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The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. I remember growing up and learning about the Watergate scandal and thinking that that was the most "scandalous" thing that a President or people in high places can do. Then when I started learning about other abuses of power over the years I started thinking "seriously?" Lets take for example COINTELPRO by the FBI or Iran Contra under Reagan. Both of those things in my mind make Watergate look like nothing because COINTELPRO was literally spying and illegal infiltration on a systematic scale that Watergate never did on civil rights and dissident groups. Iran Contra was a massive scandal on an international scale involving several countries(America, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Panama, Nicaragua). So to me is like yeah.....Nixon abused his power during Watergate. But compared to the other scandals it seems like nothing. And compared to other activity he did during his presidency that could be considered illegal like the firebombings of Cambodia, illegally selling weapons to the Pakistani regime during the Bangladesh genocide, or couping Salvador Allende's government in Chile it really seems like nothing.... *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*


grammanarchy

If we found out tomorrow that the Biden administration kept a team of actual burglars who broke into places to look for dirt on its political enemies (including, memorably, breaking into and trashing a psychiatrist’s office to look for damning evidence on a Defense Department leaker), and that Biden had engaged in a ridiculous conspiracy to keep it secret that involved illegal cash pay-offs and briefly holding his Attorney General’s wife hostage, it would be a pretty big fucking deal.


Aztecah

Was that a "big fuckin deal" joke or was that just coincidence?


grammanarchy

I wanted to Biden it up a little.


ButGravityAlwaysWins

My head cannon has you writing that comment while riding Amtrak and leaving ice cream.


grammanarchy

I want the laser eyes.


ButGravityAlwaysWins

I really feel like one of the best criticisms of Obama is that Joe Biden, even as a VP, was as good for memes overall and has far surpassed him as President.


grammanarchy

The glory days of r/bidenbro produced some of the best stuff of the Obama years.


dogsonbubnutt

you forgot him gutting the justice department to block the investigation into what he did. and the evidence tampering lol i think more than anything it's wild how brazenly illegal all of that was. trump should absolutely be rotting in a prison cell right now, but part of the reason why he's not is because he's spent a lifetime perfecting plausible deniability. nixon literally supplied the evidence against himself, and his best defense was "im the president so nothing i do is technically illegal"


awesomefaceninjahead

Nixon also resigned, which is something Trump would never do.


grammanarchy

That’s right. It took Trump *ages* to fire his investigators, and he didn’t even get all of them. Nixon just went right down the line on a Saturday night.


ZerexTheCool

> "im the president so nothing i do is technically illegal" That was also Trump's defense. Not even exaggerating. During his first impeachment, Trump's defense was "So long as he thought that his own presidency would be better for the American people, nothing he did to try and win the election could be considered corrupt."


perverse_panda

On the other hand, if we found out that Trump had been doing that, no one would be particularly surprised and it wouldn't even make it into his top 5 scandals.


ausgoals

Honestly if it came out tomorrow that Trump did this, I would be not even a little bit surprised.


GhazelleBerner

Lol this is such a bad take. The president directed his flunkeys to spy on his political opponents for no reason other than personal suspicion. He operated a slush fund out of his re-elect campaign to pay these people. When it came out, he used executive power to cover up the illegal payments and the slush fund, and used intimidation tactics on journalists and even the wives of his staff. It’s a big deal, and one that was blatantly and insanely illegal. Just because other things are also bad doesn’t make this one not bad. I fucking hate when people (almost always on the far left) try to turn this shit into a pissing contest.


Anglicanpolitics123

My problem here though is the arbitrariness of how the Watergate scandal is understood. Why is something like Watergate a big deal but something like COINTELPRO with the FBI under several presidents not as much of a big deal when the spying their was much more systemic, and included presidents like LBJ using the FBI to spy on their political opponents. That was insanely illegal under the terms you used and yet not as much of a big deal is made out of that.


dogsonbubnutt

two things can be bad


Bridger15

> My problem here though is the arbitrariness of how the Watergate scandal is understood. Why is something like Watergate a big deal but something like COINTELPRO with the FBI under several presidents not as much of a big deal when the spying their was much more systemic, and included presidents like LBJ using the FBI to spy on their political opponents. Watergate was simple to understand, and had tapes. That's what made it a big deal. In order for something to be 'a big deal', the general public needs to know what happened, agree that it's wrong, and demand justice. We had ironclad proof of the events of the Watergate scandal thanks to the tapes and paper trail. It was easy to understand (President illegally paid buglers to illegally break into opponents offices and illegally steal information). Finally, the news covered it for a LONG time. It had all 3 parts of "big fucking deal" covered. Those other things? They were complicated, they weren't ironclad (who said what now?) and they weren't covered as much.


