I’m not one to overuse Rush Limbaugh-esque I-told-you-so-isms, but I never, for a fraction of a second, believed the Russia collusion story. That is the degree to which my contempt and disregard of the Democrat machine and so-called mainstream media had grown over the roughly fifty years since the Watergate scandal broke.
Now it turns out that everything President Trump told us about the corrupt effort to destroy his presidency may (allegedly) be true.
I never believed a word of the garbage narrative that will go down in history as the Russia Collusion Hoax. Don Lemon, Anderson Cooper, Jim Acosta, and the rest of the failures at CNN may be too busy examining the contents of the White House toilets to report on the Durham filings, but that won’t make them go away.
Knowing how everything is spun to the left—and Limbaugh had a lot to do with solidifying my understanding—very early on I was able to dismiss out of hand almost anything Time, the broadcast alphabet networks, or my hometown newspapers in Oakland, California, and Portland, Ore., said. Because pretty much anything they reported on, including the weather, was larded with manipulative poison and falsehood.
It is a bad situation, but a good way to approach major media, thank you.
Looking back, I was aware of the general scope of the Watergate investigation and hearings because the foreman of the Berkeley home renovation crew I worked on blasted those hearings from a worksite radio every day. Frankly, at age twenty-two in 1973, I was more interested in what The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin were up to. But you couldn’t escape what was going on, and the nightly news, which was the only televised national news, licked its chops over the scandal every night.
My impression of the Watergate break-in was how ludicrous it seemed. Inept “burglars” on a mission to dig up dirt at the Washington offices of the DNC. Nixon’s attempts to scuttle the investigation, his foolish bunker mentality; might he have survived if he’d come clean from the start? Worse: he would have won the election of 1972 anyway. He went on to crush McGovern even though the scandal had broken. The actions of his operatives at Watergate and beyond were never needed.
Despite my callow disinterest in what seemed like the nasty, small-ball politics of the day, one sad, enduring image stuck with me: Nixon, turning to wave before boarding the helicopter that would fly him into the tragic aftermath of his presidency.
The years after Watergate were a blur of political ineptitude, Ford and Carter. Several years after the Democrats and their media accomplices brought Nixon down (with help from Nixon himself), the man Californians had twice elected governor, Ronald Reagan, would bring me out of the cold and into the Republican trenches.
In retrospect, Watergate seems again like a stupid, botched, almost adolescent foray into political subterfuge. It can be honestly said that the cover-up was worse than the crime, even though, yes, it is unethical to break into offices and rifle through files for the purposes of opposition research. The humanity.
Some have called the Russia hoax the biggest political scandal since Watergate. That’s undeniably true, but in terms of the level of corruption and subversion, old Nixon’s dimwitted fiasco pales in comparison.
Hillary Clinton and the Deep State bureaucracy have (allegedly) delivered to us a grand example of political subterfuge and operative sabotage done right. Clinton bought and paid for it, and the Deep State ran with it without the due diligence you’d expect from a county dogcatcher. They calculatedly devised, and protractedly disseminated falsehoods in an attempt to destroy a candidate and duly elected president. The operative logic—and prepare to hear this from pundits on both sides of the aisle—was that Trump is so bad that any means necessary were/are justified to stop him and/or remove him.
Maybe they’ve been caught in the act, and maybe they haven’t. Perhaps individuals will be held accountable; probably, in the current balance-of-power environment, they won’t.
The Russia hoax and all of its salacious fictions didn’t quite work, if you believe that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election. But no one can deny that they pulled out all the stops, both with the collusion hoax and the implementation of some extremely questionable electoral tactics. The fact remains that we don’t have a President Trump anymore, at least not until 2024.
I think of Rush Limbaugh, and how, on worksite radios throughout the 1990s and 2000s, he educated me on the absolute cutthroat capabilities of the left.
In Heaven, there is no pain, no suffering, no want. There are no demonic plots.
Nixon, in his grave twenty-two years, though reelected, botched his effort.
Here on Earth, Ms. Clinton, though she lost, has (allegedly) shown us how to do demonic right.
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