Roadtoad
Bufo Caminus Inedibilis
This week was a weird one in the news: First, we learned the identity of "Deep Throat," the secret source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's articles regarding the illegal activities of the Nixon White House. That W. Mark Felt, the number two man at the FBI, was the one who leaked the information is particularly interesting, considering his activities against the Weather Underground, among other groups.
Second, the Michael Jackson trial has now gone to the jury.
As I listen to the commentators on both the right and the left as they discuss this, parallels emerge. It's depressing, to say the least, but it bears mentioning.
To be honest, given my own political leanings, it would almost be perversely appealing to accept the notion that by bringing down Richard M. Nixon, that Mark Felt had some partial responsibility for Cambodia, for the fall of Saigon, (and South Vietnam, of course), that he was somehow responsible for undermining the Constitutional values I thought all Americans shared.
It would also be equally appealing to view Felt as a hero. He brought down one of the most corrupt human beings to occupy the Oval Office, a man E. Howard Hunt came to see as petty, self-serving, almost cowardly. Tom Wicker's views be damned, Richard Nixon was a rat bastard.
Somewhere in the middle, of course, lies the truth.
As we're now learning, Felt was miffed that he was passed over for promotion, and the job was given to L. Patrick Gray. Gray, we later learned, was feeding information to Nixon's staff so that he could beat the investigation into what began as that "Third Rate Burglary" at the Democratic National Headquaters in the Watergate office complex. Felt's motive, if we can believe any of this, is that he was offended by the politicization of the FBI in the wake of J. Edgar Hoover's death.
As a result, he began feeding information to Woodward and Bernstein, and in the end, he wound up breaking the back of the Nixon Administration. The final act was actually played out earlier than most realize, with a meeting set up by Alexander Haig and key Senators, in particular, Barry Goldwater, who told Nixon that he had no chance of beating an impeachment trial.
It needs to be reexamined, because let's face it, Bill Moyers, while he worked for LBJ, pulled nearly the exact same crap that Nixon's flunkie, Donald Segretti, did with the "Rat F***ing" activities of the Committee to Re-elect the President, (CREEP). At one point, so the story goes, a reporter asked Johnson if he'd bugged Goldwater's offices, and employed a dirty tricks crew.
Johnson's answer: "Yes. Next question."
The whole business of the Watergate break-in was next to nothing. Even Hunt, in his book Undercover, reveals that he thought it was a dumb idea. G. Gordon Liddy makes some weird claims about it, but let's face it, the man has become a caricature of the man he once was. What made it a bigger deal than it was is the fact that Richard Nixon could not, and would not, tell the frigging truth!
Haig makes a few pertinent observations, not the least of which is that Nixon would, while discussing possible activities with his staff, set up strawmen, which he would quickly knock down himself, while the staff would listen, and take notes. The goal was to figure out strategies from every angle, and this was his normal procedure, whether it was dealing with political opponents, the opening of diplomatic relations with China, the Paris Peace Talks, or a problem with some overzealous operatives at the CREEP.
Much of this came out in the secret tapes released by the Administration. The problem, though, was that damned Smoking Gun tape, where Nixon suggested that the CIA could chase the FBI off the Watergate investigation.
The problem: Someone actually tried to pull that one off. Not a strawman to be knocked down.
So, we had months of tedious hearings, led by Senator Sam Ervin, (D-NC), (a former segregationist much like Sen. Robert Byrd of WV), and the often repeated, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" The answer, we learned, was that he knew everything, and he was damned determined to make sure that in spite of obstruction of justice, in spite of the cover-up, in spite of the threats against those who opposed him, in spite of the abuse of power by the FBI, and the Secret Service, (the latter arrested a guy who made coffee cups with Nixon on the face of a "two dollar bill" because he was "counterfeiting"), in spite of the mounting evidence of abuse of the office and perjury, he was going to stay in office, that none of this mattered because he was the President.
There were heroes in the Watergate mess, but they aren't Mark Felt, or any of those who ultimately turned against Nixon. In the end, the heroes were people like Howard Baker, Judge John Sirica, Barry Goldwater, and yes, Sam Ervin, who worked with the system, and force Nixon to hew back to what was right, even as he and his staff were determined to undermine what gave them their authority in the first place.
