Tag Archives: watergate

We Have 10 Days of Madhouse Politics Ahead of Us

Mother Jones

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With 10 days to go before Election Day, we are FUBARed. Have you heard? There are some emails. They are pertinent to something or other. But nobody has actually read them, so, actually, maybe they aren’t.

They are from Hillary Clinton to Huma Abedin. No, wait, they aren’t. Or maybe they are. No they’re not.

They are duplicates of emails we’ve already seen. No they aren’t. But maybe some of them are. Or most of them.

The FBI was legally required to inform Congress about these emails. No, just the opposite: it was an egregious breach of a longstanding Department of Justice policy of not announcing things that might affect a presidential campaign within 60 days of Election Day.

The emails are “bigger than Watergate.” They’re a nothingburger.

Jim Comey was in a no-win situation. No, he should have waited until he knew more.

Comey had no idea what effect his cryptic letter would have. Don’t be an idiot: he’s been in Washington for decades and knew exactly what effect it would have.

Sure, but he’s a standup guy. No, he’s a Republican hack and he’s trying to affect Republican chances in downballot races.

What an unbelievable cock-up. Are we really going to spend the last ten days of the election eagerly awaiting each new leak from “officials” at the FBI who might know things and might not? Seriously? After this election is over, Jim Comey should resign and then spend the rest of his life in a monastery reflecting on his failings.

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We Have 10 Days of Madhouse Politics Ahead of Us

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13 Conservatives Who Think Benghazi Is Obama’s Watergate

Mother Jones

Last week, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) subpoenaed Secretary of State John Kerry to testify about Benghazi, and House Speaker John Boehner created a select committee to mount yet another investigation of the 2012 attack on the US facility in Libya. It’s the latest effort by House Republicans to squeeze a scandal out of the tragedy. While the GOP’s relentless Benghazi crusade continues, there has been an outpouring of rhetorical excesses, with some conservatives going as far as likening the Obama administration’s response to the attack to the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal.

Appearing Sunday on CNN, Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporter who joined with Bob Woodward to break the Watergate story, said there’s no comparison: “This is not Watergate, or anything resembling Watergate. Watergate was a massive criminal conspiracy led by a criminal president of the United States for almost the whole of his administration. We’re talking total apples and oranges here.” He added, “This is about an ideological scorched-earth politics that prevails in Washington.”â&#128;&#139;

Frank Rich at New York magazine wrote last year that Republicans are pushing the Watergate analogy because they believe Benghazi could be a “gateway both to the president’s impeachment and to a GOP victory over Hillary in 2016.” But they’re running into a problem, Rich noted, namely that “no one to the left of Sean Hannity seriously believes that the Obama White House was trying to cover up a terrorist attack.” The Huffington Post observes that Benghazi is hardly the first Obama administration affair that has driven Republicans to reference Watergate. They’ve wielded this analogy to decry Fast and Furious, the Solyndra controversy, the so-called IRS scandal, and the Department of Homeland Security’s handling of Freedom of Information Act requests. And Republicans have dredged up the Watergate metaphor repeatedly since 2012.

Here are 13 conservatives who have compared Benghazi to Watergate, in chronological order:

1. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.): “I think this is an issue—Benghazi-gate is the right term for this. This is very, very serious, probably more serious than Watergate.” —Fox News, October 1, 2012â&#128;&#139;

2. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.):

3. Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh: “What we’re watching here today is the equivalent of Woodward and Bernstein helping Nixon cover up Watergate. The mainstream media is Woodward and Bernstein. Watergate is Benghazi.â&#128;&#139;” The Rush Limbaugh Show, October 24, 2012

â&#128;&#139;4. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): “You know what, somebody the other day said to me that this is as bad as Watergate. Well, nobody died in Watergate. But this is either a massive cover-up or an incompetence that is not acceptable service to the American people.” —CBS’s Face the Nation, October 28, 2012â&#128;&#139;

5. Fox News contributor Bill O’Reilly: “Richard Nixon denied he had anything to do with a low-level political break-in. If the press had not been aggressive, Nixon would have gotten away with it. And certainly the break-in at the Watergate Hotel was not nearly as important as failing to define a terrorist attack that killed four Americans. President Obama…should have given us the facts weeks ago. He chose not to.” Fox News, November 15, 2012â&#128;&#139;

6. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa): “I believe that it’s a lot bigger than Watergate, and if you link Watergate and Iran-Contra together and multiply it times maybe 10 or so, you’re going to get in the zone where Benghazi is.” —The Washington Times, December 12, 2012â&#128;&#139;

