-step-with-research-on-addiction/
scuffletuffle
@Gin & Tonic: You did the right thing. Remember the good times and the love you shared and remember that the kindest thing we can do for our pets is outlive them.
Mike J
@John Revolta:
They don’t, for murder.
However, since he was not guilty by reason of insanity for all the other charges, it would seem difficult to file new charges now.
PurpleGirl
@Gin & Tonic: Sorry for your loss. You did the right thing. It was a mercy to him, ending his suffering. You’ll remember all the good things about him and what you did together. You’ll always have those memories.
I well remember when that decision had to made about Hugo (the Doberman). Hugo may have been my friend’s dog but Hugo made me one of his humans and I still miss him and remember all the good things about him.
amk
Heh, most americans forgot the atrocious dumbya/darth regime within two years and voted back the same corrupt loons into power. So, what watergate?
PurpleGirl
@John Revolta: IIRC, he was charged with attempted muder and now the charges could upgraded. There is no statute of limitations on murder. Any attorneys, correct me if I’m wrong.
Suffern ACE
@PurpleGirl: yeah, but see above on insanity finding. I suppose this would be a way for someone to make a name for himself. But a lot if these articles are filler.
in a similar vein, the times wasted a lot of column inches today on the idea that Obama intervening in Iraq would make it easier for Putin to invade Ukraine. With quotes from a lot of experts who can read Putin’s mind. Ukraine isn’t really related to Iraq, but it’s fun to speculate that it is.
John Revolta
Ah. Thanks.
Andrew
@? Martin:
The penalty the judge handed down is basically what the 65 major conference teams decided to do on Thursday. It’s not a big deal, financially. Definitely a big deal morally/legally as far as precedent goes, but they’ll still make insane amounts of money. Like this will cost them ~500k/year/school. Also known as like… the linebackers coach’s salary.
James E. Powell
@Mike J:
Even if there were a limitation statute for murder, it wouldn’t apply yet because the victim just died. It’s not a murder when the person is shot; it’s a murder when the person dies.
If I recall the stuff I learned in law school correctly, there was a year & a day rule – the person had to die within one year and one day of the event that allegedly caused his death. It’s been abolished or modified in different ways in different states. I’ve no idea what the rule in DC is.
hitchhiker
Been listening to Rick Perlstein’s latest book all week. The Watergate break in happened on the night before my 20th birthday, so yeah, I remember that time very well.
Sad that people think it was all political; this was the POTUS & his senior staff talking jovially about where to get the hush money to pay off the criminals they’d hired. And talking about using the CIA to prevent the FBI from investigating the crimes. And Pat Effing Buchanan smugly describing to the congress how they’d succeeded in sabotaging all but the weakest of the Democratic candidates, the one they preferred to run against.
And a whole lot more. The tapes were absolutely shocking, mostly because of how vulgar and thuggish our leaders turned out to be when they were alone together.
Perlstein is good, btw. Makes me want to scream, though, hearing how Reagan just rolled the press and public and the Dems with his “I get to make shit up out of whole cloth because I do it SO WELL!”
Unbelievable opportunity lost after Watergate. Could have been a reckoning with our better angels, but because of people like Pat Effing Buchanan it was just the first stage of bitter division that has only grown and hardened.
Bastards.
Chris
@efgoldman:
Yeah. And thatâs a difference between him (and Reagan for that matter) and the W crowd. If the Cheney Regencyâs crimes had been offset by, say, an opening to Iran or some real movement on the Israel/Palestine conflict, it wouldnât have justified their crimes in Iraq and elsewhere, but at least you couldâve put a few good marks on their record. As things stand, itâs all bad.
@Cervantes:
Course, this is true too. Itâs the part of Only Nixon Could go To China that doesnât get mentioned much. I read something recently that sowed that a majority of Israelis would be fine with a two state solution as long as it was Bibi who negotiated â in other words, only if it came from the people who will never agree to it. Be nice if people stopped surrendering their foreign policy to these guys, wouldnât it?
Chris
@Hobbes:
This.
Iâm a millennial, and I canât pretend I donât find Watergate a little quaint, or at most, just one drop in the bucket. Between then and now, weâve had Iran-contra, which was Watergate if theyâd jumped right to the Ford pardon before the resignation; then the Bush years started with an election that was fraudulent at best and a Supreme Court coup at worst, and continued with the creation of a gulag in Cuba, the deregulation of the NSA, and, ah, the glorious Iraq War. In my case at least, itâs not that I donât take Watergate seriously. Itâs just that these kinds of politics have become absolutely mainstream.
(And truth be told, they were always more mainstream than we are comfortable admitting, even if it didnât used to be as brazen as it became in the Bush years. Watergate, after all, was coming in the aftermath of Nixonâs sabotage of the 68 peace talks, the Tonkin Gulf Big Lie, and forty years of J. Edgar Hoover).
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
I blame our #slatepitch loving society and the reluctance to deal with recent history because it’s “uncivil”. We didn’t learn about anything post WWII formally in school and popular culture and news love to talk about all the “progressive” domestic legislation Nixon signed. If it weren’t for my father, I wouldn’t realize that Nixon and Kissinger spent 18 months arguing over the shape OF A FUCKING TABLE WHILE PEOPLE WERE DYING.
Nixon and Kissinger were sick, sick men. Most people my age and younger have no idea.