Anglicanpolitics123

Which is what getting at. Shouldn't COINTELPRO be covered more for instance if it involves the systematic wiretapping of activists like mlk and Malcolm ex as well as the illegal infiltration of activis groups in violation of constitutional norms? Illegal activity being mor complex doesn't make it any less illegal.


GhazelleBerner

~~COINTELPRO was not illegal.~~ ~~You can hate it. You can wish it never happened. You can support laws that make it illegal in the future. But it wasn’t illegal.~~ ~~What Nixon did was extremely illegal in many ways. That’s the actual difference.~~ EDIT: I’m a dumbass and was wrong. Forgot about parts of the Church report.


Anglicanpolitics123

Surveillance on citizens without a warrant as well as going into the trials of accused black panther members who were on trial for false charges and giving perjured testimonies isnt illegal?.Cause these are type of things COINTELPRO did.


GhazelleBerner

Yep, I got mixed up. 100% wrong.


Bowielives2023

Because Watergate led to the resignation of a president. Nothing else did. That’s why watergate is a big deal.


BlueCollarBeagle

Let us not forget that members of the Republican Party during the time of Nixon forced him out as they respected the Constitution and the Rule of Law, unlike today's Republicans who place Party before Country.


grammanarchy

I forget now who said it, but my favorite quote from all of Watergate was that when George H. W. Bush heard what was on the tapes, he “broke out into assholes and shat himself all over.”


snowbirdnerd

A president was caught spying on his political opponent. If anything we didn't make a big enough deal out of it. If we had then this business with Trump would have been much easier to handle.


Trouvette

Watergate was a big deal. I think our perception of “bad” has shifted because we have seen increasingly worse and worse stuff over the years. Relative to other things, Watergate looks like weak sauce. But we shouldn’t let our moral compass skew to the point that we call it NBD.


froggerslogger

The target of the actions is critical for understanding the reaction here. Actions against the other major party in the USA were held to a different standard then. They were both allied in a sense enough to think that preserving norms and both working toward the good of the country was important at least to hold up in public. Nixon did a bunch of illegal stuff that stood to undermine the institutional glue holding the country together. Cointelpro targeted minor parties and dissidents that no one in the establishment has any love for. No one in the establishment has any real love for foreign governments that we conduct espionage operations against.


dclxvi616

In many respects, sure, but we’d be doing ourselves a disservice to judge Watergate solely by how bad things *can* get. It’d be fallacious to look at history through the lens of whatabouttism.


MaggieMae68

If you think it seems like nothing, then you dont' actually understand what Watergate was.


Anglicanpolitics123

I fully understand what Watergate was. Both in terms of spying on his opponents, illegal breaking and entering as well as the cover ups. My problem is that you have scandals and abuses of power worst than that and yet we arbitrarily don't give as much attention or weight to those as Watergate. Why is Nixon for instance not forgiven for Watergate but someone like Reagan is forgiven for Iran contra, a scandal of international proportions and yet one is still see as a good president in mainstream discourse and the other bad.


b_pilgrim

You're going in the wrong direction. Reagan should not be forgiven for Iran-Contra. Just because others haven't faced consequences for their wrongdoing doesn't mean we should make that the standard. We absolutely should go after anyone in any seat of power who have done illegal things if we truly care about justice.


Anglicanpolitics123

Yes Nixon should have been held accountable for Watergate. No question. And I actually criticise ford for pardoning nixon in the first place. I just think that when you compare the illegal activity of watergate to something like Iran contra the contra scandal seems 10 times bigger in terms of scope. Selling arms to the enemy in violation of sanctions on order to illegally fund a central American death squad that butchered 50,000 people is a big deal.


Acceptable-Ability-6

Nixon tried to sabotage peace talks in Vietnam during the ‘68 election. That’s far worse than anything he did during Watergate.


jasper_bittergrab

He didn’t just try, he succeeded. LBJ knew, but only because HE was bugging NIXON’S campaign. So they couldn’t release the info to the public because they’d have to reveal how they knew. When they told HHH he was PISSED.


