Way back when we foolishly thought that nobody could ever be sleazier, more corrupt, more venal, more foul-mouthed, or more of a small, vicious bully than Richard M. Nixon. Yes. Good times, good times...
ICTT, “The New York Times reporters who published bombshell investigative details from top-secret White House Situation Room meetings are Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.” These are hopefully our Woodward and Bernstein.
“Their reporting—which detailed tense strategy discussions regarding the Jeffrey Epstein files and military decisions involving Iran—sparked major internal leak probes among Trump administration officials, who feared that the highly secure conversations had been secretly recorded.” -Axios
Context: Jen Psaki she wore GREEN 🟢 on the Set Tonight to honor the GREEN 🟢 algae growing in the fetid, still water of the no-longer-reflecting-pool. After trump announced an algae solution with made-up "nano-technology". Earlier today workers were seen dumping gallons of Clorox into trump's algae pool.
Hyperbole: So there was BULL MARKET for Clorox (NYSE: CLX) which is currently trading at $97.51 per share, reflecting a gain of +1.53 (+1.59%) during the regular NYSE session.
Love this! Thanks for the succinct retelling of Watergate. I was about 12 years old the Summer of the hearings. It’s a reminder about how different the congressional and judicial branches are today vs back then when ultimately doing the right thing was ok.
I can understand this interpretation of Ford's pardon; I sure was angry about it at the time. In retrospect, though, it probably did help the country to move past Watergate. By August, 1974, people were also ready to move past the Vietnam War. I don't fault Ford's pardon for giving us Trump. I fault the failure of Republican legislators to do their job, plus a Supreme Court which apparently likes the idea of a unitary executive for some reason.
I agree. I understand philosophical differences but Project 2025 desires to create a Hitlerian form of government complete with replacement theory devices and the movement of wealth into fewest hands. I will admit I haven’t read the document and I must. I was lax too having never read the Pentagon Papers. Probably because I was devoting too much time welling weed, lol. Now I don’t touch it. I want my lungs as clean as possible. But I will examine Project 2025 maybe next up.
Wasn't ready to move on… he was a criminal… and, if in fact the country was ready to move on… ford wouldn't have lost the election… I'm 70 and I'm still mad
My Dad had an office in the Watergate and thieves were stealing his (new) computers. He went to the Security office and said they needed more guards. It was the new hire who noticed the door was unlocked and caught the burglars on his first night on the job. So Dad always said he kept them from getting away with their thievery.
We do not have to wait months for a tape recording to know that the sitting President is a foul mouthed sociopath. Thanks to streaming we get a face full of it every day. The only thing better than streaming is HCR's regular extended quotations of his rambling.
And:
Chances the current SCOTUS would do the right thing? I want to laugh but the anger overcomes my normally bitter sense of humor....
No. No honest cop in the middle of the night. Instead, federal cops invading homes of protestors and filing bogus charges here in Minneapolis literally as I write this. Different world.
Watergate was the beginning of my political awareness. Yes, I had always voted, but I just paid attention to the candidates, and wasn’t exactly an informed voter. When Nixon was threatened with impeachment and conviction, I started paying attention to the nuances in politics. Since then, I worked at the polls in NJ for 35 years, and became an avid reader of political news. Now, I just hope that we will be out from under the criminal regime as soon as possible.
Thank you both. I remember clearly that era even though I was a teenager. My parents taped the front page of the New York Times from the day Nixon resigned to our front door. My father actually giggled while he was doing it.
Flawed, not perfect is at least an order of magnitude better than the Trump & Co packs of depraved sociopaths. Please 86 47 & his capos with a Blue Tsunami. #VoteBlue!
Trump makes Nixon look like a Saint. I was in college in Vermont and part of the youth movement that led to Nixon”s resignation, the end of the Vietnam War and so much more. I wish the youth of today would follow that path and take back our country film this truly evil Administration !
I once heard John Dean say that the difference between Trump and Nixon was that Nixon at least had a sense of shame. After revisiting a lot of Watergate history this month, I think that it might be partly about a sense of shame, but at least as much due to a functioning Republican party in 1974.
I have hope they will. I regret that I was young, uninformed, & caught up in what has been called an era of cynicism after Watergate. Little did we know how the inattention would lead to the escalation since the 80s. Even though I did vote, it wasn't until Bush II that I saw the direct impact & I still naively thought our system would be self-correcting until 2024. I think it's more complicated for young people now when Democrats are also playing political theater, but they are smart enough to figure it out & apathy is NOT an option. We're lucky to be able to still learn from the example of the hard work done by young people that were involved then, like you!
NIXON ON WATERGATE WAS A CHOIR BOY COMPARED TO WHAT TRUMP IS DOING TO THE UNITED STATES.
