Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime, until maybe now: https://t.co/9NCmordowo
— Dan Rather (@DanRather) February 14, 2017
Thing is, Nixon didn't need Watergate to win. But Trump needed Russians & Comey to squeak out electoral college win https://t.co/cn4QLCEH4f
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) February 15, 2017
Sensible people understand that Gerald Ford pardoning Richard Nixon — and thereby eliminating any chance of airing the true extent of the nitwitted criminality of the entire Nixon Administration and its GOP supporters — was a national tragedy. It allowed all the low-level CREEPsters to scurry away into wingnut-welfare hidey-holes from which they would reemerge, stronger and ever more venal, first during the Reagan Adminstration (aka ‘Iran-Contra’), and later during the Cheney Regency. What the country needed in 1974 was the equivalent of South Africa’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission, where amnesty might be granted, but only after a full examination of the crimes and their impact on civil society.
Of course the criminals in the permanent Republican Party, and their nitwit courtiers among the Media Village Idiots, persist in their self-defensive fantasies that Watergate was a cruel and misguided assault on a great man and his loyal acolytes. Since paranoia, racism, and a lust for cruelty are never out of fashion in the authoritarian fringes of the far right, whole generations of would-be Haldemans and Ehrlichmans have nursed ambitions to avenge Tricky Dick… and it seems that they may be seizing upon the President-Asterisk and his klown klavern as their last best hope.
As a leading indicator, Drum-Major-General and Bothsider-in-Chief David Brooks meeps out a preemptive call for Truth and Honor, once again, to submit to the needs of The Narrative. After hastily dismissing both the Democratic tactic of actual resistance to Trump’s no-longer-hidden attempts to subvert our democracy, and the #NeverTrumpist withdrawal into their think-tank boltholes, Brooks declaims that “we” need… another Gerald Ford:
… The third possibility is that the primary threat in the Trump era is a combination of incompetence and anarchy. It could be that Trump is a chaotic clown incapable of conducting coherent policy. It could be that his staff members are a bunch of inexperienced second-raters…
If the current reign of ineptitude continues, Republicans will eventually peel away. The Civil Service will begin to ignore the sloppy White House edicts. The national security apparatus will decide that to prevent a slide to global disorder, it has to run itself.
In this scenario, the crucial question is how to replace and repair. The model for the resistance is Gerald Ford, a decent, modest, experienced public servant who believed in the institutions of government, who restored faith in government, who had a plan to bind the nation’s wounds and restored normalcy and competence.
Personally, I don’t think we’re at a Bonhoeffer moment or a Benedict moment. I think we’re approaching a Ford moment. If the first three weeks are any guide, this administration will not sustain itself for a full term. We’ll need a Ford, or rather a generation of Fords to restore effective governance…
… and “we” will find them, never doubt, among the comers at the Heritage Institute, the young sprigs of the National Review, and whichever statehouse seatwarmers the Kochs and Mercers decide are ready for a bigger platform.
Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon not only gave Trump his presumption of impunity but allowed Trump's particular cronies to stay in politics. pic.twitter.com/UqhAwvD18x
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) February 14, 2017
When David Brooks yearns for a Gerald Ford, he is wishing for someone to wave a hand and deny this is all happening and it's anyone's fault.
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) February 14, 2017
But if we have to relive the Watergate nightmare (second time as farce!) we can at least entertain ourselves assigning roles from the old cast. Looks like we may already have our Martha Mitchell, if we can believe the Intercept — somewhat of a connoisseur in the field of political paranoia:
Carter Page, briefly a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, sent a peculiar, rambling letter this week to the Department of Justice, asking it to review “the severe election fraud in the form of disinformation, suppression of dissent, hate crimes and other extensive abuses led by members of Mrs. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their political allies last year.”
Page is reportedly one of several targets of a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI into possible links between Trump associates and Russian officials.