Mark Felt went outside the system. One of the few things said by the Watergate conspirators that I agree with is that Felt should have gone to the Grand Jury with what he knew. Instead, he undercut the Constitution, as he did when he and his fellow agents broke into the headquarters of left-wing radicals. He did no one any favors by doing this, because ultimately, he undercut the Government's strongest cases against the Weather Underground and others, which killed a lot of the efforts to bring violent and dangerous people to justice.
But, we see what it is we want to see. Peggy Noonan wants to believe that Felt caused the Killing Fields, when, in reality, it was a failed foreign policy that began with Eisenhower and became a political and military morass under Kennedy and Johnson, aided and abetted by Ghoul-in-Chief, Robert McNamara. Ann Coulter will have us believe that Felt was a deceptive sneak, but he was every bit as deceptive a sneak when Reagan pardoned him for his conviction for his past offenses. Chuck Colson wants us to remember that Felt should have gone to the Grand Jury if he felt so strongly that the FBI was being politicized, as he should have, but he forgets to mention that it was his office which was involved in the politicization, and that Hoover was no quiet bystander, as we learned from the Red Scare of the 20's, from the McCarthy Hearings of the 50's, and from countless documents which were finally released under the Freedom of Information Act.
As a fourteen-year-old watching all this play out, living in Stuttgart, West Germany, I saw things as black and white. (My dad was the Station Manager for AFN Stuttgart at the time, and the whole staff would show up at the station to listen to Nixon meander on about how he was not a crook. I still remember one of the staffers, S/Sgt Al Rowland, complaining that if he heard any more of that sh**, he was going to be sick; Nixon wasn't fooling anyone but Nixon.) It was hard to understand why my Dad was reacting as he was, a mixture of high comedy and grand tragedy. I sometimes didn't know if he was going to cry as he laughed, or cackle madly in vulgar epithets about the misery of it all.
Ultimately, when Bill Clinton revealed that he couldn't tell the truth, either, particularly about something so petty, (Susan Wright Webber's ultimate ejection of the whole case from third-rate trailer tramp Paula Jones could have been summed up from the bench in a stentorian "GIVE ME A FREAKING BREAK!") I could feel myself start to cackle, too. He could have been a good president, but he was thinking of himself too much, and couldn't give a damn about the Constitution.
Sound familiar?
Much of what we saw in Watergate came about over years. It took years of abuse, most of it subtle, before we saw the excesses in the 1970's. There were no innocents, in many ways, and the revelation that Deep Throat was someone who had thumbed his nose at the Constitution more than once before confirms this. The fact that we cannot trust the media is an outgrowth of this; if the President can lie with impunity, who can say the media can't, either by omission or comission?
We ignored this just as, over the years, we ignored the growing weirdness of the Neverland Ranch. It was known for years that Michael Jackson was sleeping with young boys at his house, but we chose to ignore that, until Jackson settled with one of his accusers.
Now, we've had this rather sensational case, (though, to Jackson's credit, his attorney, Thomas Mesereau, conducted, from what I could see, a very honorable defense), and a few things emerge that leave me troubled.
Not the least of these is that Jackson's accuser's family knew about the earlier settlement. Yet, the mom not only allowed her kids to visit Neverland, from what we've heard, but encouraged it. How do you explain that one?
People see what they want to see. They act based upon what they perceive they need or want. And then it all gets justified later. Felt didn't get his promotion, he acted, called it in the best interest of the FBI, and we're left to pick up the pieces.
Jackson said there's nothing wrong with sleeping with little kids, and that he gives them cookies and milk, and reads them stories. But there's the payoffs, numerous ones from what we've heard, not to mention the near constant activity of attorneys to keep Jackson either out of the wrong limelight, or out of jail. Anyone else would have taken the hint, and called off the sleepovers.
Jackson's accuser's family doesn't seem to be doing much talking, just taking the fifth, but you have to wonder how the mom is justifying accepting trips to Disneyland and other places, the shopping sprees, and the gifts, even when there was evidence that Jackson's interest in her son wasn't entirely platonic.
We see what it is we want to see. We do whatever we damned well want, then justify it all later, as if that clears the bill. The Church has taught us, a quick wave of the fingers, all harm gone, all is forgiven, even as real life reminds us that reality operates on different parameters.
Michael Jackson and Richard Nixon share one thing in common: They're both where they are because of their own egos. They have forgotten that the rules, ultimately, are going to apply to everyone.