At the time, I was appalled by the Watergate break in and the subsequent stonewalling and falsifications by Nixon and his gang. I particularly applaud Judge Sirica, Elliot Richardson, and, eventually, the Supreme Court for pursuing the law and jailing about two dozen defendants.
As a member of the Nixon White House Enemies List, initially I was appalled that Nixon was pardoned, while so many others—including Attorney GeneralMitchell—went to jail.
Years later I was delighted that Ford was awarded a Kennedy school Profile in Courage. What Ford did was initially opposed by a great number of Americans. Indeed, what he did, despite the political reaction, was to get America back on a more normal course after extraordinary disruption.
In retrospect, what Nixon did on Watergate was reprehensible, but the court—judiciary and Congress—prevailed.
By contrast Nixon was a choir boy compared to Trump who has flaunted and ignored the Constitution, used the Department of Injustice to execute his revenge against those who pursued the law, and intimidated Republicans in Congress to genuflect to Trump rather than follow their constitutional responsibilities.
America was able to recover rather quickly from the Nixon Watergate nightmare.
At 92 I fear that it will take a number of years to check and then sharply reverse what Trump has done to the Constitution, the judiciary system, and, especially, to the soul of America that I fervently wish that my five grandchildren can inherit.
Never fear! The villain of any age ‘has his day’, but even children know that people deliberately doing WRONG eventually are found out and punished.
It only makes us all appreciate more the very GOOD Presidents the USA has produced, and though it gives a sharp pain to remember the Watergate scandal, the outcome was ‘righteous’, and the current situation will get there, with or without the co-operation of Trump or any of his sycophants.
Right behind you, in fact, two years behind. (We old dudes got to stick together, don't you know . . . My granddaughters are my principal motivators, too.) I was inspired by political science in the fifties, deepened by philosophy and history in the sixties. and morphed into policy science in the sixties as a young Fed, but America, she is 250, and some of the weaknesses we see can be attributed to the fact that the founders could never have imagined an America with billion- and trillionaires, or political parties and a Congress that would become sheep to scoundrels, or communication technologies that would seep voters' capacities to study, ruminate over, and constructively act in "the commons" to the benefit of the whole.
For two years I've devoted myself to making such contributions. I've shared thoughts, reached out to others, and the ZERO response I've gotten to those efforts astonishes me. It makes me think that Trump has wrapped his damned canvas around yours truly, not the Kennedy Center. Sixty copies sent by mail to a like number of Democrat Congressional leaders' Washington offices two months ago have yielded not a single acknowledgment let alone any engagement.
Tant pis, one might say.
What haunts me is that the obvious failure to think large, comprehensively, imaginatively about all the component issues virtually assures America's decline. We have very little time. Remember, it took 12 years to get from the Declaration to the Constitution. Democrats MUST win the midterms (four months plus), complete the requisite oversight hearings making clear the stakes (eighteen more months), win the 2028 presidential election (four more months), capture both houses and start the 121st Congress (2029) and T-H-E-N finally begin the renewal of the Republic for its second 250 years. (All of that cognizant of the fact that such work will be undertaken, not with a clean slate, but under the structures of the Constitution and its provisions for amendment we now have full of all its apparent flaws.)
Thank you, Mr. Wheelock for pulling this out of me one more time . . .
That summer my sisters and I visited our grandfather. He was glued to the television. We had our young children with us. I wish I could find the photo I took showing our grandfather and a bunch of little kids all lined up in the couch watching the hearings.
I wrote my first satire blaming Nixon for inventing streaking where a person stripped naked and ran across campus. I blamed him for distracting the public over the Vietnam war. It was published inthe university of Hartford literary magazine. Not bd for a dumb kid.
stephen miller TELLS trump what to do EVERY SINGLE DAY!
stephen miller IS the President.
trump IS miller's PUPPET!!
trump IS a WEAKLING!
AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT!
But both trump and miller are SO frightened of ALL PEOPLE that they have become very cynical and so they believe that they ARE smarter than EVERYONE else!
BOTH, of course, ARE DEAD WRONG!
They ARE BOTH very very very sick people.
THEIR paranoia WILL be their downfall!! And it CAN'T come soon enough for me!
Way back when we foolishly thought that nobody could ever be sleazier, more corrupt, more venal, more foul-mouthed, or more of a small, vicious bully than Richard M. Nixon. Yes. Good times, good times...
ICTT, “The New York Times reporters who published bombshell investigative details from top-secret White House Situation Room meetings are Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.” These are hopefully our Woodward and Bernstein.
“Their reporting—which detailed tense strategy discussions regarding the Jeffrey Epstein files and military decisions involving Iran—sparked major internal leak probes among Trump administration officials, who feared that the highly secure conversations had been secretly recorded.” -Axios
For all of the garbage Trump has subjected us to, I think that there has been a lot of spectacular journalism in response to it.