Page provided the lengthy letter to The Intercept when asked whether he would support President Trump using his power as president to declassify any government material to disclose any intercepted conversations between Page and Russian officials. He did not say. Instead he forwarded the letter, which is well-formatted, heavily-footnoted, grammatically correct and has no spelling mistakes. However, its content is bizarre…
It… makes the grandiose claim that “the actions by the Clinton regime and their associates may be among the most extreme examples of human rights violations observed during any election in U.S. history since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was similarly targeted for his anti-war views in the 1960’s.”
Page repeatedly describes as “outrageous” the news coverage claiming that he has significant connections to Russian officials, and what he says was the Clinton campaign’s hidden hand behind it.
The Clinton campaign, says Page, engaged in “human rights violations,” “illegal activities,” “unlawful deceptions,” “Obstruction of Justice – the charge upon which President Nixon was impeached,” spreading “False Evidence,” and “an obviously illegal attempt to silence me on an important issue of national and international consequence in violation of my Constitutional rights.”
Page also states that he was targeted by the Clinton campaign because he is Catholic, a military veteran and a man…
Much more detail at the link; the reporter very efficiently lays out Page’s history with the Trump campaign (and that of “Putin’s chief propagandist Dmitriy Kiselev”).
Trump creates enviro where he demands fealty/creates his own fact set sometimes, and has advisers who try to demonstrate loyalty in public.
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) February 14, 2017
Not sure which Nixon flunky KellyAnne Conway would be reenacting, but the worst-of-the-1970s political movements are giving some observers flashbacks…
I serve at the pleasure of @POTUS. His message is my message. His goals are my goals. Uninformed chatter doesn't matter.
— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) February 14, 2017
"I was Chairman Mao's dog," Jiang Qing said at her trial. "Whomever he told me to bite, I bit." https://t.co/D9LZTz7pXQ
— Isaac Stone Fish (@isaacstonefish) February 14, 2017
Not gonna say Trump admin riven by factionalism & corruption but I heard "Hai Rui Removed From Office" is getting revival at Kennedy Center
— Jordan Ellenberg (@JSEllenberg) February 15, 2017
? Martin
In many ways this is far worse than Watergate. The open warfare between the IC and the President (and presumably DOJ) is just astounding, particularly because as we now understand it, the White House may be in the dark about various threats. I would say that it is a constitutional crisis when the executive branch has become so dysfunctional that it’s at war with itself. I don’t see how this situation can resolve itself prior to a new President being elected.
Jerzy Russian
Can someone give me a Vulcan mind meld or something similar to remove that Brooks segment from my brain? Stupidity llike that needs to be painful if we are ever to move forward as a society.
Jerzy Russian
@? Martin: with that note I need to try to sleep. If anyone out there meets Insomnia in person, please kick him in the nuts for me (I am pretty sure it is male).
Villago Delenda Est
I want the heads of these maggots on pikes.
cosima
I was not encouraged when I read this morning (my time) that ‘Bannon’s pal’ will be vetting/reviewing (???) IC folk. I suppose he’s looking for the source(s) of the leaks. Sort of rained on the parade that I was having in my mind reading that ‘US allies’ have their own intercepted intelligence that backs up the US IC claims. I guess in a nutshell those of us who are not insane must now hope that there is a US ally out there who is willing to let their own intel folk leak info about the US gov’t (current), undermining their relationship with the US, to save the US from its own gov’t. Are we living in one of the circles of hell right now?
