J. D. Vance wants you to believe white people got Reagan elected in 1984 but not Nixon in 1972, among other fantasies

In any case he's going with "we're more like Nixon than Reagan".

Alrighty then.

I think they'll be a LOT more like Nixon after November.

Watergate a Story of How the Deep State Took Down Nixon

VP Vance, Nixon Library

 

It's not a story, it's a statement of an opinion: "Watergate is a story ...".

 

Like the remark about whites, the Deep State remark is just another one-off Vance burbles more than he argues.

 

Some call this knowing how to get in the headlines, others call it dog-whistling.

 

But let's talk substance instead. 

 

The actual luminaries of the Deep State in 1974 turned out to be Richard Hofstadter's 1964 practitioner of the paranoid style himself, the father of the conservative movement, Senator Barry Goldwater, and a moderate Republican Senator, Howard Baker from Tennessee, Nixon's would-be protector.

 

Goldwater was the one who had to break it to Nixon on August 7, 1974 that once impeached by the House there were not 34 votes to acquit in the U.S. Senate, not even half that, and maybe not even his vote. He was 1974's John Thune of 2026, who doesn't have the votes for Trump's election interference bill.

 

Baker's June 1973 question, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?", asked 53 years ago tomorrow, unintentionally became the opportunity for White House Counsel John Dean to detail Nixon conversations which implicated Nixon in the cover-up of his aides' Baker-styled "rogue activity", the Watergate break-in. 

 

It didn't take long for Baker to realize Nixon also was guilty.

 

At length seven Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee joined all the Democrats in voting to impeach Nixon by July 1974.

 

Had Nixon not taped himself, however, there would have been no Smoking Gun tape from June 23, 1972, which showed that the president ordered H. R. Haldeman to use the CIA to stop the FBI's investigation into the Watergate break-in six days earlier.

 

It doesn't get more Deep State than that. 

 

The release of its transcript on August 5, 1974 convinced everybody that Nixon obstructed justice and covered it up. That's what sent Goldwater & Co. to the White House on August 7th.

 

Nixon announced his resignation the very next day and left office August 9, 1974. 

 

Nobody took down Richard Nixon except Richard Nixon. 

 

By August 1974 66% of the country had joined this so-called Deep State conspiracy against Nixon, which marked an astounding reversal from the 67% who had approved of him in January 1973. 

 

Trump's not far behind Nixon at 58.6% disapproval just one month ago.

 

We'll see what mood the country is in to get rid of him shortly. The November election will be a referendum on this. 

 

A healthy republic repents of its mistakes, and a Christian society accepts that repentance. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Commenter explains Donald Trump to oblivious Marxist at CBS News MoneyWatch who appeals to Richard Hofstadter's passé paranoid style

Here:

IHATEUSERNAMESLIKETHIS April 21, 2016 6:6AM

It's not class resentment.

First you destroyed the way we funded our homes and communities -- the Savings and Loans.

Then you destroyed the ways we collectively bargained -- the unions.

Then you stole the [principal] of the Social Security Trust fund, some 2.7 trillion dollars so it couldn't earn interest and started to act like it was a handout you were giving us.

Then you shipped all the manufacturing jobs to China.

Then you shipped the service jobs to India.

Then you "commoditized" the mortgages on our homes in violation of the long standing "statute of frauds" and put them on the big roulette wheel you call Wall Street.

Then when that scheme failed you bailed out the banks that came up with the fraud and stuck us with the bill to bail them out.

Then you ran the money printing press so fast, so the big roulette wheel could prosper while the rest of us found our money buying less and less.

That is not called class resentment. That is called waking up.

Laugh of the Day: Libertarian Charles Murray says only business elites, the Republican establishment and New Dealers remain true to the American creed!

In The Wall Street Journal, here:

For the eminent political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing in his last book, “Who Are We?” (2004), two components of that national identity stand out. One is our Anglo-Protestant heritage, which has inevitably faded in an America that is now home to many cultural and religious traditions. The other is the very idea of America, something unique to us. As the historian Richard Hofstadter once said, “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies but to be one.”

What does this ideology—Huntington called it the “American creed”—consist of? Its three core values may be summarized as egalitarianism, liberty and individualism. From these flow other familiar aspects of the national creed that observers have long identified: equality before the law, equality of opportunity, freedom of speech and association, self-reliance, limited government, free-market economics, decentralized and devolved political authority. ...

Who continues to embrace this creed in its entirety? Large portions of the middle class and upper middle class (especially those who run small businesses), many people in the corporate and financial worlds and much of the senior leadership of the Republican Party. They remain principled upholders of the ideals of egalitarianism, liberty and individualism.

And let’s not forget moderate Democrats, the spiritual legatees of the New Deal. ... But these are fragments of the population, not the national consensus that bound the U.S. together for the first 175 years of the nation’s existence. ... Operationally as well as ideologically, the American creed is shattered.

---------------------------------

Of all the objections to the essay which leap to mind perhaps the most important objection is the way Murray glosses over the religious interpretation of the formation of the American character in favor of the modernist preoccupation with ideology.

The English Dissenters who helped establish our country from the beginning did so finally out of a frustration born of being treated as second class citizens, for whom the chartered rights of Englishmen were denied on specifically religious grounds. The desire for equal status has to be understood from its Christian setting, not from the arid point of view of a seminar in political philosophy. These Dissenters went on to populate our country along with other Christians who set about erecting a society, not a libertarian paradise where everyone did as he pleased. Built on agrarianism and the local Protestant church, it is hard to imagine a place less conducive to letting people be all that they could be.

The Richard Hofstadter reference is telling. A former communist, the liberal historian was a life-long anti-capitalist who had a reputation as an historian as something of a hack because he relied on secondary sources, ignoring the primary.

As every ideologue knows, when the evidence doesn't support your view, just ignore it.

Maureen Dowd: Hillary's private server a metaphor for the paranoid style

The liberal Pot calling the Conservative kettle black.

Maureen Dowd, here:

"Her strategists worry about surveys showing that voters do not trust her. But her private server is a metaphor for her own lack of trust and a guarded, suspicious mind-set that lands her in needless messes."

Now Add "Shorters" to "Truthers" and "Birthers" in Conspiracy Theory Pantheon

I kid you not:

Another economic warfare tool that was linked in the report to the 2008 crash is what is called “naked short-selling” of stock, defined as short-selling financial shares without borrowing them.

The report said that 30 percent to 70 percent of the decline in stock share values for two companies that were attacked, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, were results of failed trades from naked short-selling.

The collapse in September 2008 of Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank, was the most significant event in the crash, causing an immediate credit freeze and stock market crash, the report says.

In a section of who was behind the collapse, the report says determining the actors is difficult because of banking and financial trading secrecy.

“The reality of the situation today is that foreign-based hedge funds perpetrating bear raid strategies could do so virtually unmonitored and unregulated on behalf of enemies of the United States,” the report says.

For the complete story at The Washington Times, go here.

The paranoid style in America lives to die another day!