If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: Watergate was my formative political event. Living through the twists and turns of that scandal consumed a lot of my time as a high school kid. When Tricky Dick resigned, I was in Athens, Greece not Georgia, and attended a spontaneous demonstration at Syntagma Square. It was also a sign that the short-lived military dictatorship had fallen the previous month. Fascists were on the run; freedom was in the air.
It turns out that the 50th Vice President, JD Vance, is a fan boy of the 36th Veep Richard Nixon. Vance works for the most corrupt president in history and identifies with the second most corrupt POTUS:
“Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media,” Mr. Vance said. “It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”
Tricky Dick was also fond of referring to himself in the third person. It’s a trait they both share with the Kaiser of Chaos. He, of course, is his own favorite president.
Vance is on a mission to minimize Nixon’s crimes as a way of minimizing Trump’s crime wave. Tricky JD makes Tricky Dick sound like a piker. He was not: He was a better president than Trump but who wasn’t? By accepting a pardon Nixon admitted his guilt, something his apologists gloss over.
Vance’s recent speech at the Nixon Library was a full-throated defense of Tricky’s corruption and, by inference, that of the Trump-Vance administration.
“I’m actually fascinated by Nixon as a character in history,” Vance said at an appearance this week at the Nixon Library in California. “I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so. As I joked with Robert backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like, the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”
That’s only true of the right-wing media. Unfortunately, it’s grown like kudzu since the Insult Comedian started slapping gold paint on everything in the Oval Office.
There’s more:
Vance continued: “And by the way, 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 and the first Trump administration. There is a parallel.”
Trump 2.0 is so horrible that there’s some nostalgia for the first term when the First Toddler had some adult supervision. They tried not to let him tear up the constitution. Trump 2.0 began with Elon Musk and his woodchipper and chainsaw.
Musk was deposed as volunteer Reich Chancellor but the destruction derby continues. In contrast, Nixon’s first term had some positive accomplishments, most of which were the work of Senate Democrats who pushed Tricky to the left. That ended after his landslide win in 1972. I was in Athens for that as well. The junta was in the saddle and thrilled that Team Nixon-Agnew remained in power. I, of course, was not.
What scandal plagued Republican administration will Team MAGA whitewash next? Team Gamaliel’s Teapot Dome scandal was no big whoop compared to the Trump 2.0 scandals. Will Tricky JD tell us that he identifies with the 29th Veep, Calvin Coolidge? Coolidge, of course, became the 30th POTUS after Harding kicked the bucket. It’s only way Tricky JD will ever become the first executive of this beleaguered country.
Watergate revisionism has been going on since the scandal itself. The author of Nixonland and Reaganland, Rick Perlstein said this about that:
My fellow Americans: you have memories like goldfish. Republicans have always said that – ever since Nixon’s first speech on Watergate in April 1973 about the botched burglary that set the scandal in motion 10 months earlier, when a prominent ally said it was just a prank at a press conference the next day, that the break-in was part of the “usual atmosphere of campaigning”, and the culprits were “not criminals at heart”.
Thus spake Ronald Reagan future president of the United States Of Amnesia.
Let me say this about that was a classic Nixonism used almost as much as let me make one thing perfectly clear. Every time I use either circumlocution, I make the V for Victory sign just like Tricky.
Nixon’s final address to his staff was once the gold standard for bizarre presidential moments.
During Trump 2.0, we have equally, if not more, bizarre moments nearly every day as the Insult Comedian babbles like a toxic brook.
Tricky JD’s speech put the lie in lieberry. Even if he wasn’t worse than Trump, Richard Nixon was a criminal who deserved what happened to him. If he was ousted by the so-called deep state, it was for cause. Even some Republicans took a dim view of the Nixon White House horrors but, much like after the Dipshit Insurrection, amnesia took hold of the GOP. They want us to remember Watergate as a third rate burglary. Rewriting history is MAGA’S jam. My jam is correcting them. At least I got a nickname for the Veep out of this nonsense. Come on down, Tricky JD.
Let me make one thing perfectly clear: Richard Nixon was a crook. So is Donald Trump.
The last word goes to Clarence Gatemouth Brown: