Joe Conason (Salon): Nixon's revenge

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Salon.com (Subscription or Day Pass Required)
Dated Friday June 3

Nixon's revenge
The revelations about Deep Throat aren't as noteworthy as the continuing audacity of the former president's apologists.
By Joe Conason

Historical amnesia long ago leached away the meaning of Watergate for most Americans. With the revelation that former FBI official Mark Felt was the secret Washington Post source later known as "Deep Throat," an opportunity arises to examine the criminality that endangered the Constitution under the Nixon presidency and the role of the press in exposing that crisis -- as well as the continuing audacity of the Nixonian criminals, their enablers and their apologists in attempting to rewrite history.

Far beyond a "third-rate burglary" of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, Watergate came to stand for the wide-ranging gangsterism of the Nixon regime. At the bottom were fascist thugs like G. Gordon Liddy, who plotted the black-bag jobs, warrantless wiretaps, illegal spying and campaign dirty tricks, all in the cause of reelecting the president in 1972. In the middle were the Nixon operation's white-collar goons, those lawyers and bureaucrats who collected bundles of cash from corrupt corporations and then handed out the money for secret campaign slush funds and hush-money payoffs. And at the top sat Tricky Dick, along with his White House palace guard and his corrupted appointees at the Justice Department, the CIA and the FBI

Read more.

[Dudley_DUright]

1. Here is a little tidbit from the article I was not aware of

He (Nixon) once tried to persuade his ardent supporter, rightist billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, to buy the Post from the Graham family.

Wow, Scaife has been part of the VRWC for much longer than I realized.

[EVDebs]

2. And nothing has changed.

We've got worse than the Huston Plan with martial law via the FEMA and DHS and the whim of a bureaucrat willing to declare an 'emergency' and shitcan the constitution.

The media still misses the real story.

The CIA still does what it wants when it wants, both foreign and domestically. (BTW, Butterfield was CIA, the burglary was CIA, and you wouldn't have had an impeachment without those tapes-- DeepThroat didn't make that much difference either way).

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

3. The last two paragraphs are the best

That budding pol spent the summer of 1974 in Washington, according to historian David Greenberg, circulating pro-Nixon memos from a phony grass-roots group called Americans for the Presidency, and fighting what he thought of as "the lynch-mob atmosphere created in this city by the Washington Post and other parts of the Nixon-hating media." He had worked so closely with the Nixon campaign's dirty tricksters, and become so immersed in their style of politics, that he briefly drew the attention of the Watergate prosecutors. Indeed, his reputation was so grimy that George Herbert Walker Bush, then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had him investigated -- and then dismissed the accusations despite strong taped evidence against him.

That man is named Karl Rove, and he is now the White House deputy chief of staff, the unofficial boss of the Republican Party and the most powerful political figure in the nation aside from the president himself. He may well agree with Liddy and Buchanan, but such stale polemics cannot engage his attention. He is too busy wreaking Nixon's revenge on the rest of us.

[candy331]

4. Seems he put him on hold till needed for Jr. n/t