NEWS REVUE
Putin Shocked! Harry Blocked! Walz Mocked! Nixon Clocked!
This column appeared earlier today in Santa Barbara Current.
“US Tried to get Navalny into Russia Swap—but then he Died” (Yahoo News)
But then he was murdered. Undoubtedly on the orders of mad Vlad Putin. Probably to ensure Navalny could not be part of a swap.
Way to go, Joe!
“Evan Gershkovich Made a Stunning Final Request Before was Freed in the Historic Prisoner Swap” (NY Post)
Evan requested an interview with Putin.
The sign of a true journalist.
(By law, the CIA is not permitted to use journalists as agents, rendering Russian accusations of espionage without merit.)
“Revealed: The Moment Furious Putin is Told 1,000 Ukrainian Soldiers Have Crossed Border in Audacious Surprise Assault” (Daily Mail)
This is what you look like when you’ve overstepped your boundary and the gate keeper exacts a toll you didn’t expect to pay.
“Royal Sources Say ‘Desperate’ Harry & Meghan are Suddenly Keen to Build Bridges with the Palace” (Daily Mail)
My own inside sources tell me that Buck House has but one condition for accepting hapless Harry back into their royal court: Divorce Me-Again.
They believe nothing short of that will allow Harold to be admitted.
“Tim Walz Signed Bill Making Minnesota Sanctuary State for Child Sex-Changes” (National Review)
Turns out, the Kackling Kamel’s running mate is an even bigger whack-job than California’s goofy Gav.
Gender-changing surgery for minors should be outlawed. Period. Anyone sanctioning otherwise is culpable for cruelty.
Tampon Tim (so named for installing women’s sanitary products in male restrooms) was also a staunch guardian of lockdowns during COVID.
One thing I’ve never quite understood: If everyone had to be under house arrest, why didn’t the China bug bite through the homeless community, an unsanitary existence devoid of social distancing?
Even though Minnesota’s government chose to provide a free pass for looting and arson, the rioters, at a minimum, should have been reprimanded for violating Tim’s draconian lockdown.
But under Tim’s rule, you were only allowed out on the streets if you burned down buildings and businesses.
“Squad’s Cori Bush Meltdown After Being Ousted from Congress” (Daily Mail)
“I’m coming to tear your kingdom down!” she shrieked.
Is this the woke definition of grace under fire?
Two down, seven to go.
And Ilhan Omar may be next. (Her primary is this Tuesday.)
We can only pray… for another episode of comic drama.
“X to Close Flagship San Francisco Office” (New York Times)
Yup, the company formally known as Twitter is moving to Texas, as have numerous other California companies such as Charles Schwab, Hewlett Packard and Oracle.
The final straw for Elon Musk was Cali’s new law removing children from parental permission or knowledge with regard to transgender issues.
“Nixon Shouldn’t Have Resigned” (WSJ Opinion)
It was 50 years ago yesterday that Tricky Dick Nixon gave up the White House.
Two years ago, on the anniversary of the scandal that brought him down, I posed in my Santa Barbara News-Press column whether or not Nixon had gotten Watergated by institutional Washington.
Excerpted from that column:
Why did Richard Nixon, on the cusp of easy victory to reelection, risk everything in an illegal attempt to gain access to whatever might have been locked up in Democratic National Committee (DNC) files?
This is the question that continues to vex Washington Post sleuth Bob Woodward.
One could suggest Nixon was paranoid; that he believed his enemies were out to get him (they were, normal in politics, but in his case more intensely); and wanted to know what dirt theyhad on him.
He knew (and so does everyone now) that the 1960 presidential election was stolen out from under him by votes emanating from Chicago’s cemeteries as orchestrated by Joe Kennedy waving a baton at his Prohibition pals in the Mafia. (Earlier, Joe pulled strings in West Virginia to clinch the Democratic nomination for his son.)
Nixon knew the truth —and let it go with dignity.
But it had made him somewhat sensitive to Kennedy campaign tactics and strategy to a point that he became irrationally convinced that another Kennedy—Ted—would announce his candidacy and beat him in ’72 despite Chappaquiddick, where 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne lost her life, drowning in a car the U.S. Senator from Massachusetts abandoned late one night in July 1969 after skidding off a one-lane bridge and landing in the drink.
Yet half-a-century later, if the “why” still vexes Watergate sleuth Bob Woodward, a highly astute and committed student of Washington intrigue, something murkier than paranoia must have been going down.
