Evening to All!

I well remember the summer of 1973, when my 12 year old self watched over the ironing board wherein my mother was ironing clothes with my on again off again help, in the den of our family home, as the old Packard Bell broadcast Senators Ervin and Baker co-chairing the Watergate Committee. I can still hear Sam Ervin's charming Piedmont brogue in my mind's ear, along with Howard Baker's piercing question, "What did the President know, and when did he know it?!"

The parallels with the Seditionist Sociopath are eerie, but certainly Trump was and remains far, far worse than Nixon by leaps and bounds.

I disagree with Heather about Ford's pardon of Nixon. The healing that was so necessary in the immediate wake of Watergate would not have occurred without the pardon, and in the political culture of the time that was far more mature and enlightened than today's, there was no need to bring Nixon to a more penal form of justice, as history had already adjudged him guilty. To fall from the most popularly re-elected President in modern history to the first and only to resign in disgrace was punishment enough. Further, all elected officials knew it, and took the lesson accordingly. The post Watergate Congress was one of the most productive in our history, and the election of Jimmy Carter a mere two years later moved the Country even further forward.

Of course, four years after our Nation's bicentennial, then came the deluge.

Somewhere in the ancient Persian desert, Carter's failed hostage rescue attempt crashed along with---unbeknownst to him and us at the time---the very concept of forward progress, as America, awash in patriotic diversion and nostalgia for the never was, chose Reagan and regress.

I would add one point that is oft missed in the Watergate saga. The unanimous opinion in U.S. v. Nixon was 8-0, not 9-0. That was because then Associate Justice William Rehnquist having previously worked in the Nixon Justice Department, had readily and unquestionably recused himself from the proceedings.

Today, Justices No Clearance Clarence and Sullen, Sanctimonious Sam Alito are so disdainful of basic democratic decency and their own professional responsibilities that they refuse to do so.

And we are now left, as Fitzgerald so famously stated, to "beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past".

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