The FEMA official who claimed God teleported him to a Wafrle House has resigned.
This is worth noting, but I didn’t want to start a whole new thread.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President JD Vance on Thursday said the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon would have been a blip in today’s news cycle, and he drew parallels between Nixon and President Donald Trump — arguing that both were targeted by “deep state” forces.
…
Sadly, I think Vance is right but not for the reasons he thinks. The so-called trump administration is so thoroughly corrupt at every level and in every way that Watergate by comparison looks like a crime at the level of spiking the punch at a Sunday school picnic. Even Nixon would not have sunk to the levels that DJT has. The Republican party itself had some principles and standards back then. Not any more.
“Targeted by ‘deep state’ forces…”
Get off it, J.D.!
Of course there’s a deep state. The Republican Party has created it just for the felon and his inner circle.
Eh. An unsurprising number of Republican Senators were ready to stand by Nixon, too, but the party realized they didn’t have the numbers. It was going to be an embarrassment to have to defend the ‘no’ Senate votes on impeachment but fortunately Nixon was not totally unprincipled.
Sure, they’ve gotten worse (as has the American electorate), but they weren’t as principled as all that 50 years ago, either
Here’s the difference that I see: Today they have a news apparatus (of which Fox News is the most reasonable) to spin and distort the truth.
What forced decency on the Republicans in the 1970s was the fourth estate - the press - that dug in, gathered evidence, and didn’t blink when it came time to report it to America.
Today, the details would be so twisted that Nixon would avoid accountability. Nobody actually stole anything important, and Nixon didn’t need the votes, so who cares? Besides, I heard the guy who did the break-in was actually a democrat; and what about Tom Eagleton - he had electroshock therapy!
Not only was there a comprehensive news apparatus, but the general public got the news from only a few sources. Most people took a daily newspaper, and many cities had not only more than one newspaper but multiple additions of a given newspaper every day. You really did go and physically buy the latest edition of the newspaper to find out what the latest update on any event was. Are there people as old as I am here who actually remember doing this as adults? During Watergate I had already been out of college for 3 years and I was married.
Also TV news was our main source of information. There was a time when Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. News was not available around the clock. That didn’t happen until CNN covered the first Gulf War in 1990, 24/7.
Today with the internet, news if you can call it that… let me just say information comes from many, many sources most of them unreliable. YouTube, podcasts, message boards, TikTok, Reddit, the person on the street with a phone. A public event that might have been covered by multiple TV news cameras in the past is now recorded by dozens or hundreds of individuals on the spot with their phones.
It was a very different world with respect to news coverage.
I got one: He’s sto-o-opid.
Or figures the voters are
He once took the entire text of The CBS Evening News, and converted it to text the same size font as a newspaper. It filled less than the front page. He then declared, “Anyone who depends solely on broadcast news is foolish.”
This is probably why I can’t stand watching videos. Unless the information has a heavy visual content, I would rather read the information. I find videos to be a remarkably inefficient way to transmit information.
Apple News has an audio section. Sometimes a story there will catch my eye and I’ll click on it, only for an audio clip to start playing. Fortunately there’s almost always a way to read the story instead.
At least we have the best folks working on the diplomacy side! And who doesn’t want to catch up with friends while talking with the President of the UAE?
Just saw something today on Twitter:
If Watergate happened today, Woodward and Bernstein would have saved the good stuff for their book, published a year later.
Back when Walter said that, people did not DEPEND SOLELY on broadcast news. They also read at least one NEWSPAPER every day.
In 1970, the U.S. had about 1,748 daily newspapers with a total estimated weekday circulation of 62.1 million. By 2026, the number of daily newspapers declined to around 938, and combined print and digital weekday circulation dropped to approximately 20.9 million. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Source: Gemini &Wikipedia
Today people depend on multiple reliable and unreliable sources from anywhere and everywhere and rely on their own good judgment (HA!) to detemine what’s true and what isn’t. By that I mean they rely on how much they trust (deserved of not) the source, their own level of education, their personal ability to comprehend what they read/hear, and their own biases and prejudices. IOW it’s a crapshoot.
A discussion of the lamentable decline of real journalism belongs in its own thread. If I talk about it any more, my head will explode.
This really says it:
I agree 100%.
I virtually never click on a video link (except maybe if there’s a cute puppy in it). That’s why I get very irritated when someone posts a video link here without so much as one word about what it says or why I should care. If YOU watched it, then YOU can summarize it.
And it’s 45 minutes long.
The ones that make me the maddest (saddest?) is “you have to watch this review of the movie!” And the “review” is two hours! Why am I going to watch something longer than the original movie?
I miss decent print journalism. And I miss copy editors that catch typos and wrong word usage. Does no one have pride in their work any more?
You can have pride in your work, or you can get your work done very quickly. Guess which one is rewarded, and which punished?
Sing it, my friend!!
Oh puh-LEESE. Don’t go there with me.
Why on Earth would you need a copy editor when you can use Grammerly?
/s
No doubt. (Woodward is still in the book-selling business, getting sales from book-revelations that could have been reported at journalism outlets.)
Well, like any human being he made his decision on what he ASSUMES will be in his self-interest. Taking back his ‘could embarrass Trump’ vote might let him save face with MAGA voters to some extent, but they will never embrace him—they will never vote him into the Louisiana governorship, for example. They’ll remember the first vote.
He’s made himself neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring.
“I’d be the greatest Communist in history”
You make this sound like it’s a bad thing.
He should have had those conversations with them in the bathroom.
Vance accuses “deep state” of bringing down Nixon and targeting the felon.
The felon’s touting his imaginary crowds.
Felon’s flack’s wife insults war hero general.
The felon is now threatening 100% tariffs on Europe with no authority to do so.
Ugliness aside, why does a document that’s only issued to AMERICAN CITIZENS say “welcome”?