Why liberals are so pathetically fixated on Watergate

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

https://nypost.com/2017/12/30/why-liberals-are-so-pathetically-fixated-on-
watergate/

From glancing at the headlines (or even at entertainment news), you could
be forgiven for thinking a full-blown Watergate is upon us.

“Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg find parallels to Nixon era,” ran a Dec.
15 headline in The Washington Post. Spielberg has said he made the movie
“The Post” because the dawn of the Trump era was exactly the right time
for an unabashed prequel to “All the President’s Men” that ends with the
Watergate burglary. Hanks added that if President Trump invited him to
screen the movie at the White House, he’d decline and be more likely to
lead an anti-Trump revolution. “We have to decide when we take to the
ramparts,” Hanks said, promoting his new 1971-set film about The WaPo’s
and The New York Times’ decision to print classified deliberations about
the Vietnam War.

Back then, “The Nixon administration tried to stop the story from being
published,” Hanks said. “They took on the First Amendment by saying: ‘You
can’t tell that story, and if you do, we’re going to threaten you.’ That
is going on, of course, right now.”

Actually, the Nixon administration didn’t just “threaten” the media but
via its Justice Department secured an injunction to forbid The Times from
publishing the Pentagon Papers. This is not “going on, of course, right
now.” What is going on is that, like the flabby 59-year-old who can’t stop
telling you how he scored the winning touchdown in high school, liberals
can’t stop reliving the Watergate era. To them, Watergate stands for the
twin milestones, never approached since, of taking out a Republican
president and making heroes out of liberal reporters.

Today, after a year of breathless coverage of what still looks like an
evidence-free Beltway urban legend about supposed criminal collusion
between Donald Trump and the Russians to sway the 2016 election, there is
still no reason to think the president is going to be impeached anytime
soon. And last month a devastating Quinnipiac poll showed 58 percent of
voters disapprove of the way the media covers Trump, 39 percent believe
the media simply makes up stories about the president and only 54 percent
trust the media more than Trump to tell the truth.

The Tom Hanks movie “The Post” is leading the way in a flood of projects
about the downfall of Richard Nixon.Niko Tavernise
“Oh, well!” say lefty activists and their allies in journalism and the
arts. Let’s just make believe.

“The Post” is one of several Watergate-inspired works Hollywood is pumping
out to troll the Trump administration. HBO’s documentary “Newspaperman:
The Life and Times of Ben Bradlee,” debuted this month, while George
Clooney just announced he is developing and executive-producing an eight-
hour Watergate miniseries for Netflix.

Meanwhile, the headlines keep on coming. “Donald Trump is a one-man
Watergate,” ran a story in the Chicago Reader. (This, back in March).
“Worse than Watergate: Trump’s Constitutional Crisis,” screamed a
Huffington Post headline in May. “Trump is in much deeper trouble today
than Nixon was in September 1972,” ran an October headline in Slate. “This
is moving sooooo much faster than Watergate investigation did,” tweeted
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell on Dec. 1. Trump is at a “Watergate moment,”
Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said on MSNBC the same day. John Dean,
the former Nixon White House counsel who helped bring down the
administration, waited until only four months into Trump’s tenure before
making the rounds to tell anyone who would listen (Samantha Bee, the LA
Times, even a Tennessee boys’ school called Montgomery Bell Academy) that
Trump was worse.

For the Trumpsistance, “The Post” is not just an absorbing newspaper
procedural but more like another “Lord of the Rings” outing upon which
they imagine themselves slaying orcs with Frodo and Aragorn. Don’t be
surprised to see them lining up to watch “The Post” in their cosplay
finest — pussy-bow blouses for the Katharine Graham fangirls, 4-inch-wide
ties for the Ben Bradlee wannabes. Except Ian McKellen never encouraged
his fans to think he shared their delusions about actually venturing into
Mordor to do battle with supreme evil.

Hanks is, of course, free to prove me wrong by “taking to the ramparts,”
ordinarily understood to mean participating in an armed insurrection
against tyranny, not just giving speeches on awards shows and interviews
to Stephen Colbert. (Which is the kind of stuff Hanks does even when he
doesn’t think the republic is in danger.)

The truth that Spielberg, Hanks, co-star Meryl Streep and the rest of the
enraged left can’t quite admit (because it would damage their chances of
winning awards) is that Trump’s incessant Twitter attacks on the media may
be unprecedented (and counterproductive, and childish) but they don’t
actually endanger the Constitution and they aren’t impeachable offenses.
There’s nothing in the First Amendment that says, “The president shall
tweet no tweet abridging the freedom of the press by typing “FAKE NEWS!!!”
at duly accredited journalists or even Wolf Blitzer.”

Trump may share President Nixon’s habit of losing his temper, but if being
tantrum-prone were a disqualification from high office we’d have needed a
congressional committee to investigate that lamp Hillary Clinton
reportedly threw at Bill during the Monica Lewinsky crisis.

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large at National Review.


--
Donald J. Trump, 304 electoral votes to 227, defeated compulsive liar in
denial Hillary Rodham Clinton on December 19th, 2016. The clown car
parade of the democrat party ran out of gas and got run over by a Trump
truck.

Congratulations President Trump. Thank you for cleaning up the disaster
of the Obama presidency.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp.

ObamaCare is a total 100% failure and no lie that can be put forth by its
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Obama jobs, the result of ObamaCare. 12-15 working hours a week at minimum
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Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $20 trillion in the eight
years he was in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood queer
liberal democrat donors.