Saturday, November 16, 2024

Watergate redux

 

From the moment Trump declared his candidacy for president in 2015, Democrats tried to recreate their successful attempt to bring down a siting president.

The Watergate scandal became and remains the model they are using, and we expect will be resurrected again once Trump is sworn in as president for the second time.

This is partly why we saw Woodward and other ghosts from Watergate resurrected over the last year to reprise their roles and to firmly cement the idea in the public’s mind that Trump is another Nixon, who needs to be brought down.

Woodward has been celebrated as the greatest investigative journalist of all time, even though it appears that he was merely a tool for the Democrats to unseat Nixon. His role again Trump has been far less effective, partly because a number of people in media have come to question the validity of and the motives behind his activities in regards to Watergate.

Some people believe that Woodward operated with the intention of helping then Senator Ted Kennedy to become president (which fortunately never happened) since it was Kennedy and his team of lawyers that led the committees investigating Watergate (Ted recused himself to avoid public scrutiny of his own misdeeds).

Deep Throat, Woodward’s best source (a deputy FBI director as we later learned) helped propel him to near sainthood and the Washington Post into the most influential paper in the country, even though there were strong editorial ties to the Kennedy family, suggesting collusion.

All this might have gone to naught had not another major player stepped into the mix, providing congress with the legal justification to draft articles of impeachment against Nixon  -- which forced him to resign – even though the legal ruling used was criticized by constitutional scholars.

Hillary Clinton – not yet married to Bill Clinton – argued that a president could be impeached for small crimes, rather than the previously presumed major crimes scholars argued as necessary. She later reversed her position when her husband, Bill, faced impeachment.

Yet, her position on this helps explain why she helped create the Russian Collusion scandal (her campaign paying for a fictious document called the Steele Dossier which created the illusion of a serious crime against Trump needed to justify yet another impeachment. It also explains why the New York Attorney General creatively used election law to upgrade a misdemeanor into a federal crime in order to convict Trump, and perhaps keep him from qualifying as a candidate for office. This may well be the Nixon-like tool Democrats will try to use again to once more try to impeach a president they could not cheat out of an election as in 2020 or beat him in the 2024 election.

Clinton’s role in Watergate may have contributed to her husband’s eventual election as president, and the party support for her as a candidate in 2016, since she like Woodward, did her duty to bring down a president on behalf of the Democrats.

Democrats have no ethics as shown by the current counting of illegal ballots in Pennsylvania in an effort to overturn a GOP victory in the Senate race there. Rules don’t apply, but loyalty to a cause as displayed in Watergate by Woodward and Hillary is rewarded eventually.

So far, the antics have backfired. The NY case exposed the dirty tricks Democrats will resort to in order to retain power, legal or not, and the more they use dishonest means the way they seem to have done with Watergate, the stronger Trump becomes.

 

 


email to Al Sullivan

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