A product of Whittier, California, Mr. Nixon never signed onto the Eastern Establishment, whose members felt entitled to ownership rights over foreign policy—and U.S. policy in general. (President Lyndon Johnson, half a decade earlier, had not signed on either, but LBJ’s concession was retaining “the best and the brightest”—JFK’s Harvard intellectuals—to steer his presidency, though, their escalation of the Vietnam War might more aptly designate them “the worst and the dimmest.”)
In his quest for intelligence that might aid his imagined campaign against Teddy, President Nixon had already dispatched his snarling Rottweilers—H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and John Ehrlichman—on a fishing expedition to Langley to hook CIA files on the Kennedy Administration’s attempts to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro (an operation still hush-hush back then—along with assassinations in general—having been hatched when Nixon was vice president, inherited by JFK).
Moreover, Nixon was convinced DNC chairman Larry O’Brien had information about bribes paid to himself and his younger brother, Donald, by reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, who had been trying for several years to quash the Atomic Energy Commission’s underground nuclear testing in Nevada (where he lived) due to (valid) concerns about radioactive contamination.
When news reached Nixon about what O’Brien possessed, he may well have panicked, leading to irrational behavior—and rendering him easy prey for a trap.
Hank & the Pratt House Crowd
Enter Henry Kissinger, assigned to the White House (through New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and what Nixon disparagingly called “the Pratt House crowd”) to keep the Nixon White House in check and, as national security adviser (back then a lowly position that Dr. K elevated to the stratosphere), and shape foreign policy, especially after he became secretary of state. (Pratt House, in New York City, is home to the Council on Foreign Relations, a private entity that has been referred to as “the brain trust of the establishment.”)
Kissinger privately referred to his boss as “the meatball mind” and “that madman”—and he fed Nixon’s madness, his paranoia, and insisting that, in the interest of national security, White House leaks must be plugged, whatever laws might be broken in the process.
Hence, at Henry’s direction, a “Plumber’s Unit” was created under John Ehrlichman (run by an operative who liaised between Dr. K and Mr. Ehrlichman) to investigate and patch their leaky pipes.
Enter E. Howard Hunt (ex-CIA), G. Gordon Liddy (ex-FBI), Frank Sturgis (ex-CIA asset) and James McCord (ex-CIA official likely reporting back to CIA)—and their team of Cubans (ex-CIA assets) who had assisted with (what a coincidence!) another rogue operation nine years earlier, say, in November 1963.
Thus began a series of illegal break-ins that foreshadowed Watergate, including the psychiatric practice of Dr. Lewis Fielding to steal his medical file on Daniel Ellsberg, a Pentagon bureaucrat who had blown the whistle on the Vietnam War by exposing “The Pentagon Papers,” which caught the government in multiple lies and failures—and severely embarrassed Dr. K.
It may well be that the real objective of the Watergate break-in was for the Plumbers to get caught red-handed, as in, set up by their own superiors. An anonymous telephone call to the on-duty security guard was all it would have taken.
Well, not entirely. It needed a push to launch it from the back pages of The Washington Post to page one.
Enter W. Mark Felt, Associate Director of the FBI, who, as “Deep Throat,” provided Bob Woodward with tidbits about Nixon Campaign slush funds that paled in comparison to those maintained by Lyndon Johnson and others before him. (Mr. Felt had his own personal gripe, believing he should have been chosen to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, who died six weeks before the Watergate burglary.)
In desperation,Nixon sent new emissaries to Langley to solicit their assistance to counter the onslaught against him. CIA would not comply and refused to get involved, so Nixon fired its director, Richard Helms. But not before telling Helms, “I know who killed John.” (The CIA director did not respond.)
In retaliation, the agency found a way, through Alexander Butterfield, to reveal the existence of a White House tape-recording system, which led to cover-up conversations that, effectively, led to institutional Washington’s firing of Dick Nixon.
So: Was Nixon set up and kissed off by Henry the K? It would certainly answer the vexing question Bob Woodward finds so elusive.
A sidenote: Watergate bequeathed upon society the absurdity of ensuring that every future scandal would be post-fixed with the word “gate”—and that every future secretive source from the inside would be given the moniker “Deep Throat.”
You’re letting Bob Woodward off the hook. He was O.N.I. (Office of Naval Intelligence) with no journalism education, background or experience, tasked by the Deep State as a wet behind the ears cub reporter “hired” by the CIA’s conduit Washington Post. Lt. Bob then “broke” the story of the Century—with Mark Felt as the go-between.
You are correct in concluding the Establishment had to ditch Nixon, our Last Liberal President—but after JFK, assassination was just too messy and suspect.