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The lessons of Watergate

What did Republicans learn from Watergate? I'm here to explain:

  • Bipartisan investigations are very bad things. Following Iran-Contra, it became obvious that they were very, very bad things.
  • Partisan investigations are great! They are highly effective at damaging the opposition and should become a routine tool of Republican administrations.

On the 50th anniversary of Watergate it's good not to be naive about what it ultimately meant. It was responsible for royalty-gate; Whitewater and all its offspring; Benghazi; Hillary's phone; Hunter Biden; and so much more. Thanks a lot, Dick.

30 thoughts on “The lessons of Watergate

  1. clawback

    Eh. Pretty sure they would have figured out all that stuff anyway.

    In any case, it seems they didn't learn it so well, seeing as they passed up the chance to gum up the Jan. 6 proceedings, ceding the whole thing to the Democrats.

  2. LowerDecker79

    After Roger Ailes died, I read that the lesson he took from Watergate was that Nixon's presidency would have survived if there was a conservative media apparatus to support him.
    50 years later...

  3. akapneogy

    If only Dick were a more consummate, more brazen crook. He was like the GOP hemming and hawing and stuttering to express its inner id while the golden one waited in the wings.

    1. mudwall jackson

      wikipedia has catalogued more than 260 uses of "gate" as a suffix in connection with some sort of scandal. the list includes attachments to beer, sleep, fart and dildo, but no royalty. beats the poop out of me.

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        Gotdamn William Safire is an oleaginous fucking stooge for Nixon himself & Dicky Mil's legacy. He began calling any scandal in Washington, regardless how picayune, a gate, to minimize the actual crimes of his patron's regime.

        He basically did a moral relativism/secular humanism... but from the right.

        1. akapneogy

          Maureen Dowd had an office next to Safire's. She says she learnt a lot from him. Sometimes, reading her recent columns, I think she's trying to unlearn a bit.

          1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

            LOL.

            Sure, she never averred Shrillary Climpton's imminent 1997 indictment as Billy Saf's did, but she definitely is a wordplay-drunk Democrat scandalmonger like her mentor.

    2. cld

      I think that was where Political Action Committees would buy warehouse loads of any wingnut's book to artificially promote it onto the bestseller list, then give them away or send them to a landfill.

  4. Jasper_in_Boston

    On the 50th anniversary of Watergate it's good not to be naive about what it ultimately meant. It was responsible for royalty-gate; Whitewater and all its offspring; Benghazi; Hillary's phone; Hunter Biden; and so much more.

    Watergate isn't responsible for that. Our Madisonian system is. The formal separation of powers means the legislative branch can investigate the executive branch any time it feels like, for any reason whatsoever, no matter how flimsy or nakedly political.

    Its antiquated and poorly designed constitution is why, among major high income democracies, it is the United States that is so regularly and frequently plagued by these blistering, crippling political crises.

    1. Austin

      Agreed. Understandably, the Founding Fathers both (1) were creating democracy from scratch with no other contemporary examples to learn from and (2) never thought we’d keep the same constitution for hundreds of years, but… they really fucked up in designing our federal government to be able to handle major demographic, economic, sociopolitical and technological changes.

      1. Salamander

        I don't think they anticipated a world as relatively fast moving as we have now. How many months did it take for a ship to carry a message between Philadelphia and London? Then the return voyage for a reply?

        The whole "Senate" nonsense was a concession to the slave states, along with the guns amendment and counting part of their "property" to increase their voting power.

        1. SC-Dem

          Some historical inaccuracy here. The senate and house are the result of the Connecticut Compromise. Connecticut and most other New England states wanted each state to only have one vote; they were opposed to basing representation on population since they thought they were destined to have small populations. States that initially opposed it included NC, SC, & GA as they thought they were destined to be large. I think Mass also opposed (Maine was owned by Mass at the time.)

          By the way, slavery was legal in NY and NJ when the constitution was written.

          Plenty of people were counted at 100% for representation who didn't get to vote: women, children, free persons of color, poor white men, and Indians who lived amongst whites. The 3/5 figure came out of a struggle during the Articles of Confederation period. That Congress apportioned taxes amongst the states based on their share of the total national wealth subject to tax. This was based on the figures submitted by the states and it turned out PA was cheating.

