On June 17, 1972 five people were arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic national headquarters in Washington, DC and were subsequently tried and convicted.
Then one of the rat canaries, James McCord, squealed on President Richard Nixon the following March and the Watergate scandal was blown wide open. Nixon was accused of covering up the break-in at Watergate, which was a political black-op strategy to wiretap the Dems, not to get dirt on a call girl operation supposedly operating out of the now infamous apartment complex.
Another rat fink, former White House counsel John Dean, testified at the Watergate Hearings that former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell had actually signed off on the burglary, with the full knowledge of former White House counsels H. R. Halderman and John Erlichman.
All of these crafty jaybirds subsequently did stretches in federal pens, as did former FBI agent and current radio talk show host, G. Gordon Liddy, who helped plan the Watergate break-in. It’s an old ploy: give me a deal and I’ll give you the boss.
That sniveling coward John Dean served up Nixon on a platter and the Commander-in-Chief got the axe. But not for ordering the Watergate burglary or for masterminding it or for even knowing about it. Nixon was the scapegoat for an America that had learned to hate and to hate hard and long and Americans crucified Richard Milhous Nixon for the lesser sin of sweeping the whole nasty incident under the rug. And now, that pseudo-macho, know-it-all Liddy is the king of right-wing haters and shakers everywhere, while the memory of President Richard Nixon remains tarnished forever.
People forget that this was the same President who ended that stupid and hideously wasteful Vietnam War and who parted the bamboo curtain by being the first U.S. President to ever visit China. He was also a strong law-and-order President who was far from being "a crook" and a tough presence in the Executive Branch who helped keep OPEC at bay at a time when that cartel really began flexing its muscles in its effort to hogtie and swindle an entire world. Just ask Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who were both powerless to fight the notoriously greedy oil barons of OPEC. (author's note: Gerald Ford was still living at the time of this blog posting).
More than anything else, the Watergate scandal was a watering hole for the liberal press and a spotlight for left-wing patriots from Maine to California. These were the people who watched “All in the Family” like it was a religious service and who believed that the characters “Meathead” and “Little Girl” represented the visionary spirit of a new America, while they disdained anything Archie Bunker did and said as bigoted and narrow-minded. The new America was now the land of equal opportunity for muck-raking, scandal-mongering and downright hatred and Watergate was the biggest political legacy of the Baby-Boomer Generation. Will we ever own up to that or, like Nixon, just try to sweep it under the rug?
As for me, I don’t really give a hoot. When they impeached Bill Clinton for having a girlfriend in the Oval Office and then didn’t impeach George W. Bush for invading Iraq to end a family feud with the bin-Ladens, I stopped wondering if anyone in government would ever do the right thing again.
Then one of the rat canaries, James McCord, squealed on President Richard Nixon the following March and the Watergate scandal was blown wide open. Nixon was accused of covering up the break-in at Watergate, which was a political black-op strategy to wiretap the Dems, not to get dirt on a call girl operation supposedly operating out of the now infamous apartment complex.
Another rat fink, former White House counsel John Dean, testified at the Watergate Hearings that former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell had actually signed off on the burglary, with the full knowledge of former White House counsels H. R. Halderman and John Erlichman.
All of these crafty jaybirds subsequently did stretches in federal pens, as did former FBI agent and current radio talk show host, G. Gordon Liddy, who helped plan the Watergate break-in. It’s an old ploy: give me a deal and I’ll give you the boss.
That sniveling coward John Dean served up Nixon on a platter and the Commander-in-Chief got the axe. But not for ordering the Watergate burglary or for masterminding it or for even knowing about it. Nixon was the scapegoat for an America that had learned to hate and to hate hard and long and Americans crucified Richard Milhous Nixon for the lesser sin of sweeping the whole nasty incident under the rug. And now, that pseudo-macho, know-it-all Liddy is the king of right-wing haters and shakers everywhere, while the memory of President Richard Nixon remains tarnished forever.
People forget that this was the same President who ended that stupid and hideously wasteful Vietnam War and who parted the bamboo curtain by being the first U.S. President to ever visit China. He was also a strong law-and-order President who was far from being "a crook" and a tough presence in the Executive Branch who helped keep OPEC at bay at a time when that cartel really began flexing its muscles in its effort to hogtie and swindle an entire world. Just ask Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, who were both powerless to fight the notoriously greedy oil barons of OPEC. (author's note: Gerald Ford was still living at the time of this blog posting).
More than anything else, the Watergate scandal was a watering hole for the liberal press and a spotlight for left-wing patriots from Maine to California. These were the people who watched “All in the Family” like it was a religious service and who believed that the characters “Meathead” and “Little Girl” represented the visionary spirit of a new America, while they disdained anything Archie Bunker did and said as bigoted and narrow-minded. The new America was now the land of equal opportunity for muck-raking, scandal-mongering and downright hatred and Watergate was the biggest political legacy of the Baby-Boomer Generation. Will we ever own up to that or, like Nixon, just try to sweep it under the rug?
As for me, I don’t really give a hoot. When they impeached Bill Clinton for having a girlfriend in the Oval Office and then didn’t impeach George W. Bush for invading Iraq to end a family feud with the bin-Ladens, I stopped wondering if anyone in government would ever do the right thing again.
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