Another Holocene Human (now with new computer)
@Chris: You’re right, I mean as political scandals go there was the allegation that George HW Bush actually committed treason to better Reagan’s chances against Carter w/r/t the Iran hostage crisis, you have Iran Contra, which is one of my earliest memories, you have the more recent scandals in the 2000 election. Forget the Muskie “canuck” letter, you have Bush operatives doing “black baby” robocalls on McCain in South Carolina. It does seem quaint.
And the Iraq war recapitulated all the stupidity of our adventures in Indochina and then some.
Watergate was a sort of turning point in Americans’ trust in their government. I think that’s why it’s so significant. Gosh, my day hasn’t even started and I want a drink now. Iran Contra, fuck me.
Chris
@Another Holocene Human (now with new computer):
I think Watergate (and the Church Committee hearings around the same time) were a turning point in the sense that the shady, corrupt and, frankly, antidemocratic practices that had always gone on behind the scenes were forced into the public eye and the question asked âare we going to just accept this?â The ultimate answer, of course, was âyes.â But there was a moment after it had all been forced into the open when that wasnât obvious yet and people were genuinely outraged.
ETA: if Watergate was the moment when that window opened, Iran-contra was when it closed.
satby
@Chris: the window didn’t just close, it was slammed shut and locked. And Ollie North is on TV as a “pundit”.
Cervantes
@Avery Greynold:
I said above this is succinct. Upon re-reading it, I think it can even stand beside Edward Thompson’s description of Foreign Policy Reagan as commander-in-chief of “military adventurers, merciless financiers, and illiterate amateur diplomats.” (Written before Iran-Contra became public knowledge.)
TriassicSands
I heard a replay of an interview with Woodward and Bernstein about the scope of Nixon’s misdeeds and Bernstein stressed the “criminality” of Nixon from the time he took office until he left. There was a consistent pattern of criminal behavior on the part of the president that included break-ins, phone-tapping, misuse of government agencies and resources, and in the case of CREEP and the 1972 election, Nixon’s efforts were aimed at ensuring a Nixon victory regardless of what the voters did.
The best way to sum it up is to state, without reservation, that Nixon was a crook, period. A serial criminal. He should have spent time in prison and Ford’s pardon of Nixon has created a situation now where presidents are never held accountable for the crimes they commit in office. It’s actually kind of funny that what may have been Nixon’s most famous utterance: “I am not a crook,” was just one more lie.
Cervantes
@TriassicSands:
Yes, he was always a thug, not merely a lout, from the moment he began to seek public office, from 1946 on â and a true-blue criminal from 1968 on.
Positively hilarious. I’m laughing so hard I could cry.
skwerlhugger
@Eric U.: “Watergate involved a break in/burglary planned in the White House with the presidentâs knowlege.” Not quite, I believe it’s accepted that Nixon did not know about the burglaries in advance. He approved the illegal coverup. He could be a vile man, with a deeply flawed character, making his political start with Joe McCarthy. But he had some curious, complex twists and turns, to me quite unimaginable with someone like Paul Ryan or G. W. Bush. Nixon was an opportunist, and there was no opportunity in the ideas of racism and the rich throwing us trinkets in the late 60s.
Cervantes
@skwerlhugger:
What happened at the Watergate complex was part of a long-running scheme of illegality for political and personal profit involving Nixon and his henchmen. Telling me that Nixon did not know about one specific illegal act before it happened â even if this is true â is like telling me that the capo di tutti capi did not know in advance about each and every murder his crime family committed. Technically true, perhaps, but irrelevant.
Death Panel Truck
Why is Watergate relevant? Because, among other crimes, Nixon ordered the CIA to tell the FBI, “Don’t go any further into this case, period!” That is a criminal obstruction of justice, and that alone was enough to justify impeachment.
Doesn’t matter whether he knew or not, it’s what he did afterward that matters.
Lurking Canadian
@Cervantes: this.
And even so, Iran-Contra makes the entire Nixon apparatus look like two kids jumping the turnstile because they’re late for school. If you could dig up James Madison and let him watch the Iran-Contra hearings, he’d say “Holy shit, guys! This kind of thing is why we PUT impeachment in there in the first place!”
I’ve never really understood the case for impeaching GW Bush. He should be rotting in a gibbet at The Hague as a war criminal, but I’m not sure what he did that was impeachable. He did, after all, have Congressional approval for Iraq.
Cervantes
@Lurking Canadian: Re the legitimacy of impeaching George Walker Bush, it’s an important question but, for me, a discussion for another time.
Same thing re asking: who was more impeachable, Nixon or Reagan? A good question for another time.
Thanks for your comments.
Matt McIrvin
In American politics it was the scandal, the origin of “-gate”. But even in the 1970s I remember kids my age, probably parroting their parents, saying “Nixon just did the same things all politicians do; he just got caught.”
Matt McIrvin
@skwerlhugger:
There was immense opportunity in racism, and Nixon took it. The Democrats were splitting apart over civil rights, and under Nixon, the Republicans happily jumped into the breach. The payoff was that they dominated presidential politics for a generation.
Mike S
@Elizabelle: Chrome is working for me to now access Balloon-Juice for the first time in four days or so with out locking up.
Mike G
@Eric U.:
Because a burglary of the opposing party’s HQ would be a footnote in the crimes and dirty deeds the Republican swine have pulled off since.