Somebody just release some bloody tapes so that we can get this shit over with, rip off the bandaid. And as long as we’re talking about this, let’s also talk about hacked RNC emails so that it’s quite clear why there doesn’t seem to be any movement from congressional ‘leadership’ to investigate. More noise Dems (in Congress & Senate)!
montanareddog
Brooks has evidently surmised that if he is ever going to get his coveted White House Correspondent accreditation, he needs to wrest the title of “Dumbest Man on the Internet” away from Jim Hoft
dianne
I keep hearing that we are in uncharted waters. That there is no law or method to allow for a do over. We need such a law if it turns out that foreign involvement swayed the election and gave it to their preferred candidate. How else will we prevent the next attempt if there is no punishment and the candidate is allowed to get away with it. I know it will likely never happen but it seems that the Russians and the Rs have been rewarded for criminality while the rest of us will suffer. I’m so tired of being a chump while Reps chortle with glee. Between Comey and the Russian / Wikileak involvement, I don’t believe any Dem could have won. We were behind the 8 ball all along and never even realized it.
amk
crook, raygun, dumbya, twitler – each one progressively worse. when and where will the repubs stop?
hellslittlestangel
@cosima: The documentary about Trump’s lackeys trying to find the source of the leaks was released in 1940 and entitled, “A Plumbing We Will Go.”
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
This is the kind of mantra cultists chant.
Zinsky
Don’t forget that Watergate also set the stage for the brutal, “revenge” politics that caused Bill Clinton’s presidency to be one long, drawn-out investigation and Barack Obama’s presidency to be one large act of obstruction by the venal Republicans. The GOP is still pissed about and wants revenge for Tricky Dick’s very public demise.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@? Martin:
They may literally still be in the dark since they’ve had problems finding the light switches.
Ericblair
Apparently the Guardian is saying that Roger Stone, the slipperiest weasel of them all with the most sensitive political anemometer, is calling for an investigation. You can trust the Congressional Republicans to do the most cowardly and self serving thing out of any set of options, so when investigating Trump becomes that option they will do it. This may be sooner than I expected.
Good luck with some billionaire outsider trying to figure out what’s going on in the IC if they don’t want him to.
Joyce H
@? Martin:
I was just thinking about this today – imagine if when the Watergate was broken into, the guys arrested trying to bug the DNC were Soviet agents, acting on behalf of the Republican candidate! There would have been no pardon for Nixon, he would have ‘died in jail’! But in the current case, the Russians in cahoots with the Republicans weren’t just trying to steal Democratic info, they succeeded!
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Chuck Colson. Nixon hatchet man who conspired to kill gadfly journalist Jack Anderson.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
KGB will attempt to clean this up. Watch, the people who know too much will start having unexpected heart attacks and will slip and fall in their bath tubs.
The Lodger
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: So we get to see Conway find Jesus? Fabulous.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone???
cosima
@hellslittlestangel: I’ve a feeling that Bannon & his lackeys aren’t as benign as the usual Trump lackey. Look forward to being proved wrong there.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@The Lodger: She’ll probably become an actress and star in the remake of “The Manchurian Candidate” as Raymond Shaw’s incestuous, murderous, treasonous mother
Kay
I don’t know- does this come under “intimidating witnesses”?
OzarkHillbilly
@cosima: Ain’t never gonna happen.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
The Republicans are going to be forced sooner or later to pretend to have hearings. When they do, the conclusions will be written in advance and they’ll do everything they can to suppress any actual evidence, questions, witnesses, etc.
I don’t think they can actually succeed, and obviously we all hope the bungled cover-up will drag more of them down.
So I think we really are about to relive Watergate. My memories of that time, as a teenager, were an endless drip-drip-drip of hearings that dominated TV and radio ratings every day. And that when we found out Nixon recorded EVERYTHING, and we got to hear how he talked in his own office (the phrase “[expletive deleted]” was everywhere on those transcripts) that was kind of the shocker that woke everybody up to what a terrible person he was.
The “pu**y grabbing” tape didn’t affect Trump’s ratings at all. We couldn’t hate him more, and his fans want to be him and talk that way. But I’m starting to get the sense that what we’re going to hear in the next few months is far, far beyond bad language and WAAAY over the line into criminal treason. And that the IC has proof. Whether it’s legally admissible evidence (illegal wiretap maybe?) or not.
Kay
Feinberg will be there to report on Trump dissidents- same role as Bannon and Kushner.
