In an early display of Republican mockery of civil rights and democracy, a “wartime” Presidency – in the name of national security -abused the FBI, IRS, and CIA for god knows what real reason.
One assault on democracy happened on this date in 1972 with a break-in, by Republican operatives, of Democratic National Committee headquarters in an attempt to bug the phones. Now of course a wartime Presdent merely gets the NSA to listen in remotely, or would hire Haliburton / Blackwater to do the dirty work.
Those Republicans were amateurs compared to this crop of ^%$%%%^$, as Nixon ringleader John Dean has so eloquently pointed out. Cheney and Rumsfield, who managed to escape the fall-out and prosecutions of the Watergate scandal, managed to improve their game dramatically. Why bug, when you can waterboard?
…, I think on Moyers, made the case that successfully protecting Nixon from impeachment and pardoning him created a meme that impeachment was too ‘over the top’ to be politically to fly with the American public. It also broadened the possibilities of what a president might be able to get away with without real consequences.
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p>Constitution? What constitution?
There is a silly story that, if you put a frog in boiling water it’ll jump right out. But, if you put it regular water and slowly heat it, the frog stays and dies.
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p>The point being that incremental change attracts less attention and works better. Same with gas prices, $1, $2, $3, now $4 gas was gonna be the tipping point that changed behavior forever. Didn’t happen
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p>Cheney and Rumsfield were the bitter end Nixon loyalists who thought he should have burned the tapes, defied Congress and the Courts, called out the Army, whatever, to keep power. He was a wartime President after all.
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p>Sadly, we let these ^$%%^&$$%^& back into power.