CSotD: What do we know, and when did we know it?
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This isn't the best morning to be running this blog. The politics are coming hot and heavy enough that I can't in good conscience simply feature funny comic strips, but everything remains so ill-defined that it's hard to offer more than, as Winslow does in today's Prickly City, a cookie.
Well, there's nothing wrong with Fig Newtons, in moderation.
I had an interesting conversation with elder son the other day. He's in his mid-40s and so remembers a world without Facebook and such, and suspected, correctly, that living through Watergate was different than this, starting with the fact that things unfolded slowly and not so constantly in our faces.
As it happens, Watergate came along around the same time he did, so his mother and I may have been a bit distracted: I graduated a month before the break-in, he was born a month after the Washington Post disclosed that a check had turned up tying the burglars to the Committee to Re-Elect.
More to the point, it was simply a scandal up to the point when John Dean testified a year after the break-in, and, even then, it remained a scandal until Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the tapes, at which point it started to look like something might truly come of it.
But even then it was another year before Nixon resigned.
There were commentators defending him in the media and legislators defending him in Congress almost to the last minute, and, until the Supreme Court ruled that he must turn over the tapes, it wasn't at all clear how things would turn out.
Even then, it was only probable, not definite.
However, we had no Internet and there was no unbridled talk radio yet.
You could find headlines throughout the day — radio stations had a five-minute break at the top of each hour — but you mostly had your newspaper, two hours of the Today Show, some local news coverage at noon, and then the dinnertime network news programs and the late night local news.
The rest of your day was reserved for eating Fig Newtons.
So everything that happened, happened without — other than those few days of televised Senate hearings — wall-to-wall coverage.
Which doesn't mean we should all just unplug and eat Fig Newtons.
Though we shouldn't neglect them, either.
Juxtaposition of History
(Gib Crockett, 1973)
(Jeff Danziger, 2018)
Nixon certainly suffered from hubris, but still operated within the boundaries of a professional politician with a genuine, if misguided, desire to serve the nation. He earned the name "Tricky Dick" through a pattern of spinning and exaggerating and targeted revelations of dubious provenance, but he rarely flat-out lied and, when he did, it was fully intentional and for a specific purpose.
Certainly, if he had said he wanted to testify before the Senate Committee, he'd have done it. But he didn't want to, and, while Gib Crockett may have cocked a suspicious eyebrow on behalf of an increasingly suspicious public, we didn't expect him to sit in that chair and spill his guts.
If he had, he might well have tried to parse the truth and ended up outsmarting himself, as Bill Clinton did when he tried to define "sex" strictly as "sexual intercourse."
Even a clever lawyer can be, as they say, too clever by half.
But calling the chance to be interviewed by Mueller a "perjury trap," as many, including Clay Bennett, have, is perhaps taking the concept too seriously: It's hardly setting a trap when it doesn't require any sort of devious planning.
If Trump lied about his involvement with Russia or his money laundering, that would be understandable. But he lies about everything, including easily verifiable things like the ratings for his State of the Union Address.
(S)ince I doubt that "stupid," "vulgar" or "childish" are elements that trip the 25th Amendment, I'd like to get him under oath — doesn't matter on what pretext — and ask him three questions.
Any three.
Color of the sky, name of the first president, what he had for breakfast.
I'm sure it would yield at least one and perhaps three openings to impeach him for the same thing Bill Clinton was hauled up on.
Juxtaposition of the Day
We don't know what exactly is in the Nunes memo, but Tom Toles ventures a guess based upon the general spirit of the thing, while, over at the New Yorker, Ellis Rosen offers a more precise preview of its content, minus a few inconsequential redactions.
As I said at the top, it's just too early to be projecting exactly what's going on. We may know more today, it may drift through the weekend to Monday.
But neither of these guesses is likely far from the truth: The memo is intended to undermine the investigation and is selectively written to justify the president. You don't need a leak or even a Magic 8 Ball to know that.
It's the "so what" that matters, and the "so what" is that, in an age of conspiracy theories, even a clearly delusional fraud becomes a deadly weapon.
Ruben Bolling nails it, and, as ridiculous as this scenario is on the surface, he's completely right on a metaphorical level: Trump is employing the OJ defense of simply denying the obvious and counting on loyalties to pull him through where evidence, logic and common sense will not.
There were, and continue to be, Nixon loyalists who believe Watergate was no big deal, that everyone does it, that it was all a witch hunt by the Democrats and the liberal press.
But by the conclusion of Watergate, their protests and excuses fell largely on deaf ears, because we didn't have unbridled talk radio and the group insanity of the Internet to rev things up.
So have a cookie.
But then gird up and get back in the game. He who gets hurt will be he who has stalled.
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