Imagine how horrible it is to work there. The paranoia and back-stabbing must be incredible.
bystander
@Villago Delenda Est:
Same here, but on toast points for me, thanks.
I will repeat that I saw battle axe in heels Kay Bailey Hutchison conditioning America for President Pence. “He’s just been pitch perfect throughout this, rock steady.”
The people in the media who dutifully read the stolen DNC emails will never answer for their complicity, if only a confession of stupidity.
Kay
“Republicans” haven’t done one bit of oversight and it’s coming out anyway, mostly because Trump has a big mouth, no self control and he’s vindictive and reckless. Donald Trump directly caused every single problem that administration has. Republicans may never have to do anything.
Trump is a horrible manager. He hires bad people and is bad at running things. He’s not going to get better at it because he also lacks the temperament and personal qualities that he would need to get better at it.
Unlike Nixon, Trump is completely unqualified for this job and that’s the problem. He’s both incompetent and of poor character, which makes him a worse executive than Nixon.
He would need experience or good character and humility and the capacity to learn. He has neither.
cosima
@OzarkHillbilly: You’re harshing the very little mellow that I’m allowing myself!
And I think you’re being too cynical. I’m quite cynical, but there are a lot of moving pieces to this issue. Not all of the pieces are owned by the US, but rather owned by countries that have a vested interest in seeing the US/Russia alignment go down in flames, if only to protect their own countries from a similar fate. Not too far outside the realm of possibility to see this tied to the rise in alt-right (the right here in the UK is different than in the US, but for simplicity we’ll call it that) in other countries, funded & fuelled by Russia. The stability of the entire world is riding on all of this coming to light. While I’d like to see the light shined on it sooner rather than later, if it takes time to get all of the necessary information — with the assistance of other country agencies — I’ll wait. Not patiently, of course.
Frankensteinbeck
@amk:
It won’t. I cannot sufficiently stress how aware they are of the demographic timer ticking, and what a nightmare that is for anyone who finds minorities scary. Anyone with more than the smallest racism issues has been getting more and more scared, desperate, and crazy for decades. A black president hit ‘dystopian Hell’ for them.
This is what California went through, and people seeing the end result now forget the decades of damage and political chaos as the GOP went scorched Earth to protect their fading white supremacy.
p.a.
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: There’s already apparently a body count of Russians, apparently US Intel assets who were undone by incompetence, bad luck, or info (consciously or unconsciously given) by the current misadministration. On the clock, so no time for link search now…
Frankensteinbeck
@p.a.:
If IC agents have died because this administration outed them, there truly will be Hell to pay. I knew they would consider Trump a traitor for siding with Russia, but forgot that it could get personal.
Ben Cisco
@Jerzy Russian: My mind to your mind…
Fred
Third Presidential campaign in my lifetime “won” by GOP treasonous conspiracy with foreign government. Nixon, Reagan and now Trump. As the saying goes “thrice is the charm” Can we finally draw the line and send these goons to prison where they belong?
Waldo
My concern is that with the bunker mentality already setting in, the ruthless pricks like Bannon, Miller, Gorka etc. will soon get free rein to protect the regime at all costs. I shudder to think where that could lead.
Snarki, child of Loki
“What the country needed in 1974 was
the equivalent ofSouth Africa’s necklacing with burning tires soaked in gasoline”How do you say pour encourager les autres in Xhosa?
Spaniel
@? Martin:
My opinion from the various articles is that the IC does not trust the administration to keep a secret, as well as to why is a political advisor in NSA meetings as a principal, so the means of how that info was gotten is not divulged. Wouldn’t want to know that Putin’s laundry last is reading the scribbled notes left in his pant pockets.
Seems the echo chamber noise is amplifying something that may not really being said.
Spaniel
Silly spell check. The word last in my previous response should have been lady.
KnaveRupe
Wait – I’m confused. Wasn’t the point of Martha Mitchell that she WASN’T delusional?
When you compare him to Mitchell, are you saying that Carter Page actually WAS targeted by the heinous Clinton machine?
