Saturday, September 8, 2018

John Dean: the man who made Watergate happen




Saturday, September 8, 2018

There’s an old song about the death of outlaw Jesse James that refers to his killer as “the dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard.”
In the Watergate scandal, John Dean is the dirty little coward that set up Mr. Nixon.
Dean not only helped establish the burglars that broke in the Watergate Hotel twice but oversaw its operations and became a key figure in the coverup after the burglars (sometimes referred to as The Plumbers) were caught, and while Dean still worked for the White House, secretly manipulating the system from within to shift blame to Nixon. Later, Dean became the principal witness upon which the Watergate investigators based their findings – at times, the only witness—but because Dean was too small a fish to fry, Democrats and media let him get away with it, in order to get at their real target and bring down a president they hated.
So, it is not surprising that almost 50 years later, the Democrats would dust off this old soldier and send him back into the trenches to come after another president the Democrats are desperate to be rid of.
Dean along with Bernstein and Woodward helped create the biggest political myth since the justification of the Union’s war on the South.
Dean became the vehicle that allowed Democrats to unjustly unseat an unpopular president, and to build a myth so completely convincing that Watergate has become the symbol of political corruption recognized world-wide, when in fact it is a myth that rivals Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in a story of political betrayal.
Democrats clearly have brought him out in what appears to be part of their effort to shape Trump into another Richard Nixon, and to implant in the public’s mind the connection between what Democrats used to bring down Nixon with the hopes of making it publicly acceptable to bring down Trump in the same way – as well as to destroy Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court (the way Democrats have tried, sometimes successfully, in the past.)
After all, if the public believed Dean’s bullshit once, maybe the public with media’s help will take his testimony as more than just another Judas sending Trump to Pilate for judgment, and time and myth making Dean more acceptable than he was back in the heyday when nearly everybody saw him for what he was, a rat deserting a ship he helped sink.
What his motivation for appearing before the nominating committee is questionable, since it is unlikely the Democrats can still hold over his head the many other charges Dean’s critics claim he may have been guilty of but was never charged with after he agreed to testify against Nixon.
Geoff Shepard, who worked as legal counsel in the Nixon White House, claims in his book on Watergate that Dean could have faced many more serious criminal charges had he not agreed to testify against Nixon on behalf of the Democrats – often serving as the only witness to many of the crimes Nixon was accused of.
Dean’s appearance at the nominating process is just one more piece in a political chess game in which desperate Democrats hope to derail once more a candidate that does not fit in with their politically correct agenda and part of a campaign to win votes against GOP candidates in the upcoming mid-term elections. By resurrecting the Watergate Myth with Dean and with Woodward, the Democrats are creating a new myth they hope will ultimately bring down the Trump Administration.
Dean and Woodward appearing on the contemporary national scene is a lot like a Civil War reenactment in which Democrats hope to retail the mythological tale of the corruption they came was typical under Nixon and by comparison, made lightning strike twice in comparing Trump to Nixon, desperate to convince the America people of this new lie in order to regain power for themselves.
Dean’s testimony follows closely on the heals of the release of a very questionable book by Watergate warrior Bob Woodward, who along with Bernstein became key pieces in the originally Democratic political coup against Nixon.
But Shepard challenges the accepted doctrine that forms the basis of the Watergate myth, and claims that it was Dean who orchestrated Watergate, and then in a passive-aggressive reversal, reinvented himself to become the chief witness the Democrats used against Nixon, plotting this reversal even while he was still working as a legal advisor to Nixon – to whom Dean gave advise that actually built the Democratic case against Nixon, when others tried to steer Nixon to other courses of action.
It was John Dean, according to Shepard who recruited Libby, the head of the Plumbers, knowing full well and because of Libby’s previous illegal activities in break-ins associated with the Pentagon Papers. It was Dean who eventually approved the third and least drastic of Libby’s plans to go after the Democratic Party ahead of the 1972 election, which included at least two break-ins at the Watergate Hotel, and Dean who helped set up the funding needed for a shitload of dirty deeds associated with this and other members of the Nixon reelection campaign.
Nixon, according to Shepard, thought the break in at the Watergate Hotel was “dumb” because he claimed there wasn’t anything in the Democratic National headquarters worth the effort. At it turned out, the headquarters was used primarily for finding sex partners for prominent Democratic officials.
While Woodward and Bernstein and Democratic backed national media made it seem like the break-in was unusual, break-ins, bugging and other dirty tricks were widely used by the Democrats – which is one of the reason Nixon did not disapprove of them when used against the Democrats. He saw some of the political antics such as sewing confusion in the Democratic camp as getting even for similar tricks the Democrats had used against him.
The fact is LBJ was notorious for bugging his enemies as well as his friends, and Bobby Kennedy, used the Justice Department he headed to investigate and monitor girl friends he apparently dated while married.
Both parties were engaged in many of the same dirty tricks Nixon – according to Dean – authorized all in an attempt to keep or gain political power – and if you look at the tricks Hillary Clinton used to hijack the national Democratic Party ahead of the 2016 election, the dirty tricks didn’t end with Watergate.
But Dean’s testimony along with questionable media reporting managed to build a case against Nixon which he could not exonerate himself from, partly because of misguided loyalty to people he had surrounded himself with, partly because media – as they are doing today – built a cage around him so that any denial looked like an admission of guilt. This allowed Dean to shift blame onto Nixon for crimes Nixon didn’t likely commit.
So, it is only fitting that the Democrats should dust off old relics like Dean and Woodward in order to build their case against another president, hoping to build a similar box around Trump from which Trump won’t be able to escape or at worst, convince the American people to vote down GOP candidates in order to limit the power Trump has if he manages to avoid being taken down by contemporary versions of Dean today.
Democrats appear to believe if they put back in place all the same pieces of the original conspiracy, history might repeat itself.



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