Tricky Dick’s Nemesis

Posted on May 31, 2005 in Accountability

Richard Nixon and the Right wRong spent the years following Tricky Dick’s 1974 retreat from power making up stories about corruption. The myth they promulgated was that every politician did what Nixon did. They pounded it like bass vibrations at a rock concert until all too many people just repeated it: they all do it. They all do it. There is no difference between the parties. There is no difference between the parties.

The Truth: Nixon was, until 2001, the most corrupt president in American history. Today, the man who passed on the inhouse memos that Woodward and Bernstein used to reveal to the world just what Tricky Dick had been doing in the name of keeping his power stepped out of the shadows: the former Number Two man at the FBI, Mark Felt, admitted that he was Deep Throat.

When Nixon was called to account for his dirty tricks, Americans still insisted on the truth from their leaders. As the Greatest Generation and their parents have died off, the more cynical Baby Boomers took a cue from Nixon and began behaving in the same way themselves — in business, on the sports field, in politics. When big scandals hit, the wRong won’t admit to them. When a petty scandal proves exciting enough to strangle an official and prevent forward progress on key issues, you can be sure that the wRong will seize on it and run it until all four legs fall off and the head blows off in a sneeze.

This is why the so-called liberal media wasted more than two years on Monica Lewinsky and have done nothing to call George W. Bush to account for the Downing Street memo. When the wRong creates a scandal, it is as large as a blue whale and as silent as an owl on the wing.

Poor Mark Felt and his family will undoubtably become targets for harassment in the days and weeks to come. It won’t be enough to turn off the television and the radio. He can’t just avoid reading magazines and the newspaper. From past experience, I have learned that the wRong will confront him in public and bring their shrillness to his home.

For they are without mercy or a sense of justice. They have mortal sins to hide and no sense of heroism.

Thanks to Jane Hamsher for this pointer.