Blame It on Woodward & Bernstein
If you’re older than, say, 60, you will be able to recall a time when many newspapers were considered conservative. Yes, Virginia, there was a period in American history when someone sharing my politics could actually write for or serve on the editorial board of an American daily.
If you’re older than, say, 60, you will be able to recall a time when many newspapers were considered conservative. Yes, Virginia, there was a period in American history when someone sharing my politics could actually write for or serve on the editorial board of an American daily.
It all changed in the mid-70s when a couple of reporters named Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein who were working for the Washington Post were approached by a bureaucrat who wished to bring down the Nixon administration. Once they were able to convince managing editor Ben Bradlee to let them pursue the story and he was able to convince the paper’s owner, Katharine Graham, to publish it, the writing was on the wall.
Almost overnight, Nixon was on the way out. The reporters, on the other hand, had a book, “All the President’s Men,” on the best seller list and would soon be depicted in an Oscar-winning motion picture. And all they had really done was to basically take direction and dictation from the mysterious snitch they referred to as Deep Throat.
The only downside for either of the hacks was that whereas Woodward was depicted by Hollywood’s favorite dreamboat, Robert Redford, Bernstein got stuck with Dustin Hoffman, the shrimp with the enormous shnoz.
I can imagine Bernstein pleading with the studio executives, begging to be portrayed by someone like Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson or Jeff Bridges. “It doesn’t have to be a Jew. Really, I’m not all that observant. I even work on the High Holidays. How about James Caan? I hear he’s Jewish.”
The weird thing about the political scandal is that it was so unnecessary. Nixon was destroyed because he had okayed the break-in of the DNC’s headquarters at the Watergate and either stonewalled or lied about it.
The unanswered question to this day remains why Nixon’s re-election team bothered. He was a sure thing in 1972, as borne out by the fact he defeated George McGovern by 18 million votes and carried the Electoral College 520-17, the worst drubbing since FDR crushed Alf Landon 523-8 in 1936.
It made about as much sense as Ohio State trying to steal Yale’s game plans before taking on the Bulldogs or the Road Runner’s breaking into Wile E. Coyote’s war room to find out what he just ordered from the folks at Acme.
But the worst thing that happened wasn’t that Nixon, the man who, together with Henry Kissinger, decided to invite China to join the so-called community of nations (and we’ve all seen how well that’s turned out), was driven from office. No, the very worst thing is that thousands and thousands of left-wing college students who would have normally become social workers, psychiatrists or permanent wards of their parents, all decided to become journalists. Thanks to Woodward and Bernstein, journalism had become the mecca for those who couldn’t become rock stars because they didn’t know how to play electric guitars or sing through their nose.
In the history of the world have there ever been so many hypocrites as presently exist in Washington, D.C., and the Silicon Valley?
In Congress, you have hundreds of legislators calling President Trump a tyrant because they insist he ignores the Constitution. For their part, the only sections of the Constitution they even recognize are the first two Amendments and they’d love to get rid of both of them.
In the Silicon Valley, you have a platoon of nerdy billionaires who keep calling for higher taxes while, at the same time, having accountants on retainer whose only job is to make sure their corporate and personal tax bite is as tiny as humanly possible.
When not evading taxes, they can be counted on to whine as loudly as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about income inequality. That’s in spite of the fact that Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon and the Washington Post, could serve as the poster boy for income inequality.
The man makes $8,961,187-an-hour. That’s not a typo; he makes nearly nine million dollars an hour. Or to put it another way, $150,000-a-minute, which translates to $2,500-a-second.
On the other hand, an Amazon employee making $15-an-hour would need to work 8-hour days for about 204 years to make what Bezos makes in an hour…even an hour when the schmuck is sleeping.
I certainly hope that President Trump is able to call off the lockdown by May 1st, as seems to be his plan. Otherwise, even with the $2.2 trillion bailout, a lot of the 17 million unemployed Americans are likely to remain that way.
I had hoped that once he got done lobbying for Obamacare, we would have heard the last of Rahm Emanuel’s creepy brother, Ezekiel.
But, thanks to the coronavirus, he’s once again popping up on my TV screen, each time making me wonder if I should be using any of those sanitizers on the glass.
He almost seems to be chortling about the possibility of the lockdown continuing for 18 months until a vaccine is produced and tested. No doubt, once again, visions of death panels are dancing merrily in his skull-like head.
Watching him the other evening, it struck me that if Hollywood ever decides to re-make “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” without the animation, Ezekiel Emanuel would make a perfect Doctor Doom and he could play the part sans makeup.
NBC is in business with China, but their news division would have you believe that Donald Trump is the one responsible for the coronavirus deaths in this country, going so far as to insist that the only reason he has promoted the possible curative powers of the anti-malaria drug, hydroxychloroquine, is because he has invested in it, even though they know it’s a lie. What we do know is that NBC is always looking to make a profit, whereas the President has spurned his salary, which after three years and three months amounts to a tidy $1.3 million, choosing to donate it to, among other things, a caregiver program for military veterans, the maintenance of a Civil War site, a program to raise awareness of the opioid crisis and a science and math-oriented camp for kids.
I already knew that prior administrations had handed over the production of penicillin and antibiotics to the vile Chinese Communists, but until the other day I had been unaware that we are also totally dependent on our major geopolitical enemy for vitamin C and aspirins.
I guess the upside is that China has no reason to invade us. Thanks to people named Clinton, Bush and Obama, this country was only too happy to hand over everything China could possibly have had on its wish list.
Patrick Miano, a Vietnam War veteran, wrote to say that he didn’t have a problem with people who wanted to avoid serving. “But what I couldn’t tolerate were people telling me I was stupid for going. If they told me getting wounded ‘served me (or the other vets) right,’ I cursed them out and gave them 10 seconds to get out of my sight.”
Although for reasons beyond my control I wasn’t drafted, I was glad I didn’t have to go to Vietnam and risk being killed or maimed in another of America’s stupider wars, but that was when my politics began to change.
Although it took a few more years before I changed my registration from Democrat to Republican, I took it as an insult if people referred to me as a Liberal. Back in those days, you see, it was still possible to make a distinction between the two.
Today, even using the Palomar Telescope, you couldn’t spot an iota of difference between a Democrat and a Liberal.
And anyone who points to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders as proof that the difference exists simply hasn’t been paying attention.
