Nixon’s Men
The Nixon apologists are telling us something.
The names of Pat Buchanan, Ben Stein, G Gordon Liddy, and Chuck Colson. They stand out because they worked for Nixon… in some cases, were actually intimately involved in the Watergate crime. The others — the partisan hacks of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin — push them aside.
The puzzling thing about G Gordon Liddy: why is he a voice reverberating on the airwaves with an occasional jab on cable news? In the end, isn’t he just an incompetent burglar?
Chuck Colson: was he really re-habilitated in prison?
It’s almost a cliche to say that Bush’s level of corruption is worst than Nixon’s. That may miss the point altogether. Nixon, and his sidekick Spiro Agnew, didn’t have the smoke and mirror contraptions that the RNC-machinery of today possesses. There’s something about G Gordon Liddy’s presence on the radio that tells ua half the story.
Or the idea of Oliver North holding forth with a Fox News tv show.
I mention Spiro Agnew because of his diatribes against the “liberal media”. Here is the great coup of the “Conservative Movement”. Notice the last cover of the National Review. A picture of a toilet. Caption “Insert Mainstream Media’s Reputation Here.” The reference to the Newsweek article, and retraction on the dumping of Koran into a toilet at Guantanamo Bay. Never mind that the US has now admitted, at the very least, urine has been splashed onto Korans (and mind you, of the troubles at Guantanamo, this is the least of the problems), a significant part of the electorate believes Newsweek is greatly off-based, and are currently hemming and hawing to a position of needle-work: “They splashed urine on them… they didn’t place it in a toilet!”
“Where is today’s Deep Throat?”, the proverbial “some” are now asking. The answer to that question is immediately trashed in the right-wing echo chamber upon entry into the public sphere. Scott Ritter is a child molester. Joseph Wilson is a partisan hack. And if it’s an anonimous source: (a) considered “rumour mongering”, (b) liable to be politicl trickery working for the powers that be, ala the inner-workings of the Koran in Toilet story (the Pentagon let it be published, mind you) or, quite possibly, Bush’s National Guard memos. (The effect is so fogged up, if you place yourself into a particular political corner, that you’re going to cry “Fake!” when memos regarding the political opportunities of the Terri Schiavo case are released to the public… thus enjoy the stupdified blogosphere!)
Rumours? The weight given to rumours depends entirely on what channels they come out of. Drudge reports on them — they must have some weight to them!
And PBS is a liberal media machine that needs to be balanced out. Never mind you can’t really find any examples except for Bill Moyers… who, incidentally, was the closest thing we had to what Woodward and Bernstein were if you chose to believe the hype.