Tricky Dick

As soon as I heard that the guy who was Deep Throat was going public with his identity, I expected a fresh round of the Nixon-apologism from the political right, which ranges from "All Presidents lie" to "Nixon was small potatoes compared to the ultimate Presidential criminal, Bill Clinton!". And sure enough, here come the "Watergate wasn't that big a deal" defenses. I think they're wrong, but what gets me is, why the effort to rehabilitate Nixon by the right? If you set aside Nixon's anti-Communism (which bordered on sheer paranoia), his positions on a host of other issues mark him as a Republican who would be laughed out of a campaign for his own party's nomination today by the time the New Hampshire primaries rolled around. If Nixon were alive and active in politics today, he'd be a Republican pariah, not unlike Christine Todd Whitman. But I guess the rehab of Nixon helps "the narrative" a bit; if we can get people to believe that Watergate was just another garden-variety Presidential screwup, then it follows that the effort to investigate and, likely, to impeach (had he not resigned first) can be written off as another attempt by the Liberals to slander their guy.

The old saying is that the victors get to write the histories, but the saying doesn't say much about subsequent victors getting to rewrite the histories.