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And it just feels all wrong. This is an out and out political witch-hunt by the left. Watergate was a whole different animal.
The good news is that now we have a special counsel who has 100% approval by both Republicans and Democrats, and whose integrity and capability is without reproach - a man who is is completely apolitical with no dog in the hunt. When Mueller is finished we'll know the truth in the matter and we can all move on, whatever the outcome. That's a good thing, right?
And it just feels all wrong. This is an out and out political witch-hunt by the left. Watergate was a whole different animal.
The individual actions can be different, ie breaking and entering vs influence peddling/collusion. The result is trending so similar that being to protect/cover-up the illegalities.
For awhile I was giving the DT people a bit of the benefit of the doubt regarding what they knew about Flynn and probably Manafort, Page and the rest. And DT in particular probably having strong loyal attachments.
But more and more of this stuff seems to be known by the Trump campaign much earlier than originally thought.
That is starting to seem to move closer to cover-up and less of loyalty.
We know the 'faithful' believe Trump's continual lies and missteps should be allowed to go without mention but that just ain't gonna happen. Sorry if having a liar called a liar upsets you.
Trump's no one special, he'll pick what he plants like everyone else.
Upset me? LOL, no, we're watching the left throwing tantrums because they didn't get their way, just as a child throws a temper tantrum when they don't get their way.
I recall Watergate a bit, and the media was all over it when it started to get big. Watergate started out small and became a big story.
The media and Nixon didn't have, uh, a David & Jonathan relationship (to put it mildly), and that went way back in Nixon's career, well before he became President.. So the full-court press against Trump by what used to be called "The Establishment" is sort of similar but more intense and was ongoing from day one. More a feeding frenzy mode. And there is more 'media' these days. Back then there was the networks and the newspapers and that was it.
That being said, when Watergate began to really explode the media, such as it was, did give it A LOT of coverage. I recall the networks actually broadcast the hearings.
Yet things were different, too. Nixon was implicated more in the cover-up, and he did fire the special prosecutor, which really amped-up the controversy. Sort of what happened with Comey getting fired causing a lot more media attention.
In some ways Nixon and his advisors were shrewder than Trump in stonewalling things (it was John Dean that broke that wall). Trump seems to shoot himself in the foot with his big mouth, basically giving fodder to the media. That didn't happen so much with the Nixon White House.
Also, by the time Nixon resigned there was a lot of collateral damage. His VP, Spiro Agnew, had to resign for unrelated corruption issues, and AG John Mitchell had to resign, too.
Also, the issues were somewhat less...weird? There was no implication of a potentially adversarial foreign power meddling in the election. The issue with Nixon was the cover-up not necessarily the burglary.
I should note a big difference in the political environment is that the Democrats held both houses of Congress going into Nixons second term (though as two factions back then, the old Southern/Moderate Democrats were still around, vs the liberal Democrats), so he most likely would have been impeached if he had not resigned.
With Trump, there is a more partisan environment, and the GOP controls both houses, so will stay united behind a GOP president, thus unlikely Trump will be impeached, unless there is some sort of direct evidence of law-breaking by Trump. Open question if this happened. I guess we will eventually find out. Right now just a lot of speculation.
Recall we did have another recent example of impeachment. In Clintons case he didn't do what Nixon did. He didn't resign when impeachment was imminent. Clinton was impeached, but was not removed from office via the Senate trial.
His crime would have been perjury (cf "I did not have sex with that woman!").
There was an excellent, two-hour documentary about Watergate on ABC TV last evening - if you missed it, do try to watch online. It included network coverage from the time, interviews with those involved at the time - and now - and was quite comprehensive and made clear how the break-in snowballed and eventually led to Nixon's resignation. The post-White House interviews with Nixon - and his daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower - were most revealing of both the man's brilliance and his corruption.
I lived through Watergate - I am about the same age as Nixon's daughters - and each day brought new revelations, though it started very slowly. "Deep Throat" and Woodward and Bernstein are true patriots - without them, the magnitude of the corruption and lies and Nixon's direct involvement would never have been publically known.
He even lied to his daughters. My father was a Nixon supporter early on, but when Nixon lied to his daughter Julie when she asked him directly if he was involved, my father just shook his head in disbelief, as for him, this was what most clearly revealed Nixon's lack of character.
Certainly many current lessons to be learned from this American tragedy.
For those who were around during Watergate, how does this Russia probe compare?
I remember Watergate very well.
I voted for Nixon and shortly after his re-election, the rumors were flying about the "minor break-in at the DNC."
From there, it developed slowly. Much more slowly than Russiagate is moving. For a long time, like today's Trumplings, I thought it was a lot of smoke with no flames. Seemed to me the Dems were just being sore losers and that was really all there was to it. I never expected it to grow into the major scandal that it turned out to be.
But as the investigation deepened, more and more things came to light and then it was becoming clear that it was about a lot in addition to the "3rd rate burglary." Still, Nixon wasn't nearly as obsessed with that scandal as tRump is with his. Nixon continued to function and get things done, in spite of the troubles. As we can all see, tRump and the GOP are almost completely paralyzed.
Russiagate is moving at supersonic speed in comparison. And the underlying activity appears to be MUCH more serious than it was back in 1972.
What looks very different this time is this:
Nixon was undone politically and was forced to resign, but that was pretty much the end of it for him. Several of his close aides did end up in prison for their crimes, however.
Whatever tRump is hiding/covering up seems like it could be MUCH more serious. He's scared as hell and acting as guilty as the puppy that peed on the carpet. He's completely consumed. Maybe the activity that he's concealing is serious enough to not only remove him from the White House, but could be so nasty as to topple his family business, as well. And his top aides are scrambling to get high caliber legal counsel. They'll likely need it, from all indications.
Russiagate has a MUCH more ominous feel to it.
I expect Trumplings will react by poo-pooing the whole thing. That'll just make the impact more severe when it finally registers with them.
That's just my take on it. I'm no more than an old geezer who lived through it then and is now a very interested observer. Like I say often in this forum, tRump is very entertaining. Call it Schadenfreude.
As they say, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."
The good news is that now we have a special counsel .. whose integrity and capability is without reproach - a man who is is completely apolitical with no dog in the hunt. When Mueller is finished we'll know the truth in the matter and we can all move on, whatever the outcome. That's a good thing, right?
As FBI director, he appeared before Congress and lied about Iraq's WMD and non-existent ties to Al Qaeda in pushing for the invasion. He tried to link the invasion to 9/11.
It's unclear who he serves in this capacity as special counsel since it's clear he will do and say anything for his boss. He has hired several lawyers who have been contributors to the Clinton campaign in 2016.
Similar in that both are media driven scandals that are not sufficient to warrant impeachment.
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For those who were around during Watergate, how does this Russia probe compare?
