“Fitful Fabrications: Watergate Amnesia, The ‘Nixonian’ Slur, And Other Big Lies
Let’s state this very simply, so everybody will understand. The notion that Barack Obama is “Nixonian” — or that his administration’s recent troubles bear any resemblance to “Watergate” — is the biggest media lie since the phony “Whitewater scandal” crested during the Clinton presidency.
Fraudulent as it is, we have listened repeatedly to versions of this bogus comparison uttered by figures as diverse as former Fox News commentator Dick Morris and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, alongside a phalanx of Republican politicians, including Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) – whose latest attack ad directly links Obama with Nixon.
Only in a country afflicted with chronic historical amnesia could they issue such accusations without shame or embarrassment. Only under those circumstances could the Republicans continue their fitful fabrication of a “Democratic Watergate” without fear of being laughed off the stage. It is a project that they will never grow tired of pursuing.
Coming from figures such as former White House political boss Karl Rove and Fox News chief Roger Ailes — both of whom worked for Nixon and defended him with vigor — the hypocrisy is stunning. They can only say words like “Watergate” or “Nixonian” because most Americans have forgotten who they really are behind the respectable masks – or never knew.
The last time we heard Obama mentioned in the same breath as Watergate was in 2009, when Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) – the same Issa who has labored for months to pump air into the Benghazi “scandal” – decided that a job offered to a potential political candidate had erupted into a Constitutional crisis. Is it necessary to note that nothing of consequence ever emerged from Issa’s investigation back then? Yet somehow, he maintains credibility with the Washington media.
So does Graham, who slandered Susan Rice over the Benghazi talking points, which he deemed “worse than Watergate” – an assertion since proved entirely wrong, irresponsible, and vicious. Nevertheless Graham is treated as someone worthy of airtime and quotation, rather than a discredited blowhard.
But certain liberals in the media have fretted loudly over Obama’s “scandals,” too. Is it reasonable to compare the Benghazi incident, the vetting of abused tax exemptions by the IRS, or the Justice Department’s leak investigations with the Watergate crisis? Or is it all just trumped-up hysteria? To answer those questions, it helps to remember what Nixon and his gang actually did to America – and why they were driven out of Washington and, in many cases, sent to prison.
In these circumstances, a quick history lesson seems vital. For those who have forgottten or don’t know, Watergate is the name of an apartment complex near the Potomac River in northwest Washington, D.C., where then-President Nixon’s henchmen staged a “third-rate burglary” of the Democratic National Committee headquarters on a June night in 1972.
But Watergate came to stand for a vast agglomeration of gangster conspiracies based in the Nixon White House but spanning the nation. Watergate was a series of burglaries, warrantless domestic wiretaps, illegal spying, campaign dirty tricks, election tampering, money laundering, and assorted thuggish schemes conceived by a large and lawless gang whose leaders included G. Gordon Liddy and the late E. Howard Hunt.
And Watergate grew into a cover-up of those initial felonies with still more felonies, committed by lawyers and bureaucrats who collected cash payoffs from major corporations and then handed out hush money and secret campaign slush funds.
Eventually, Watergate implicated scores of perpetrators, from the right-wing Cuban footsoldiers all the way up to the president, his closest advisors, and his crooked stooges at the highest levels of the Justice Department, the FBI, and the CIA.
Again then, in what sense is the Benghazi tragedy – thoroughly investigated by an independent board, as provided by law – akin to Watergate? How is the IRS effort to vet the tax exemptions of Tea Party groups, which were violating their status brazenly, similar to Nixon’s criminal abuse of the agency to punish his enemies with audits? What makes the Justice Department probe of national security leaks, conducted with valid subpoenas, resemble the secret Nixon White House war against “enemies” in the press, which went so far as trumped-up FCC license challenges and even threats of violence against the Washington Post?
The answers are fairly obvious: None. Not at all. Nothing whatsoever.
And so far as we know, Attorney General Eric Holder hasn’t rung up any Fox News reporter drunkenly at midnight to warn that Roger Ailes is “going to get his tit caught in a big, fat wringer.” But if and when that ever happens, the chance to roll out the Watergate clichés will arrive at last — starting with “Nixonian.”
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, May 30, 2013
“Watergate Revenge”: Republican Psycopaths Yearning To Impeach President Obama Over Benghazi “Cover-Up”
Less than four months after Barack Obama’s inauguration, the right-wing propaganda machine is already promoting the only imaginable conclusion to a Democratic administration that dares to achieve a second term: impeachment. Once confined to the ranks of the birthers, the fantasy of removing President Obama from office is starting to fester in supposedly saner minds.
Certainly impeachment is on the mind of Mike Huckabee, the Fox News commentator who — as a former governor of Arkansas and political antagonist of Bill Clinton – can be expected to know something about the subject. On Monday, he predicted that the president will be forced from office before the end of his term by the controversy over the Benghazi consulate attack last September. According to Huckabee, while the Watergate scandal was “bad,” Benghazi is worse because four Americans died there, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
The proximate cause for impeaching Obama, he suggested, is the “cover-up” of the facts concerning Benghazi. Moreover, he said, if the Democrats “try to protect the president and their party, and do so at the expense of the truth, they will go down.” When “the facts come out,” predicted Huckabee, “something will start” and ultimately the Democrats will lose “the right to govern.”
Presumably Huckabee believes impeachment would be easier than winning a national election. He isn’t alone in ruminating on the removal of a president who just won re-election last November — not on Fox News, anyway. (The ever-crafty Huck hedged by noting, however, that none of this will come to pass if Democrats win the midterm elections next year.)
Meanwhile, former UN ambassador John Bolton, whose cranky pronouncements continue to embarrass responsible conservatives, upped the ante by confiding what Huckabee left out – namely, that like every desperate Republican, he yearns for a Benghazi scandal that will stick. If there was no cover-up, Bolton insisted with characteristically twisted logic, that would prove Obama (the president who dispatched Osama bin Laden) simply doesn’t understand the ongoing threat from al Qaeda. “If it was merely a political cover-up,” he noted with satisfaction, “then there can be a political cost to pay.”
No doubt both Bolton and Huckabee — not to mention Rep. Darrell Issa, whose House Government Reform Committee maintains an ongoing Benghazi probe — plan to charge that cost not only to Obama but to a certain woman who now leads every 2016 presidential poll.
The meager substance of the “cover-up” canard was debunked months ago – and to date nothing has emerged to change those facts. (Indeed, even some of the most gullible denizens of Fox Nation have rejected the attempted frame-up lately.) Were the Republicans interested in constructive change rather than invented conspiracies, they might consult the Benghazi testimony of former general David Petraeus and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as the unvarnished report by former ambassador Thomas Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen.
But defending American diplomats and promoting American prestige are both foreign to the Republican agenda, which is concerned with nothing more elevated than partisan power.
With his far-fetched comparison to Richard Nixon’s disgrace, Huckabee helpfully unveiled a flashing neon clue to GOP psychopathology. The desire for revenge over Watergate, a Republican obsession for decades, was the underlying motivation for the outlandish Whitewater investigations that targeted the Clintons almost 20 years ago. Now, as the Obama presidency continues, America’s political predicament increasingly resembles the worst moments of that era, when the furious derangement that grips the opposition began to emerge in full.
For years we have seen the same campaign to demonize the president, the same systematic obstruction, the same refusal to accept a democratic verdict – and now the same urge to invent high crimes and misdemeanors. The only difference is that the timetable for impeachment – which didn’t commence for Clinton until the end of 1997 — appears to be accelerating.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, May 8, 2013
“Forgotten History”: No, Conservatives, Benghazi Is Not Worse Than Watergate
On Friday, I got into a little Twitter tete-a-tete with Jim Treacher of the Daily Caller over this post I wrote last week, which argued that the reason conservatives are acting as though the aftermath of the events in Benghazi is the scandal of the century is that they’re frustrated that Barack Obama hasn’t had a major scandal, so they’re making as big a deal as possible out of whatever’s handy. What ensued opened my eyes to something I found surprising, though I suppose I shouldn’t have been so naïve. It turns out that many conservatives not only believe Benghazi is far, far more serious than Watergate was, they seem to have no idea what Watergate was actually about or how far-reaching it was. After the number of Treacher’s followers tweeting me with “How many people died in Watergate? Huh? Huh?” reached triple digits (each tweet no doubt considered by its author to be a snowflake of insight), I decided that since the story broke 40 years ago, we all might need a reminder of why Watergate was, in fact, a really big deal.
