From Watergate … To This? – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

As a proud Gen Xer, I’ve always found Watergate to be quite a peculiar scandal. Especially as a kid and a young adult.

Peculiar in the sense that Watergate never really seemed like all that big a deal.

At the end of the day, a president was taken down because he might or might not have commissioned a few operatives to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters and rifle through the files of the hapless and doomed George McGovern campaign. The modern-day equivalent of such an action would be to hack into the DNC’s servers. (RELATED: Murray on Rogan on Woodward)

My guess is that most Americans assume Republicans and Democrats are doing that to each other all the time.

Was anybody killed? No. Was anybody hurt? No. Were any fires set or other valuable property damaged or stolen?

No.

A conspiracy to commit a misdemeanor. That’s what the Watergate scandal was about. And it destroyed Richard Nixon’s presidency.

Even today, half a century later, the legacy corporate media is still patting itself on the back for having “exposed” this grave abuse of political power. That same gaggle of so-called journalists staged a collective Rip Van Winkle impression for the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency, when abuses and lawlessness by men and women in political power far more egregious and substantial than anything Nixon was accused of were dropping weekly, and yet they will arrogate prestige to themselves based on the legacy of cooking Watergate until it brought down an administration. (RELATED: The Biden Health Cover-Up Dwarfs the Wilson and FDR Charades)

Good for them, I guess.

Of course, it turned out that Watergate cost South Vietnam its country, because Democrats routed the GOP in the 1974 midterm elections and then defunded the South Vietnamese military, in violation of a treaty Nixon had signed ending the Vietnam War.

You never hear about that, do you? Hundreds of thousands dead, millions enslaved by communists. We pay more attention to the abuses of China than we do of Vietnam, but even though we’ve normalized relations with Hanoi and we buy lots of cheap products from them, that isn’t what you’d call a free country.

Did anybody hang that dastardly betrayal on the Democrat Party? No. Wasn’t the Vietnam pullout and the geopolitical reversal it carried with it a lot larger scandal than a break-in of some office building in Washington? You’d think so. But when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan in an even more egregious betrayal (not because we left, but in the manner it happened), that wasn’t reported as a scandal, either.

It’s somewhat fair to understand that most Americans were worn out by Vietnam by the mid-1970s, just as we were worn out by Iraq and Afghanistan later. We’re not a country with much patience for forever wars on the other side of the world, something the Ukrainians are finding out to their consternation. So the Democrats did get away with murder in their betrayal of a U.S. ally.

It’s too damned bad Vietnam is never thrown in their faces when they screech about Trump attempting to make peace in Ukraine. Much less Afghanistan.

But these same clowns who have been flogging Watergate as the pinnacle event in American journalism — not because Woodward and Bernstein were such intrepid muckrakers that any great standard in truth-telling was achieved by parroting the disgruntled score-settling of Mark Felt, but because Watergate was a political success in taking down what had been a popular president — are trying to spend this week stirring up its echoes over a Signal chat. (RELATED: The Conspiratorial Beginning of the End of Nixon’s Presidency)

That sound you hear is the whole country, or at least everybody who isn’t a partisan Democrat, yawning.

Over the weekend, before President Trump ordered air and missile strikes against Houthi terrorists in Yemen who have been firing rockets at American naval vessels and other ships in the Red Sea for almost two years without any significant response, a number of high officials in the Trump administration, like Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, were discussing the strategy behind the strikes.

On Signal, which is a secure app for sending text messages.

But the story we’ve been told is that National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, or perhaps more accurately, someone on his staff who was handling his phone, somehow invited the Atlantic editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, a partisan Democrat propagandist known for concocting fabulist stories that cast Trump in a bad light, into the Signal thread.

Goldberg, after the missile strikes in Yemen successfully took out a number of Houthi fighters, went public with the messages exchanged and accused Hegseth and the others of essentially leaking “war plans” on Signal. The messages appear to have been real, but that didn’t stop Goldberg from lying about them.

What was said in the Signal thread? Nothing classified other than the hardly-secret fact that our military was going to strike the Houthis less than two hours later.

There are people demanding resignations over this, which is bizarre. If Goldberg isn’t lying about how he got into the Signal thread, it would seem that someone was a bit careless in policing the roster of participants in that thread, and while that might be worthy of criticism it surely doesn’t rise to the level of, say, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff guaranteeing the Chinese that he would give them fair warning if ever a U.S. attack was imminent. (RELATED: Gen. Mark Milley: A Case for Treason?)

Not a single one of the people incensed about this nothingburger of a story had a cross word to say about Mark Milley, which should put paid to any notions of outrage over the Signal chat.

In fact, the only real item of interest in the conversation Goldberg leaked out to the public was that Vance expressed reservations about hitting the Houthis, mostly based on the fact that 40 percent of European trade travels through the Suez Canal and Red Sea corridor, while only a nominal amount of American trade does. Vance asked, not unreasonably, what the U.S. was getting out of essentially fighting Europe’s war for it.

Which has stirred up anger among the Euros — why, I’m not sure. It can hardly be a surprise to them at this point that America is re-evaluating the return on our investment in their defense, given that they no longer respect the results of their own elections or, for that matter, the civil rights of their own citizens, much less their cultural patrimonies or even societal survival. That Vance would bring those observations back up in a discussion, which ultimately led to the U.S. acting in a manner protective of Europe’s trade with Asia, ought to seem at least somewhat unremarkable to anyone paying attention over the past couple of months.

Daniel Jupp called this the opposite of a scandal. He suggested it might be the reverse and coined the term “ladnacs” as a descriptor…

What they get from their ladnacs is confirmation that the Trump administration rather sensibly wants to keep shipping lanes open, rather accurately sees the European combination of weakness and arrogance, of dependence on America and contempt for America, pretty clearly, and rather refreshingly has several people able to balance being strong enough to take military action and wise enough to always want it to be limited and actually achieve something.

Even the security angle doesn’t work in the favour of the scandal criers. Because they have the “exposed” people saying that they should limit the full details to a more secure discussion platform. AND that attack only brings to focus more sharply that THIS “exposure” shows smart people sticking to their public pledges and genuinely looking at ways to deliver it, whilst prior exposures or destructions of evidence like Hillary’s emails and smashed up computers showed corruption that was so bad it had to be completely destroyed to prevent its release.

Other than laughing at someone for being a very skilled lover and a chess grandmaster at the same time, it’s hard to think of a “scandal” that makes the targets look any better.

The only reason this is news, then, is that Goldberg is attempting to demonstrate that he still has the ability, even if by accident, to penetrate a Republican administration and air something which might be interpreted as dirt.

Except this isn’t dirt. This is more like an online peeping Tom who couldn’t catch the girls with their clothes off. It’s nothing, and in fact, it suggests just how clean an administration this is if Goldberg and his Watergate Fan Club pals have to resort to this in search of a scandal.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

RFK Jr. and the Approaching Death of Major Media

Five Quick Things: The Well-Deserved Disgust of the American People

This Mess Is of Your Own Making, Chief Justice Roberts