How Regan didn’t get impeached over Iran Contra is baffling.
Comment on Why is Kamala Harris being held at such a higher standard than Trump this election?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks agothe lesson he learned from Watergate was that Nixon could have gotten away with it if the media was more sympathetic.
Then we got Reagan, Bush, and Trump, and he proved it.
HessiaNerd@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
He avoided impeachment the same way Clarence Thomas survived his confirmation hearing.
Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neal decided it wasn’t worth pursuing.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
Nixon’s approval rating before resigning was 24% while Reagan only dropped to 43%.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Reagan had already lost a big midterm in '86 and should have been easy to impeach by the incoming Dem majority.
They choose to roll the dice on electoralism instead, and gave the White House to Reagan’s (heavily complicit) VP.
rayyy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Well, yeah, thanks to Fox entertainment.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The media almost singlehandedly bringing Watergate to the average American’s attention was why Murdoch created Fox News. It was created specifically so they could force control of the narrative to their advantage.
And then we allowed every other media corporation to be bought and do the same once they saw it worked so well.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If you really get under the hood of Watergate, it had all the fingerprints of a soft coup. Nixon was a shit and made for an easy fall guy, but also Trumpian in his stubbornness and his refusal to go whole hog on the Cold War. Ford toed the line - installing Bush Sr to clean Kennedy’s liberals out of the CIA, promoting Greenspan and Rumsfield to the Republican inner circle, and tapping the breaks on our openness with China.
There was no real reason to break into the Watergate given that Nixon was beating McGovern in a landslide. But it did a lot of favors for the movement conservatives like Goldwater and Reagan to get Nixon’s ass out on the curb.
The WaPo (a hotbed of spooks even back then) played a big roll in that for a reason. Ffs, Woodward was an agency man going back to his time in Naval Intelligence. He broke Watergate less than a year after joining the paper.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Woodward going on to not reveal Trump’s admission that Trump knew exactly how dangerous COVID was and was purposefully downplaying it until Woodward published his book on Trump couldn’t be anymore revealing of capitulation to power while claiming to speak truth to power.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
He was celebrated as a whistleblower for releasing it long after the news was worth more than court gossip.
The man is the poster child for why American major news media is absolute dog shit. We see the same pattern with Bush Iraq War fuck ups sat on through to 2005. And all the banking scandals squelched during the thick of the OWS protests. And the Theranos woman misdiagnosing hundreds of patients with her hoax machine while parading around as a business celebrity. And the Bitcoin scams hushed up until the biggest players had exited the market.
Whether it’s Bob Woodward or Micheal Lewis or Judith Miller, there’s a cast of these characters who exist to hoodwink people into thinking they have a free press.
TokenBoomer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Now this a conspiracy I can get behind. Love it.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
Not really. The major issue was that the President got caught and there wasn’t a propaganda network out there to drum up support.
Several Republican senators visited Nixon before he resigned because it was too politically costly for them to not vote for impeachment. In contrast, there weren’t political consequences for voting against Clinton’s and Trump’s impeachments.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy got caught. Hunt was an old school pro and close friends with Allen Dulles. He was also directly employed by future Bush FBI director Robert Muller, before joining Nixon’s team. After committing a string of crimes for Nixon, he served a mere 33 months in a low security federal prison.
Liddy served a slightly longer 55, then got a series of sweetheart media deals from his friends in conservative media. He was the top speaker on the college circuit in 1982, three years after leaving prison.
Lead by Goldwater, a major Nixon rival for leadership in the party. Ford was Goldwater’s pick for the VP slot after Agnew resigned as well.
There was a big reward for Lieberman when he voted for impeachment. Gore put him on the VP ticket.
Meanwhile, a handful of Republicans who voted to impeach Trump - most notably Liz Cheney - got primaried out of office.