The first and most important thing to remember is that when we say “Watergate,” we aren’t referring only to the break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate hotel. The break-in was merely the event that triggered the investigations that would eventually reveal the full magnitude of Richard Nixon’s crimes and the crimes committed by many of the people who worked for him. As Jonathan Bernstein has written, for starters, imagine if Barack Obama were suspicious of some former Bush administration officials now working at the American Enterprise Institute and repeatedly ordered Rahm Emanuel to get people to break in to AEI in order to steal files that could be used to embarrass or blackmail those officials. Nixon did that (the Brookings Institution was the think tank in question). Bernstein goes on:
The president’s men, sometimes at Nixon’s instructions, sometimes with his knowledge, and sometimes perhaps without his direct instructions or knowledge but always in keeping with his general orders to his top staff, also planted spies in the camp of Democratic campaigns; broke into Democratic headquarters, photographed documents, and planted bugs; broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to learn things that could be used to destroy his image in the press; attempted to plant left-wing materials in the home of the guy who shot George Wallace; planned to (and perhaps did) selectively leak classified materials about foreign policy in order to hurt the Democrats; forged materials about foreign policy (the death of South Vietnam’s President Diem) in order to plant false stories in the press that would hurt the Democrats; wiretapped government officials; paid a private investigator to tail Ted Kennedy; performed other dirty tricks such as forged letters intended to manipulate the Democratic presidential nomination process (efforts that may indeed have been successful); and other illegal, abuse and unethical actions — this is not a comprehensive list.
Those were the original crimes. What followed was obstruction of justice as the White House, with the active leadership of the president, lied to FBI investigators and grand juries, destroyed evidence, suborned perjury by prearranging false testimony; suborned perjury by paying off witnesses and either promising or at least hinting at the promise of presidential pardons in exchange for false testimony, and using the authority of the presidency to derail and undermine FBI investigators and prosecutors. Again, the president was personally actively involved in all of those things.
The scandal also revealed so many repugnant statements and acts, some of them illegal and some of them not, that I suppose it’s hard to keep them all in your head. For instance, Judeophiles that conservatives have become, they may like to forget that the White House tapes showed Nixon to be a vicious anti-Semite (“The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal”) who ordered his staff to assemble lists of Jews working within the executive branch so he could identify his enemies (the aide who carried out a Jew-counting operation in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Fred Malek, is to this day a major Republican fundraiser). Of course, there was also the “enemies list” of Nixon opponents targeted for harassment; one memo detailed “how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.” Among the crimes planned but never executed, the most colorful has to be G. Gordon Liddy’s plan to murder columnist Jack Anderson. Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping; today he is a popular conservative radio host. Among those who ended up going to prison for their crimes in the Watergate scandal were the attorney general, the White House chief of staff, and the president’s chief domestic policy adviser. The scandal was so damning that facing impeachment and almost certain conviction, the president of the United States resigned.
The point is “Watergate” was not just a break-in. It was a panoply of government malfeasance and outright criminality the likes of which the country had never seen before and will probably never see again.
It is true, as my conservative friends point out, that no one actually died in Watergate, while there were four deaths in Benghazi. Those deaths were a terrible tragedy. But unless some evidence emerges that President Obama or somebody else in his administration, through some act of corruption or misconduct, actually caused those deaths, the deaths don’t raise the magnitude of the “scandal” past that of other scandals that weren’t related to any deaths. For instance, 241 service members Ronald Reagan sent to Beirut were killed in the bombing of Marine barracks in October 1983, but I’ll bet that not one of my angry Twitter correspondents considers that a “Reagan administration scandal” (nor, by the way, did almost any Democrats at the time, rightly or wrongly).
For the record, I agree with Kevin Drum on this point: Let’s go ahead and investigate what happened in Benghazi. If that investigation helps us improve security for our personnel operating in dangerous places, that would be a positive outcome. But let’s be honest: Republicans aren’t worked into a lather about this because of their long-standing passionate commitment to security at our embassies and consulates. They’re hoping that if we keep digging, some kind of nefarious behavior will be discovered, and they’ll be able to use it to embarrass the administration. That’s politics, of course, so it isn’t all that surprising. But that’s all it is. And the idea that Susan Rice going on television and delivering some slightly inaccurate talking points constitutes a “cover-up” on par with the Nixon administration suborning perjury, paying hush money, and obstructing justice in a whole variety of other ways? That’s just insane.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 19, 2012
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 