7. Former Arkansas Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee: “This is not minor. It wasn’t minor when Richard Nixon lied to the American people and worked with those in his administration to cover up what really happened in Watergate. But, I remind you—as bad as Watergate was, because it broke the trust between the president and the people, no one died. This is more serious because four Americans did in fact die.” —The Mike Huckabee Show, May 6, 2013

8. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.): “I want to keep pushing because the bond that has been broken between those who serve us in harm’s way and the government they serve is huge—and to me every bit as damaging as Watergate.” The Mike Huckabee Show, May 6, 2013

9. Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas):

10. Former Nixon adviser Pat Buchanan: “The break in at Watergate was a stupid burglary, political burglary, nobody got killed. This is a horrible atrocity. Killing an American ambassador; killing another diplomat; two Navy SEALs; destroying and burning that compound. Driving us out of a part of a country we have liberated. But you are right, the real thing here is the cover-up.” —Fox News, May 9, 2013â&#128;&#139;

11. Rep. Louie Gohmert, (R-Texas): “This administration is engaged in a Watergate-style cover-up, and once we get to the bottom, people in this administration need to know once they’ve been part of doing this kind of cover-up, they just need to know that people went to prison for participating in the cover-up.” —WND Radio, August 3, 2013â&#128;&#139;

12. Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.): “I will say this to my dying day, I know people don’t realize it now, but that’s going to go down in history as the greatest cover-up. And I’m talking about compared to the Pentagon Papers, Iran-Contra, Watergate, and the rest of them. This was a cover-up in order for people right before the election to think that there was no longer a problem with terrorism in the Middle East.” —KFAQ, February 3, 2014

13. Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer: “The email is to me the equivalent of what was discovered with the Nixon tapes.” —Fox News, May 1, 2014

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13 Conservatives Who Think Benghazi Is Obama’s Watergate

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Opposing View: Yes, We Should Keep Adding "Gate" to Every Flap

Mother Jones

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USA Today’s media columnist, Rem Rieder, is tired of the rest of us tacking gate onto the end of every conceivable scandal. Here’s his argument:

It’s not cute. It’s not cool. It’s not clever.

I will give it knee-jerk. And lazy. And oh, so predictable.

But it’s not supposed to be cute, cool, or clever. It’s supposed to be knee-jerk, lazy, and predictable—or, as the rest of us refer to this quality, instantly recognizable. Tomato, tomahto, my friend.

Perhaps recognizing the tenuousness of his case, Rieder adds this:

But there is a more serious reason to show gate to the gate. By awarding the suffix to everything from serious government misconduct to the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast during the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII (surely you remember Nipplegate), you create a false equivalency that ends up trivializing everything.

That certainly was the take of Sam Dash, who served as chief counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee all those years ago. “When people hear this proliferation of ‘gates,’ they feel the press is telling them this is the same as Watergate, and whatever Watergate has stood for has lost its meaning,” Dash told Suzan Revah of American Journalism Review.

I dunno. We’ve been slapping gate on the end of things for 40 years now, and Richard Nixon’s notoriety remains safe. So I don’t really think this argument holds water. Besides, gate actually has a very specific meaning. Watergate was the first big example of scandal as public spectacle during the media age, and because of this gate is generally reserved for spectacles large and small. But it’s not used for things that go beyond the realm of political spectacle. There’s no such thing as Benghazi-gate because that was a tragedy in which people died. Likewise, there’s no Surveillance-gate or Waco-gate. Its use is actually surprisingly specialized.

Still, what if we did all get tired of gate? What would we replace it with? It would be even more boring to just call all these things scandals, and that wouldn’t clearly identify them anyway. But maybe we could poach some other scandal-related suffix? What options do we have? Teapot Dome. Crédit Mobilier. The Plame Affair. Iran-Contra. The XYZ Affair. The Keating Five. Chappaquiddick. The vicuna coat. Let’s try these out to see how they sound as a replacement for Bridgegate:

Bridgedome
Bridgemobilier
Bridgeplame
Bridgecontra
Bridgexyz
Bridgekeating
Bridgechappaquiddick
Bridgevicuna.

It’s hopeless. Teapot Dome is the only one that works—though I’ll confess that Bridgexyz has certain possibilities depending on how you pronounce it. So that’s that. We either keep using gate or else switch to dome. I think we’re better off sticking with gate.

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Opposing View: Yes, We Should Keep Adding "Gate" to Every Flap

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