Mike in DC
@Zinsky:
They’re probably still pissed about Grover Cleveland, FFS.
efgoldman
@Kay:
The consenus in the overnite threads was no. Even if he gets in the front gate at Langley, he won’t get to “investigate” anything or anybody important. Adam also pointed out that there are parallel tracks – military and civilian – and neither he nor Tangerine Tantrum can just fire people in either food chain, that it would require an act of congress – which would be filibustered tio death in the senate.
Nora
@KnaveRupe: And in fact Martha Mitchell was a Republican, reporting on her own party’s wrongdoing. This guy is evidently a nutcase Republican “reporting” on Democratic wrongdoing. Not rally a good parallel at all.
low-tech cyclist
Anne, I’m not buying this for one moment.
Yes, Nixon should have been tried, convicted, sentenced, and imprisoned. No man should be above the law.
But by the time Nixon resigned, Watergate was pretty much an open book, and everyone else involved in Watergate went to prison.
And the Church Committee, much to its credit, went back and dug into the crimes of the Deep State, which were a whole separate thing from Watergate.
There were people in the Nixon Administration who weren’t involved in Watergate whose political careers did all too well after that (e.g. Roger Stone, recently of the Trump campaign), but how would a more detailed examination of Watergate have prevented that?
low-tech cyclist
OTOH, we desperately needed a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the Bush Administration. We are still paying for having let the Bushies off the hook far too easily.
And the same for Iran-Contra after Bush 41 pardoned everyone on his way out the door.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Frankensteinbeck: California always runs ahead of the nation by a few years. We’re in the unqualified celebrity elected in part due to a manufactured scandal phase.
Chris
Pardoning Nixon was to the twentieth century what forgiving the Confederate leadership was to the nineteenth century. An enormous mistake that future generations have continued and probably will continue to pay for.
Chris
@cosima:
I’d really like to hope that “establishment” politicians in Western Europe have enough sense to see the alt-right as the threat to them that it is and react accordingly, instead of simply seeing it as a source of votes and an ally against the left.
A lot of recent signs haven’t been encouraging. Hopefully, Trump will be a wake-up call. (And not the role model that the Boris Johnson crowd seems to think he should be…)
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I feel somehow heartened that there are people too crazy, too dumb and too dishonest even to work for Donald Trump. At least until somebody quits and there’s nobody left but this tool and people like him…
JGabriel
cosima:
Not terribly likely, I’m afraid. Four of the Five Eyes – Australia, UK, US, and New Zealand – have conservative/right wing governments composed of factions that support Trump, and factions that need the support of factions that support Trump.
The fifth, Canada, seems unlikely to take that step, though I suppose we shouldn’t rule it out.
Percysowner
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: Dear Lord! You mean we’ll end up with a Born Again Kelly Anne Conway, touting even more Evangelical Christian dogma?
The Moar You Know
The end of this administration MUST result in trials. Including of the president. No other outcome is remotely acceptable.
Mnemosyne
@dianne:
I’ve been ranting for a couple of months now that Karl Rove planned this down to the letter. Using a combination of voter suppression methods, including restrictive voter ID laws, he successfully gerrymandered the country. The original plan was to give Romney the victory in 2012, but Obama managed to squeak by, so the Republicans tightened up their voter suppression scheme and … here we are.
raptusregailter
“I serve at the pleasure of @POTUS. His message is my message. His goals are my goals.”
Anybody else notice that Kellyanne seems to be paraphrasing the Vulcan mind-meld incantation from Star Trek? The analogy, of course, completely breaks down when you realize that either the shitgibbon or the professional turd polisher would have to be Spock.
EBT
What happens when Pence pardons deadbeat donnie? Not legally, we all know that then legally deadbeat donnie gets to just walk off in to the sunset. I mean socially.
JustRuss
I wondered if that bit of phrasing would resurface. I remember how it was on every talking head’s lips during certain phases of the Bush regime.