Some things enter the history books and, like the air we breathe, are accepted without thought or further discussion. Right now the Left is trying desperately, and with some success, to portray the treatment of terrorist prisoners as torturous and evil. That is how legends are created.
So when “Watergate” is invoked, people who were not even alive during the 1960s imagine that the Republic was saved from overthrow by Woodward and Bernstein. And it’s all a crock of shit.
Forgive the vulgarity, but I was there and lived through that crime. What happened was a coup all right, but a Left wing coup that overthrew a duly elected President by people in powerful positions who hated Richard Nixon ever since he entered public life with a hatred not seen until the frenzy of hatred found on the Left today for George Bush.
What beings on this rather dismal bit of reminiscence? I visited a new (for me) blog today adamyoshida and found someone who put some thoughts in perspective.
Read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:
It took me a few days to get together my thoughts about the revelation of Deep Throat. My first reaction was anger – but then it struck me that it was rather uncharitable (and probably unnecessary) to wish a swift death upon a senile 91 year-old man. My second reaction was indifference – it’s all so long ago, well before I was even born. My third reaction was to return to my first – whatever this man is today does not change what he was and what he did. Whoever W. Mark Felt is today, I hate him for what he did and I wish him, and his family which hails him as a hero for what he did, nothing but the worst.
Of course, I’m sure to be taken to task for that by that certain percentage of the population who believes that hatred is an unnatural emotion and that, somehow, God demands we forgive those who not only fail to repent their sins – but who seek to profit from them. Decent people have every reason to hate W. Mark Felt and what he did. They have every reason to hate a man who can probably be held directly responsible for many of the ills which befell this country in the last three decades.
[snip]
Without Watergate, there’d have been no defeat in Vietnam. Absent what happened to Nixon, the Congress wouldn’t have been able to cut off aid to the South Vietnamese. A free South Vietnam would endure to the present day. Absent the fall of South Vietnam, Pol Pot would probably have never been able to take over Cambodia and murder millions there.
Without Watergate there’d have been no Jimmy Carter and, hence, no Iranian Revolution (or at least none like we’ve known). It took a leader of special incompetence to lose Iran as Carter did. Without Carter in the White House, there’d probably have been no Soviet invasion of Afghanistan either. It’s questionable if, without those events, there’d ever have been a rise of Islamism like we have seen. Almost certainly, there’d have been no 9-11.
Without Watergate, there probably wouldn’t have been an Iran-Contra: because, at heart, Iran-Contra was simply a Democratic effort to recapture glory days of Watergate. And without Watergate and Iran-Contra there’d probably have been no Clinton Impeachment which was, at least in part, vengeance for those earlier events. The whole of the nation’s political culture would be different (and probably better) as a result.
And what was it all for? Was Watergate so bad?
Not really. It wasn’t much different than anything that past national leaders had done and it was motivated by a sincere impulse – to defend the nation against war opponents who were behaving traitorously and basically fighting upon the side of the enemy.
Anyone who can get some distance from the subject (and examine an unbiased account or two of the situation) can easily get to the place where Watergate does not bother them. It was really a minor affair – stupid to be sure – not something to bring down a President and send him off in disgrace.
The ironic thing is that, ultimately, it seems that Nixon wasn’t paranoid after all: they were really out to get him. The media, the establishment, the liberals, and the bureaucrats – they all engaged in a vast conspiracy with a single purpose: to get Richard Milhous Nixon.
Step back and look at Watergate. It’s a textbook example of a Witch Hunt. Forget McCarthy – if you want to see a Witch Hunt, look at Watergate.
McCarthy went after actual enemies of the United States and of the Constitution. And he did so by legal means. He did so against vast opposition from the establishment. He didn’t seek to deprive anyone of their political rights, he merely opposed subversives in the government.
Compare that with the actions of Nixon’s opponents. They illegally leaked information in order to create a frenzy. They used distorted information, and at that time nearly unlimited influence of the mainstream media, in an effort to turn the public against a President that they had just overwhelmingly supported. They used the threat of draconian jail sentences to turn people against the President in their efforts to get Nixon. They used every means within their power, both legal and otherwise, in their effort to get President Nixon.
Whenever I think of Richard Nixon, I become tremendously sad. Here’s a perfect example of a good man – a moral man – literally destroyed by the evil and insidious power of the left. A leader who always sought to do the best for his country brought low, and nearly hounded into his grave, by the treason-loving left. What a terrible fate to befall such a great man.
What a tragedy it is that a drug-abusing adulterer like John F. Kennedy is remembered as a sainted martyr while Richard Nixon, a man whose struggle for his country’s good lasted his whole life, will be reviled by generations of schoolchildren who will be indoctrinated with lies about an evil President and crusading reporters.
So it is that I cannot find it in my heart to forgive W. Mark Felt for his crimes or to wish him well. So far as I’m concerned, he can go straight to hell and, with any luck he’ll be getting there sooner rather than later.
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