Deep Shit

via Media Matters for America : Buchanan, Limbaugh, Stein blamed those who “brought down” Nixon for fall of Vietnam, Cambodian genocide

- PAT BUCHANAN: There’s something deadly serious here. People that brought down Nixon also resulted in the fall of South Vietnam, the death of hundreds of thousands of people. … Nixon was brought down by people who were a hell of a lot worse than he was. [MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews, 5/31/05]

Pat Buchanan was a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and has spent years defending his former employer. Then again, moral clarity has never been Buchanan’s strong suit; he once famously called Adolf Hitler “an individual of great courage.” More recently, apparently not having learned his lesson, Buchanan wrote a column questioning whether World War II was “worth it” and wondered, “why destroy Hitler?”

- RUSH LIMBAUGH: Had they not brought down Nixon, we wouldn’t have lost Vietnam. Had [they] not brought down Nixon, the Khmer Rouge would not have come to power and murdered two million people in a full-fledged genocide. [The Rush Limbaugh Show, 6/1/05]

Rush Limbaugh was skittering out of the way of the Draft with an anal cyst. Anyone who has listened to Limbaugh’s program can imagine the dripping scorn he would bring to the revelation that a prominent Democrat had skipped a war over something like that.

- BEN STEIN: When his [Nixon’s] enemies brought him down, and they had been laying for him since he proved that Alger Hiss was a traitor, since Alger Hiss was their fair-haired boy, this is what they bought for themselves in the Kharma Supermarket that is life:

1.) The defeat of the South Vietnamese government with decades of death and hardship for the people of Vietnam.

2.) The assumption of power in Cambodia by the bloodiest government of all time, the Khmer Rouge, who killed a third of their own people, often by making children beat their own parents to death. No one doubts RN [Richard Nixon] would never have let this happen. [The American Spectator, 6/1/05]

Ben Stein, whose father is Herb Stein who chaired the Presidential Council of Economic Advisers under both Nixon and Ford, spent time as an economic policy speechwriter and lawyer for Richard Nixon at The White House and then for Gerald Ford, so he’s defending a former employer. Before that job, he spent a lot of time protesting the Vietnam War.

In November 1980, W. Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, then head of the FBI’s intelligence division, were convicted of conspiring nearly a decade earlier to violate the civil rights of domestic dissidents in the Weather Underground movement. During the trial, Felt testified that he was following standard procedures for government investigations. President Ronald Reagan later issued a full pardon for both men. Felt blamed the prosecution for contributing to the death of his wife in 1984. *

Amid the extensive media coverage of the revelation that former #2 FBI official W. Mark Felt was the secret Watergate source known as Deep Throat, Charles W. Colson and G. Gordon Liddy — former Nixon aides who served prison sentences for their involvement in the Watergate scandal — appeared on numerous network and cable news programs, where they disparaged Felt as unethical, dishonorable, “hypocritical,” and “not a hero.” But several hosts and reporters who interviewed Colson and Liddy failed to disclose Colson’s and Liddy’s roles in the scandal and their resulting convictions.

Both Colson and Liddy were convicted as criminals for their involvement in the Nixon White House’s campaign of “dirty tricks,” which Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered with the help of information from Felt. Colson, special counsel to President Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice for his role in the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, one of the many crimes linked to the Nixon administration during the Watergate investigations. (Ellsberg was responsible for leaking the Pentagon Papers to Congress and the media.) Colson subsequently served seven months in prison in 1974.

Liddy, a former FBI agent, helped plan the burglary of the Democratic National Convention headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington while on the payroll of President Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign. He was ultimately convicted for his role in the break-in, as well as for conspiracy in the Ellsberg case and for contempt of court. He served 4 1/2 years in prison.

Face it, Nixon brought down Nixon. Those of you who aren’t old enough to remember (or who weren’t born yet), don’t be swayed by these people who now try to put a hero’s badge on Nixon. Nixon was a crook, contrary to his denials and the illegal pardon Ford gave him (you can’t be pardoned from something you haven’t been convicted of). Nixon took an oath where he swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the U.S. and he broke that oath. Nixon wouldn’t even have been president without his own “deep throat” in the form of J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI and closet transvestite, who had, for years, been feeding Congressman Nixon all kinds of secret and insider info on the goings on inside the Beltway.

But besides all that… while the media is having their two week long frenzy over Deep Throat, they’re not talking about Tom DeLay, the Downing Street Memo, the War in Iraq, or even this Interactive Primer on American Interrogation. Nah, that would be too damned important and serious to talk about. It won’t sell. And the truth isn’t credible anymore, is it?