The Stupidest Thing Ever Written About Watergate

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Last edited Fri Aug 8, 2014, 01:48 PM - Edit history (1)

It has been 40 years since Nixon left the White House, mere feet ahead of the peasants with pitchforks.

There are, even today, any number of Nixon apologists **cough**Pat Buchanan**cough** who could have stepped up to the plate to defend Nixon, but on this occasion 10 years after Nixon's resignation, it was Ben Stein who won the prize.

The Stupidest Thing Ever Written About Watergate

Paul Slansky
Posted: 08/08/2014 6:44 am EDT Updated: 2 minutes ago

It has, of course, been widely reported that August 9 marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard M. Nixon's resignation. What has received considerably less attention is that the date also marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of what may well be the stupidest thing ever written about Watergate: an op-ed column for The Washington Post by one Benjamin J. Stein. This was a screed so cretinous that even its author seems to have recognized what an embarrassment it was, if asserting his right as a freelancer to keep the column out of the Post and Nexis archives -- thereby disappearing it from the public records so that if one gleefully remembered how moronic it was and wanted to take an almost obscene pleasure in liberating it from the dustbin of self-censorship and sharing it anew on this festive occasion with as many people as possible, one would have to spend several hours on the phone before finally tracking down someone at a college library that had the Post on microfilm who was willing to find and send the article -- constitutes an acknowledgment of its idiocy.
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All of this -- and so, so much more -- is decidedly mock-worthy, but how does it stack up against Stein's magnum opus, his three-decade-old treatise, "Was Watergate Really Such A Big Deal?" You decide.
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Well, what the hell was it, then? Stein professed cluelessness. "Now, in the light of time, who, who in a hundred million, can say what any one revelation of any Washington Post article was?" Who in a hundred million? "What was one bombshell they exposed? What was one threat to the republic that they caught just in time?"

"What Richard Nixon did that was wrong," the Post explained, "was to surround himself with a group of aides who were unaccountable to anyone but himself, whom he empowered to use the authority of government to break into any place they wished -- an opposition party's headquarters, a political opponent's psychiatrist's office -- to further Mr. Nixon's political interests and personal animosities. Then he and they lied about it and further tried to employ the intelligence agencies of government to concoct an alibi for them; they paid people to lie in federal court about their involvement. And for almost two years, with great contempt for the public and also, incidentally, for their own political supporters who went out on a limb for them, they kept lying -- using the White House Oval Office to lend majesty to the criminal cover-up." So, there was that.

ETA: about finding a library that has the Post on microfilm: no problem. I can easily find that issue and keyboard in the entire op-ed.

[longship]

1. Ben Stein is a complete idiot.

R&

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

2. No, Ben Stein is not "a complete idiot"

He is, however, so much a partisan of Nixon that he was essentially blind to Nixon's real faults.

[MisterP]

3. at least it's not "real patriots faced with pressure faced by sanctimony"