          The founders had a quaint belief that people would move around so that wealth was evenly distributed on a per person basis. So they decided they would figure the taxes on population instead of bogus wealth figures. Southern state argued that the wealth generated by a slave was half or less of what a free person would generate; they clearly had no incentive to do more than they were forced to do. This got argued about and they finally settled on 3/5. When it came to the constitution, there was no desire to revisit the argument.

          In the end, this worked out poorly for the South. The new Federal government never used the Articles of Confederation system of "direct taxes", but instead taxed whisky and imports. If the South had gone along with the North's argument and counted slaves at 100%, they would have come out ahead in the long run.

          1. KenSchulz

            Thanks for this; very interesting.
            Most New England states “were opposed to basing representation on population since they thought they were destined to have small populations.” Well, they were mostly right about that.

    2. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

      I wonder, thought, if that's true, given frequency with which governments in Republic of Korea, Israel, Italy, & a few other places collapse.

      I mean, certainly, Berlusconi's bunga-bunga parties never created the Posobiechian frenzy that Bill Climpton's intimate relationship with Jeffrey Epstein did, but scandal-tinged & -beset regimes are not unique to America.

    3. KenSchulz

      That’s certainly a minority opinion; most people who have given it some thought believe that the separation of powers is a good thing. Anyway, if you think that changing the form of the US government would cure the dysfunction due to economic, social, geographic, ethnic and, above all, racial divisions, you should have another think.
      Westminster systems aren’t immune from chaotic politics - Italy went through years of governments falling every few months; the Netherlands recently went a couple years with a caretaker government as parties were unable to form a new one. Not to mention the ones that have enacted antidemocratic measures and are moving to authoritarian governance.
      I think we would be better off without the Electoral College; and with a more representative Senate, or none at all. But we have the oldest democracy on the planet; we should exercise some care in reforming it.

  5. TheKnowingOne

    Actually, these fit in quite well with the two Republican rules:

    1. We tell them what to do.
    2. They can't tell us what to do.

    Your first observation about bipartisan investigations is a clear application of Rule #2. Your second observation is a strong example of Rule #1.

    This schema also works to explain how R's see no hypocrisy in their reactions to Benghazi on the one hand and Jan 6 on the other. Their reactions to both are in keeping with the Rules, so how can there be hypocrisy? Dr. Eastman's reported comments about how his scheme for overturning elections *should not* be used by VP Harris or any other Democrat but *should* have been used by Pence is similarly covered: He's clearly following the Rules, so how can you call him a hypocrite?

    BTW--I don't want to take credit for this schema of Rules. I came across it in a recent article on Daily Kos, which unfortunately I cannot re-find. But it has explained so much behavior that it has proven useful on every level. Election boards, abortion, SCOTUS decisions, environment, Indian sovereignty, labor law, race, personal pronouns, gun rights--any time you have a Republican present, this is what is running through their head. No wonder compromise is such a bad word for them.

    1. Salamander

      Well stated! Also note that only Democrats are worried about "hypocrisy" -- the difference between what a pol says and what he does. The Republican views words as a way of getting what he wants. It's not a guide to future actions. If you fall for the words and fail to notice the subsequent opposite actions, well then, you're a chump and too bad for you!

      The GQP has successfully cultivated a "base" that will vote for liars again and again and again, and will discount news coverage of what they do while in office as "fake news". They've created a closed system!

      1. MontyTheClipArtMongoose

        You know who should be most upset about Herschel "the Five Personality Man" Walker's secret &/or undisclosed progeny?

        North Carolina litigator, one-term Senator, & Democrat Vice Presidential nominee John "Son of a Millworker" Edwards. If John Boy were a GQPer, he would likely be on his third term as North Carolina governor as part of his redemption arc & a charming rogue darkhorse for president against Donald Trump & Ron de Santis.

        1. akapneogy

          So much Democratic political talent is wasted just because of a little extra-marital hanky panky or a little charming roguery. JFK was the last Democrat to get away with it.

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