Yes, And Clorox Stock was up today.
Context: Jen Psaki she wore GREEN 🟢 on the Set Tonight to honor the GREEN 🟢 algae growing in the fetid, still water of the no-longer-reflecting-pool. After trump announced an algae solution with made-up "nano-technology". Earlier today workers were seen dumping gallons of Clorox into trump's algae pool.
Hyperbole: So there was BULL MARKET for Clorox (NYSE: CLX) which is currently trading at $97.51 per share, reflecting a gain of +1.53 (+1.59%) during the regular NYSE session.
I'm pretty sure it was peroxide! Clorox MIGHT have been helpful, but they were just too stupid to think of that!
Nothing's "highly secure" in this incompetent Swiss cheese administration. Holes and leaks so big you can drive tractors through.
From Bernstein to Epstein.
so true. so brutally, brutally true.
Love this! Thanks for the succinct retelling of Watergate. I was about 12 years old the Summer of the hearings. It’s a reminder about how different the congressional and judicial branches are today vs back then when ultimately doing the right thing was ok.
And, thanks to Ford's pardon of Nixon there were no guardrails to prevent rump for becoming the crook Nixon swore that he wasn't
I can understand this interpretation of Ford's pardon; I sure was angry about it at the time. In retrospect, though, it probably did help the country to move past Watergate. By August, 1974, people were also ready to move past the Vietnam War. I don't fault Ford's pardon for giving us Trump. I fault the failure of Republican legislators to do their job, plus a Supreme Court which apparently likes the idea of a unitary executive for some reason.
I agree. I understand philosophical differences but Project 2025 desires to create a Hitlerian form of government complete with replacement theory devices and the movement of wealth into fewest hands. I will admit I haven’t read the document and I must. I was lax too having never read the Pentagon Papers. Probably because I was devoting too much time welling weed, lol. Now I don’t touch it. I want my lungs as clean as possible. But I will examine Project 2025 maybe next up.
I was in college when he was pardoned… Ford was wrong…
Wasn't ready to move on… he was a criminal… and, if in fact the country was ready to move on… ford wouldn't have lost the election… I'm 70 and I'm still mad
My Dad had an office in the Watergate and thieves were stealing his (new) computers. He went to the Security office and said they needed more guards. It was the new hire who noticed the door was unlocked and caught the burglars on his first night on the job. So Dad always said he kept them from getting away with their thievery.
That is some great synchronicity!
Well, two things:
We do not have to wait months for a tape recording to know that the sitting President is a foul mouthed sociopath. Thanks to streaming we get a face full of it every day. The only thing better than streaming is HCR's regular extended quotations of his rambling.
And:
Chances the current SCOTUS would do the right thing? I want to laugh but the anger overcomes my normally bitter sense of humor....
No. No honest cop in the middle of the night. Instead, federal cops invading homes of protestors and filing bogus charges here in Minneapolis literally as I write this. Different world.
Watergate was the beginning of my political awareness. Yes, I had always voted, but I just paid attention to the candidates, and wasn’t exactly an informed voter. When Nixon was threatened with impeachment and conviction, I started paying attention to the nuances in politics. Since then, I worked at the polls in NJ for 35 years, and became an avid reader of political news. Now, I just hope that we will be out from under the criminal regime as soon as possible.
Thank you both. I remember clearly that era even though I was a teenager. My parents taped the front page of the New York Times from the day Nixon resigned to our front door. My father actually giggled while he was doing it.
That’s funny.
Flawed, not perfect is at least an order of magnitude better than the Trump & Co packs of depraved sociopaths. Please 86 47 & his capos with a Blue Tsunami. #VoteBlue!
Trump makes Nixon look like a Saint. I was in college in Vermont and part of the youth movement that led to Nixon”s resignation, the end of the Vietnam War and so much more. I wish the youth of today would follow that path and take back our country film this truly evil Administration !
I once heard John Dean say that the difference between Trump and Nixon was that Nixon at least had a sense of shame. After revisiting a lot of Watergate history this month, I think that it might be partly about a sense of shame, but at least as much due to a functioning Republican party in 1974.
Oh, and we had a more functional Supreme Court then, too.
No I don’t think Nixon was feeling ashamed. He was I believe ashamed of having gotten caught. And he had no option but resign or be impeached.
I have hope they will. I regret that I was young, uninformed, & caught up in what has been called an era of cynicism after Watergate. Little did we know how the inattention would lead to the escalation since the 80s. Even though I did vote, it wasn't until Bush II that I saw the direct impact & I still naively thought our system would be self-correcting until 2024. I think it's more complicated for young people now when Democrats are also playing political theater, but they are smart enough to figure it out & apathy is NOT an option. We're lucky to be able to still learn from the example of the hard work done by young people that were involved then, like you!
So many won't even bother to vote!
