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Then we got Reagan, Bush, and Trump, and he proved it.
The media almost singlehandedly bringing Watergate to the average American's attention was why Murdoch created Fox News. It was created specifically so they could force control of the narrative to their advantage.
And then we allowed every other media corporation to be bought and do the same once they saw it worked so well.
If you really get under the hood of Watergate, it had all the fingerprints of a soft coup. Nixon was a shit and made for an easy fall guy, but also Trumpian in his stubbornness and his refusal to go whole hog on the Cold War. Ford toed the line - installing Bush Sr to clean Kennedy's liberals out of the CIA, promoting Greenspan and Rumsfield to the Republican inner circle, and tapping the breaks on our openness with China.
There was no real reason to break into the Watergate given that Nixon was beating McGovern in a landslide. But it did a lot of favors for the movement conservatives like Goldwater and Reagan to get Nixon's ass out on the curb.
The WaPo (a hotbed of spooks even back then) played a big roll in that for a reason. Ffs, Woodward was an agency man going back to his time in Naval Intelligence. He broke Watergate less than a year after joining the paper.
Woodward going on to not reveal Trump's admission that Trump knew exactly how dangerous COVID was and was purposefully downplaying it until Woodward published his book on Trump couldn't be anymore revealing of capitulation to power while claiming to speak truth to power.
He was celebrated as a whistleblower for releasing it long after the news was worth more than court gossip.
The man is the poster child for why American major news media is absolute dog shit. We see the same pattern with Bush Iraq War fuck ups sat on through to 2005. And all the banking scandals squelched during the thick of the OWS protests. And the Theranos woman misdiagnosing hundreds of patients with her hoax machine while parading around as a business celebrity. And the Bitcoin scams hushed up until the biggest players had exited the market.
Whether it's Bob Woodward or Micheal Lewis or Judith Miller, there's a cast of these characters who exist to hoodwink people into thinking they have a free press.
Although, to be fair, this story has at least one comical bent. She was obsessed with those fucking dogs that she did absolutely nothing to care for. Combine that with the fact that she didn't just hoax her patients, she also hoaxed investors. My favorite is knowing at some point she was buttering up Kissinger while those dogs were dropping big steaming piles of shit in the same room. Kissinger nodding along, seriously, while dogshit smell permeates everything.
It's fucking comical how stupid some of the ostensibly smartest and most important people are.
That was the comedy angle. The tragedy angle is that the patients never able to sue, because it was impossible for them to determine if they'd been part of the faulty test group.
Investors got their pound of flesh while folks who were actually harmed were left without recourse.
Now this a conspiracy I can get behind. Love it.
Not really. The major issue was that the President got caught and there wasn't a propaganda network out there to drum up support.
Several Republican senators visited Nixon before he resigned because it was too politically costly for them to not vote for impeachment. In contrast, there weren't political consequences for voting against Clinton's and Trump's impeachments.
E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy got caught. Hunt was an old school pro and close friends with Allen Dulles. He was also directly employed by future Bush FBI director Robert Muller, before joining Nixon's team. After committing a string of crimes for Nixon, he served a mere 33 months in a low security federal prison.
Liddy served a slightly longer 55, then got a series of sweetheart media deals from his friends in conservative media. He was the top speaker on the college circuit in 1982, three years after leaving prison.
Lead by Goldwater, a major Nixon rival for leadership in the party. Ford was Goldwater's pick for the VP slot after Agnew resigned as well.
There was a big reward for Lieberman when he voted for impeachment. Gore put him on the VP ticket.
Meanwhile, a handful of Republicans who voted to impeach Trump - most notably Liz Cheney - got primaried out of office.
How Regan didn't get impeached over Iran Contra is baffling.
He avoided impeachment the same way Clarence Thomas survived his confirmation hearing.
Ted Kennedy and Tip O'Neal decided it wasn't worth pursuing.
Nixon's approval rating before resigning was 24% while Reagan only dropped to 43%.
Reagan had already lost a big midterm in '86 and should have been easy to impeach by the incoming Dem majority. With 55 seats, they could even talk about conviction.
They choose to roll the dice on electoralism instead, and gave the White House to Reagan's (heavily complicit) VP.
Well, yeah, thanks to Fox entertainment.