In the end, Nixon's epitaph will finally read: "Mistakes were made." That was the closest he ever came to an apology to this nation in his interview with Sir David Frost. I suppose we'll hear the same from Jackson some day.
Whoopdie-sh**.
Second, the Michael Jackson trial has now gone to the jury.
As I listen to the commentators on both the right and the left as they discuss this, parallels emerge. It's depressing, to say the least, but it bears mentioning.
To be honest, given my own political leanings, it would almost be perversely appealing to accept the notion that by bringing down Richard M. Nixon, that Mark Felt had some partial responsibility for Cambodia, for the fall of Saigon, (and South Vietnam, of course), that he was somehow responsible for undermining the Constitutional values I thought all Americans shared.
It would also be equally appealing to view Felt as a hero. He brought down one of the most corrupt human beings to occupy the Oval Office, a man E. Howard Hunt came to see as petty, self-serving, almost cowardly. Tom Wicker's views be damned, Richard Nixon was a rat bastard.
Somewhere in the middle, of course, lies the truth.
As we're now learning, Felt was miffed that he was passed over for promotion, and the job was given to L. Patrick Gray. Gray, we later learned, was feeding information to Nixon's staff so that he could beat the investigation into what began as that "Third Rate Burglary" at the Democratic National Headquaters in the Watergate office complex. Felt's motive, if we can believe any of this, is that he was offended by the politicization of the FBI in the wake of J. Edgar Hoover's death.
As a result, he began feeding information to Woodward and Bernstein, and in the end, he wound up breaking the back of the Nixon Administration. The final act was actually played out earlier than most realize, with a meeting set up by Alexander Haig and key Senators, in particular, Barry Goldwater, who told Nixon that he had no chance of beating an impeachment trial.
It needs to be reexamined, because let's face it, Bill Moyers, while he worked for LBJ, pulled nearly the exact same crap that Nixon's flunkie, Donald Segretti, did with the "Rat F***ing" activities of the Committee to Re-elect the President, (CREEP). At one point, so the story goes, a reporter asked Johnson if he'd bugged Goldwater's offices, and employed a dirty tricks crew.
Johnson's answer: "Yes. Next question."
The whole business of the Watergate break-in was next to nothing. Even Hunt, in his book Undercover, reveals that he thought it was a dumb idea. G. Gordon Liddy makes some weird claims about it, but let's face it, the man has become a caricature of the man he once was. What made it a bigger deal than it was is the fact that Richard Nixon could not, and would not, tell the frigging truth!
Haig makes a few pertinent observations, not the least of which is that Nixon would, while discussing possible activities with his staff, set up strawmen, which he would quickly knock down himself, while the staff would listen, and take notes. The goal was to figure out strategies from every angle, and this was his normal procedure, whether it was dealing with political opponents, the opening of diplomatic relations with China, the Paris Peace Talks, or a problem with some overzealous operatives at the CREEP.
Much of this came out in the secret tapes released by the Administration. The problem, though, was that damned Smoking Gun tape, where Nixon suggested that the CIA could chase the FBI off the Watergate investigation.
The problem: Someone actually tried to pull that one off. Not a strawman to be knocked down.
So, we had months of tedious hearings, led by Senator Sam Ervin, (D-NC), (a former segregationist much like Sen. Robert Byrd of WV), and the often repeated, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" The answer, we learned, was that he knew everything, and he was damned determined to make sure that in spite of obstruction of justice, in spite of the cover-up, in spite of the threats against those who opposed him, in spite of the abuse of power by the FBI, and the Secret Service, (the latter arrested a guy who made coffee cups with Nixon on the face of a "two dollar bill" because he was "counterfeiting"), in spite of the mounting evidence of abuse of the office and perjury, he was going to stay in office, that none of this mattered because he was the President.
There were heroes in the Watergate mess, but they aren't Mark Felt, or any of those who ultimately turned against Nixon. In the end, the heroes were people like Howard Baker, Judge John Sirica, Barry Goldwater, and yes, Sam Ervin, who worked with the system, and force Nixon to hew back to what was right, even as he and his staff were determined to undermine what gave them their authority in the first place.
Mark Felt went outside the system. One of the few things said by the Watergate conspirators that I agree with is that Felt should have gone to the Grand Jury with what he knew. Instead, he undercut the Constitution, as he did when he and his fellow agents broke into the headquarters of left-wing radicals. He did no one any favors by doing this, because ultimately, he undercut the Government's strongest cases against the Weather Underground and others, which killed a lot of the efforts to bring violent and dangerous people to justice.