I was a child and didn't understand the politics, but I *did* understand Woodward and Bernstein's heroism in busting that story open. :D
This event is what shaped my political viewpoint as a teenager. And not in a very positive way.
NIXON ON WATERGATE WAS A CHOIR BOY COMPARED TO WHAT TRUMP IS DOING TO THE UNITED STATES.
At the time, I was appalled by the Watergate break in and the subsequent stonewalling and falsifications by Nixon and his gang. I particularly applaud Judge Sirica, Elliot Richardson, and, eventually, the Supreme Court for pursuing the law and jailing about two dozen defendants.
As a member of the Nixon White House Enemies List, initially I was appalled that Nixon was pardoned, while so many others—including Attorney GeneralMitchell—went to jail.
Years later I was delighted that Ford was awarded a Kennedy school Profile in Courage. What Ford did was initially opposed by a great number of Americans. Indeed, what he did, despite the political reaction, was to get America back on a more normal course after extraordinary disruption.
In retrospect, what Nixon did on Watergate was reprehensible, but the court—judiciary and Congress—prevailed.
By contrast Nixon was a choir boy compared to Trump who has flaunted and ignored the Constitution, used the Department of Injustice to execute his revenge against those who pursued the law, and intimidated Republicans in Congress to genuflect to Trump rather than follow their constitutional responsibilities.
America was able to recover rather quickly from the Nixon Watergate nightmare.
At 92 I fear that it will take a number of years to check and then sharply reverse what Trump has done to the Constitution, the judiciary system, and, especially, to the soul of America that I fervently wish that my five grandchildren can inherit.
Never fear! The villain of any age ‘has his day’, but even children know that people deliberately doing WRONG eventually are found out and punished.
It only makes us all appreciate more the very GOOD Presidents the USA has produced, and though it gives a sharp pain to remember the Watergate scandal, the outcome was ‘righteous’, and the current situation will get there, with or without the co-operation of Trump or any of his sycophants.
They are few…THE PEOPLE…MANY!
Right behind you, in fact, two years behind. (We old dudes got to stick together, don't you know . . . My granddaughters are my principal motivators, too.) I was inspired by political science in the fifties, deepened by philosophy and history in the sixties. and morphed into policy science in the sixties as a young Fed, but America, she is 250, and some of the weaknesses we see can be attributed to the fact that the founders could never have imagined an America with billion- and trillionaires, or political parties and a Congress that would become sheep to scoundrels, or communication technologies that would seep voters' capacities to study, ruminate over, and constructively act in "the commons" to the benefit of the whole.
For two years I've devoted myself to making such contributions. I've shared thoughts, reached out to others, and the ZERO response I've gotten to those efforts astonishes me. It makes me think that Trump has wrapped his damned canvas around yours truly, not the Kennedy Center. Sixty copies sent by mail to a like number of Democrat Congressional leaders' Washington offices two months ago have yielded not a single acknowledgment let alone any engagement.
Tant pis, one might say.
What haunts me is that the obvious failure to think large, comprehensively, imaginatively about all the component issues virtually assures America's decline. We have very little time. Remember, it took 12 years to get from the Declaration to the Constitution. Democrats MUST win the midterms (four months plus), complete the requisite oversight hearings making clear the stakes (eighteen more months), win the 2028 presidential election (four more months), capture both houses and start the 121st Congress (2029) and T-H-E-N finally begin the renewal of the Republic for its second 250 years. (All of that cognizant of the fact that such work will be undertaken, not with a clean slate, but under the structures of the Constitution and its provisions for amendment we now have full of all its apparent flaws.)
Thank you, Mr. Wheelock for pulling this out of me one more time . . .
Hendrik And to you!
That summer my sisters and I visited our grandfather. He was glued to the television. We had our young children with us. I wish I could find the photo I took showing our grandfather and a bunch of little kids all lined up in the couch watching the hearings.
I wrote my first satire blaming Nixon for inventing streaking where a person stripped naked and ran across campus. I blamed him for distracting the public over the Vietnam war. It was published inthe university of Hartford literary magazine. Not bd for a dumb kid.
stephen miller TELLS trump what to do EVERY SINGLE DAY!
stephen miller IS the President.
trump IS miller's PUPPET!!
trump IS a WEAKLING!
AND EVERYONE KNOWS IT!
But both trump and miller are SO frightened of ALL PEOPLE that they have become very cynical and so they believe that they ARE smarter than EVERYONE else!
BOTH, of course, ARE DEAD WRONG!
They ARE BOTH very very very sick people.
THEIR paranoia WILL be their downfall!! And it CAN'T come soon enough for me!
VOTE 'EM ALL OUT!!
I have tried to get DC reps to champion the establishment of Frank Wills Day, but there is no stomach for the fight among 'em.
Great story!