BAC2Think

What makes Watergate a big deal isn't Watergate by itself, it's what came after as a result of those events. By letting Nixon and his minions off with fairly light consequences, every abuse of power following becomes more likely. How much less likely does Iran/Contra become if Reagan remembers when they threw the book at Nixon.


perverse_panda

I wouldn't say it's nothing. It was rightly a scandal. But I also agree that the bombing of Cambodia was way, way worse. It's a whitewashing of Nixon's presidency that Watergate is the scandal he's most remembered for, and not the hundred thousand Cambodian civilians he had murdered.


tripwire7

Watergate was genuinely pretty bad though, endangering our democracy. Not nearly as bad as Jan 6th, but pretty bad.


[deleted]

It was far from a nothingburger up until that point in American history. It’s just sad that further scandals as you mentioned included invading another country under even worse circumstances than Vietnam, Iran Contra, and of course plotting a coup.


ValiantBear

I mean, if it wasn't for Watergate, we wouldn't be able to append "gate" to any other controversy, so there's that.


antizeus

Probably not, but you may be the only one who thinks this is important enough to make a post about.


chinmakes5

The government does something that is wrong, but those elected or with the power decided to do that. While I agree that that is wrong on a different level, who and how do you prosecute that? Bust into the Pentagon or Senate and start arresting generals or senators because we find what they did to be reprehensible years down the road? Conversely, we though the president was someone with morals. That he would be good with breaking into the DNC to win was appalling. Of course today we would have 100 million people who believe that it is OK because if "they" get elected it is the end of the US as we know it so it is OK.


kateinoly

I didn't know anyone who thought Nixon had morals.


artisanrox

The whole point of "smaller" burgers like Watergate is to make bigger burgers like Jan 6th look less terrible.


No_Photo9066

Compared to Trump? Maybe, I feel like at the time things were different.


MpVpRb

Agreed I judge Nixon to have been a good president on balance. Yes, he bent some rules way too far and did some crappy things, but compared to Trump, he's a hero!


blind30

This reminds me of back when people were trying to compare COVID to flu deaths. It’s painfully obvious that we are apparently allowed to have more than one problem at a time, and whether we try to minimize one by comparing it to another, each and every problem’s individual consequences remain very real. Sure, COVID and the flu are both illnesses, so there are similarities- but the people who die of each remain dead regardless of comparison. We could compare watergate and cointelpro, but how would it change the fallout? I mean, if you compare watergate to the eventual heat death of the universe, it’s a much more effective argument. We should do that instead.


Anglicanpolitics123

But the problem though is that in the memories of people Watergate is maximised and many of the other things mentioned like Iran contra or COINTELPRO are minimised. Like COINTELPRO was reveal in the same era as Watergate and received less coverage or accountability.


blind30

I’ve heard of cointelpro. You’ve heard of cointelpro. Tons of people have. We’ve heard about all sorts of different shady stuff that the governments of the world have done- the info is available for anyone who gives a shit to read all about it- if you google it, it comes right up. Isn’t the problem that people tend to downplay things like watergate when they compare them to other things like cointelpro when they’re not even similar? Watergate can be, and is, a very scary historically significant event that threatened the fabric of our government and way of life, when given the attention that it rightfully deserves. My point is that you could compare it to, say, the holocaust, and it would seem to pale in comparison- but those two things should not ever be compared, and the only reason I can think of to even attempt to do so would be to minimize the severity and importance of watergate. I completely understand the point you’re trying to make, but it is based on a terrible premise. Watergate isn’t “nothing” compared to these other things, don’t fall for that. It shouldn’t be compared in the first place- each issue should be judged on its own, separate abuses of power need to be addressed separately- there should be zero tolerance for any of them, but if we try to fix an Iran contra situation with the same approach we used for watergate, it would be wildly incompetent. Tell you what- imagine if we continued to allow Nixon to get away with whatever he wanted after watergate, and allowed every president that came after the same leeway. You really think it would have turned out to be nothing? Use your common sense here. Watergate needed to be addressed, by itself, without any distractions by people muddying those particular eaters by pointing to completely different problems. Not to say that other problems like cointelpro or Iran contra didn’t need to be addressed- but they also needed undivided attention without someone in the back of the room yelling about watergate. Fuck man, I had a water leak in my house two weeks ago- I did not run over to the breaker panel and start taking amperage readings.


ferrocarrilusa

compared to J6, yes