But, we see what it is we want to see. Peggy Noonan wants to believe that Felt caused the Killing Fields, when, in reality, it was a failed foreign policy that began with Eisenhower and became a political and military morass under Kennedy and Johnson, aided and abetted by Ghoul-in-Chief, Robert McNamara. Ann Coulter will have us believe that Felt was a deceptive sneak, but he was every bit as deceptive a sneak when Reagan pardoned him for his conviction for his past offenses. Chuck Colson wants us to remember that Felt should have gone to the Grand Jury if he felt so strongly that the FBI was being politicized, as he should have, but he forgets to mention that it was his office which was involved in the politicization, and that Hoover was no quiet bystander, as we learned from the Red Scare of the 20's, from the McCarthy Hearings of the 50's, and from countless documents which were finally released under the Freedom of Information Act.
As a fourteen-year-old watching all this play out, living in Stuttgart, West Germany, I saw things as black and white. (My dad was the Station Manager for AFN Stuttgart at the time, and the whole staff would show up at the station to listen to Nixon meander on about how he was not a crook. I still remember one of the staffers, S/Sgt Al Rowland, complaining that if he heard any more of that sh**, he was going to be sick; Nixon wasn't fooling anyone but Nixon.) It was hard to understand why my Dad was reacting as he was, a mixture of high comedy and grand tragedy. I sometimes didn't know if he was going to cry as he laughed, or cackle madly in vulgar epithets about the misery of it all.
Ultimately, when Bill Clinton revealed that he couldn't tell the truth, either, particularly about something so petty, (Susan Wright Webber's ultimate ejection of the whole case from third-rate trailer tramp Paula Jones could have been summed up from the bench in a stentorian "GIVE ME A FREAKING BREAK!") I could feel myself start to cackle, too. He could have been a good president, but he was thinking of himself too much, and couldn't give a damn about the Constitution.
Sound familiar?
Much of what we saw in Watergate came about over years. It took years of abuse, most of it subtle, before we saw the excesses in the 1970's. There were no innocents, in many ways, and the revelation that Deep Throat was someone who had thumbed his nose at the Constitution more than once before confirms this. The fact that we cannot trust the media is an outgrowth of this; if the President can lie with impunity, who can say the media can't, either by omission or comission?
We ignored this just as, over the years, we ignored the growing weirdness of the Neverland Ranch. It was known for years that Michael Jackson was sleeping with young boys at his house, but we chose to ignore that, until Jackson settled with one of his accusers.
Now, we've had this rather sensational case, (though, to Jackson's credit, his attorney, Thomas Mesereau, conducted, from what I could see, a very honorable defense), and a few things emerge that leave me troubled.
Not the least of these is that Jackson's accuser's family knew about the earlier settlement. Yet, the mom not only allowed her kids to visit Neverland, from what we've heard, but encouraged it. How do you explain that one?
People see what they want to see. They act based upon what they perceive they need or want. And then it all gets justified later. Felt didn't get his promotion, he acted, called it in the best interest of the FBI, and we're left to pick up the pieces.
Jackson said there's nothing wrong with sleeping with little kids, and that he gives them cookies and milk, and reads them stories. But there's the payoffs, numerous ones from what we've heard, not to mention the near constant activity of attorneys to keep Jackson either out of the wrong limelight, or out of jail. Anyone else would have taken the hint, and called off the sleepovers.
Jackson's accuser's family doesn't seem to be doing much talking, just taking the fifth, but you have to wonder how the mom is justifying accepting trips to Disneyland and other places, the shopping sprees, and the gifts, even when there was evidence that Jackson's interest in her son wasn't entirely platonic.
We see what it is we want to see. We do whatever we damned well want, then justify it all later, as if that clears the bill. The Church has taught us, a quick wave of the fingers, all harm gone, all is forgiven, even as real life reminds us that reality operates on different parameters.
Michael Jackson and Richard Nixon share one thing in common: They're both where they are because of their own egos. They have forgotten that the rules, ultimately, are going to apply to everyone.
In the end, Nixon's epitaph will finally read: "Mistakes were made." That was the closest he ever came to an apology to this nation in his interview with Sir David Frost. I suppose we'll hear the same from Jackson some day.
Whoopdie-sh**.
