Tuesday, April 30, 2019

I remember this in 1972

Nixon was re-elected in '72. John Mitchell was his campaign manager, no longer the AG. He was convicted of his crimes in 1975. Nixon had resigned a year earlier.

I remember how anxious we were to remove Nixon and punish, especially, Mitchell. Nixon had won by the biggest landslide in U.S. history. Two years later he was gone in disgrace. I even remember people who held foreign countries in disdain claiming those foreign countries thought America was mad, because Nixon was so effective in foreign policy. If that sounds like Neal Gorsuch, it's because history rhymes, more and more.

So when I read something like this:
I remember the sense of impatience. But I am old, and now I know how long these things take. The investigation of Nixon moved like a glacier. It now seems like it moved at lightning speed. Congress just returned from recess. Is it coincidence Mueller's letter shows up in WaPo and NYT today? Yeah, I don't think so, either.<
William Barr should be impeached and removed from office, and then disbarred. I have no use for him as a lawyer. But I also reflect on the wisdom of Sweeney Todd: "You are young. Life has been kind to you. You will learn."

It's charming the way some people believe in the awesome power of the System. It's also maddeningly naive.  Watergate took forever. Watergate was over in the blink of an eye. And six years later, we had Reagan. In the end, did we permanently change anything?

Old age and wisdom suck like that. Or maybe it's just my cynicism.
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2 comments:

  1. The Thought Criminal5:13 AM

    In those six years, reading the Boston Globe, a local paper that doesn't exist anymore, The Nation, The Progressive, listening to mostly NPR for non-print, I learned that the media, even the alleged liberal media always, always skewed in favor of Republicans, it had during the 1968 race, it did in 1972, as soon as Carter was in office it was a matter of deriding his Southern origin then blowing up everything from an alleged minor bar incident with Hamilton Jorden, the alleged amours of a couple of the others and the almost always harmless antics of Billy (compare the Trump brood to him) and kicking up minor incidents into "scandals". Then it was Ted Koppel's long series of Republican campaign ads as news and the like and as soon as Reagan was in office, the entire tone of presidential coverage changed to fawning adoration, Jim Angle's Southern Charm gentility replaced the previous NPR White House reporting (odd how Southernness was supposed to be different when presented in that context) and hardly any scandal short of Iran-Contra was worthy of really pressing because the media were to be worried about balance and fairness to the powerful. And that's not going into how the lefty media sandbagged Carter.

    I remember those long, long hearings that led to the Nixon impeachment, I must have listened to just about all of them. I remember being amazed that John Dean was supposed to be so dreamy, I didn't see it. People are idiots if they expect this to happen faster than the election calendar.

    If the United States wasn't a racist military worshiping country - as most are - they should have impeached Nixon on his expansion of the War into Cambodia, a true crime against humanity. But that article of impeachment introduced by Fr. Robert Drinan didn't make it out of committee, as I recall. I don't remember if Peter Rodino voted for it or not.

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  2. Rmj6:34 AM

    The long ago days of moral clarity and rectitude were anything but.

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