JD Vance is right
Yes, you read that correctly. If Watergate happened today it would have just been a 12-hour story. And we can thank one-time Nixon image maker and Fox Propaganda Channel honcho Roger Ailes.
“If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy. … If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”
James Donald Bowman, son of Middletown, Ohio, wasn’t even a glimmer in someone’s eye when Richard Milhous Nixon resigned in disgrace at noon on August 9, 1974.
That came after such notorious “Deep State” actors like Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater told Nixon he would be impeached, convicted and removed from office if he did not step down.
But a knowledge of history apparently is not a requirement to hold higher office in the United States these days, especially for someone like the man now known as JD Vance, a Fauxbilly willing and able to shape shift into any position to please patrons from Peter Thiel to Donald Trump.
And so it came to pass that the man who admitted that he lied about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs, sat before a gathering at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum to praise the 37th President of the United States.
And himself:
“Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media. It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”
It’s a sentiment Nixon would likely return. They certainly share a hatred of the media, a disdain for the Constitution and a willingness to say and do anything to achieve their ends.
And guided by the spirit of Ailes — who rose from a local TV talk show producer to a kingmaker and propagandist by helping to sell a “New Nixon” to voters in 1968.
Vance clearly was either unfamiliar with or lied about the history of an insecure president whose role in the break-in of Democratic Party headquarters on 1972 bears a resemblance to the current Oval Office occupant’s role in the January 6, 2021 insurrection that attempted to overturn the 2020 election results.
He ignored the voluminous Oval Office recordings that captured Nixon spewing racist and anti-Semitic bile and attempting to cover his backside by saying “it would be wrong” to pay hush money to the inept Watergate break-in crew.
The Yale Law School graduate glossed over the fact 40 government officials were indicted or jailed for their role in the coverup that followed the break-in, including former Attorney General John Mitchell. None of whom were pardoned.
Or the role played by leaders of the FBI and CIA, now widely viewed as the much-reviled Deep State Trump and Vance have blamed for efforts to stall “the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
But Vance was absolutely correct in assessing the change in the media landscape as the right-wing led Slow-Motion Coup learned from its failing to protect Nixon and his own media attack dog, Vice President Spiro “Nolo Contendre” Agnew.
Where America once got its news from local newspapers and network newscasts anchored by “the most trusted man in America,” today’s landscape includes a Tower of Babel of voices on social media, podcasts and an alternative network of radio and cable television outlets pumping out what they say is an alternate voice to the “liberal media.”
A a central figure in the growth of that alternate voice was Roger Eugene Ailes, who produced Nixon’s “Man in the Arena” campaign appearances where he answered screened questions from a hand-picked audience; graduated to green-lighting race-baiting commercials for George H.W. Bush’s 1988 election; and then teamed up with Rupert Murdoch to create the Fox “News” Channel.
There is little doubt Watergate — which actually played out over two years after being triggered by a “third-rate burglary” uncovered by two young Washington Post reporters — would have had a different outcome if cable news and social media existed in 1972.
Not to mention if print and local journalism had not been hollowed out by venture capitalists and billionaires purchasing outlets and selling off their assets.
Nor can we ignore the craven indifference of today’s Republican leaders like House Speaker Mike Johnson compared to the courage shown by Goldwater and others who confronted Nixon with hard truths that sycophants like Vance, interim Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Ka$h Patel are unwilling to do.
Here’s the cold, hard truth about Watergate that Vance is trying to erase in service to his ambitions.
“We have more than enough information from the Nixon era to know that there was no intelligence conspiracy against Richard Nixon,” said Timothy Naftali, a historian at Columbia University’s School of International Public Affairs and the former director of the Nixon library. “He brought his house of cards down upon himself.”
And whether the president is named Richard Nixon or Francis Underwood, houses of cards are doomed to fall.
Fauxbilly!!!!