Unlike Watergate, the current crisis in government/spying/politics doesn’t have a memorable name. But for those of us who lived through Watergate it has a certain resonance with that event as well as major differences, imparting a strange sense of familiarity, dislocation, and increasing alarm.
This isn’t some burglary to get some dirt on the opposing party, and it isn’t a threat (unfulfilled) of using government entities to “get” the opposition.
This is the marshaling of those government entities by one administration in order to “get” the next, and nearly succeeding.
And—as Roger L. Simon points out:
...One of the more notable differences between Watergate and the metastasizing scandals involving the FBI, our intelligence agencies, and the Obama administration — subjects of the soon-to-be-released inspector general’s report — is that the media exposed Watergate. They aided and abetted the current transgressions.
By providing a willing and virtually unquestioned repository for every anonymous leaker (as long as he or she was on the “right” side) in Washington and beyond, the press has evolved from being part of the solution to being a major part of the problem....
...Forget Donald Trump. Forget whoever is running. It could be your Aunt Fanny or Willam Buckley's random person from the Boston telephone directory. Forget whatever party we are talking about. This is the stuff of high treason of a type not imaginable to almost all of us in our lifetimes as American citizens. I and others have compared this plot to Lavrentiy Beria and the NKVD. At first, I admit, I was exaggerating a bit for effect. Now, not so much.
What we have here are people who think they are "good" driven to evil by their own self-righteousness.
So what will the mainstream media who participated so heavily in this, who were in effect the enabler of this disgraceful anti-democratic enterprise, do when the inspector general's report is finally published?
We may have gotten a taste in the nervous reaction of CNN's Jake Tapper to an informative series of tweets from the WSJ's Kimberley Strassel on the matter. Roughly a year ago, Mr. Tapper famously accused Donald Trump of himself being a purveyor of "fake news" for alleging he was being wiretapped (what an understatement that turned out to be!). Instead of apologizing for being wildly wrong or even acknowledging his mistake, Tapper tweaked Ms. Strassel for accidentally tweeting "Hurricane Crossfire" rather than "Crossfire Hurricane" (the name the FBI cribbed from Mick Jagger as a trendy name for their repellent activities).
Tapper is considered one of the more intelligent and putatively responsible of the MSM crew. If he is unable to face this coming press Armageddon, few will be. They bet the house that Donald Trump was the worst man in the room, but it turned out, and will be made quite explicit I would imagine, that there were many men and women far worse than he. It's not even close....
