I've never done a deep-dive on Watergate, I've never read competing accounts and compared who's footnotes are getting everything right versus who is being dishonest. I did do a deep-dive on Trump's Russia-gate scandal, and basically my conclusion was that Trump was innocent of any sort of "collusion" or obstruction of justice, albeit he did lie to the public on certain things and that the special prosecutor team was on a malicious fishing expedition. So I am predisposed to believe Shepard's account, that the same thing was done to Nixon.
From the limited amount of I've checked up on Shepard's account:
- I haven't seen any liberal de-bunkings of his book, mostly they seem to ignore it.
- On a key point (the "smoking gun" tape conversation being not about Watergate at all) Shepard quotes John Dean's book from 2014 and it seems like the original quote does partly corroborate Shepard but that also Shepard cut pieces from the quote in order to make it seem more exonerating than John Dean intended.
gorge
1d ago
Nixon's Attorney General appointed a Kennedy man, Archibald Cox, as special prosecutor.
From Wikipedia:
The president publicly welcomed the selection and, consistent with his new public relations offensive, commended Richardson's "determination" to get to the bottom of the affair.[109] Privately, Nixon seethed with anger. In his memoir he said: "If Richardson searched specifically for the man whom I least trusted, he could hardly have done better."[110] Richardson, however, thought he had the best man for the job, because once Cox cleared the president there would be no hint that he colluded with Nixon or even that he was sympathetic. Richardson had perhaps been misled about what his assignment was (and what the president's true intentions were) when the president instructed him the night Kleindienst was dismissed to "get to the bottom of it" "no matter who[m] it hurts."
Notice that last bit of editorializing by Wikipedia ... perhaps Nixon was actually genuinely earnest when he said '"get to the bottom of it" "no matter who[m] it hurts."' because Nixon knew that Nixon was innocent and actually wanted the real criminals rooted out and for Nixon to be cleared.
Beyond that...the entire "east coast liberal establishment" hated Nixon, and so by default if you staff a team of aggressive lawyers in Washington you are going to staff it with east coast Ivy League liberals who hate Nixon and would love nothing more than to make a name for themselves by bringing down a president. So he was likely to get an office staffed with anti-Nixon partisans unless one specifically sought ought either conservative extremely principled neutral lawyers.
If we believe Shepard's story and sympathetic to Nixon, we would say that his Attorney General Richardson dramatically underestimated just how ruthless and Machieavelians the liberal-Democratic establishment would be. Richards expected a thorough investigation, but expected that they would still be playing it fair.
This is somewhat belied by Nixon's own decision making, he probably could have survived the break-in had he come clean about it early, it was only the long cover up that sank him.
Have you read Geoff Shepard's book (The Nixon Conspiracy) or listened to any podcasts with him? Shepard was a young aide in the Nixon White House and as part of his junior lawyer duties was one of the first people to originally listen to the tapes to review them for problematic material. Recently, as an older man, he got access to a lot of the prosecution documents and then wrote a revisionist history. I haven't read the book in full, but Iistened to a podcast with him and it was very interesting.
Basically, he argues Nixon was completely unaware of the break-in, he was not trying to cover it up, but that he fired special prosecutor Cox because Cox had totally gone rogue, including giving the person much more responsible (Dean) a slap-on-the-wrist plea bargain. The specific trigger point for the firing was Cox reneging on a deal about the tapes, which Nixon thought would show people that Cox was being plainly unreasonable.
Shepard also argues that:
-
The 18 minute gap was actually likely due to a mistake by the transcriber and it is extremely unlikely that it covered up any key conversations. He additionally notes that it was Nixon's lawyers inside the Nixon White House that discovered the gap and told the judge, but it was then portrayed to the public like the special prosecutors had on their own discovered this nefarious destruction of evidence.
-
Another famous incriminating line from Nixon supposedly showing Nixon calling for a cover-up was actually a mis-transcription and mis-interpretation of a very low quality tape.
-
The famous "smoking gun" tape in which Nixon is giving the OK to tell the CIA to stop the FBI from interviewing a certain witness, turned out to have nothing to do with Watergate, but was due to wanting to cover-up a legal campaign donation that was coming from a well-known Democrat (who did not want it known that he supported Nixon).
So all-in-all, Nixon did not try to cover-up Watergate, he could not come clean about it because he actually did not know about it. What got him in trouble was thinking the special prosecutors team was actually trying to find the truth about what happened, when in fact they were on a fishing expedition to take down Nixon. At that point he was screwed, if he tries to block them, it looks incriminating. If he allows them to do anything they want, well, besides the embarrassment of having all the internals of the presidency leaked to the press, no presidency can survive a team of prosecutors going Beria ("find me the man I'll find the crime") on his entire staff.
gorge
6d ago
Trump is accused of using personal money for a campaign purpose.... The accusation is that this is a campaign finance violation because this benefited his campaign and therefore should have been marked as such.
It should be noted that this "accusation" is not actually in the indictment.
gorge
6d ago
Well, he LARP'ed going to war with the establishment, and the establishment had reasons, both valid and more Machiavellian for taking his LARP seriously. The "lock her up chants" were unprecedented norm-breaking, even if he never followed through with it. In many ways, Trump did the worst possible thing by taunting the bear but then being actually very weak in power and letting the establishment run roughshod over him (eg the Russia-gate investigation leading to a crippling investigation and imprisonment of his men).
I think the thing that legitimately scared the establishment is that he would transgress certain taboos, and verbally come out against the bipartisan consensus on certain issues, and rather than groveling after such transgressions he would plow ahead. That meant he could not be controlled by establishment norms in the same way most high-profile Republicans in the past have been controlled.
gorge
6d ago
there are tons of high level republicans who are not subject to prosecution, with the obvious explanatory difference being that they, you know, didn’t commit crimes
No the obvious difference is that they never went to war with the establishment the way Trump did. Also, admittedly Trump is publicly a liar and sleazeball so that makes a lot of people think that he must be a criminal too, which creates a favorable environment for pursuing a prosecution.
This looks like a case of “man does crimes, gets prosecuted for said crimes.”
No he did not commit a crime.
- Paying hush money to a mistress is not illegal
- Paying hush money as a pre-tax company expense to avoid embarrassment for the CEO is not illegal
- Paying hush money from non-campaign funds is not illegal, in fact, arguably the opposite would be illegal. This is an area where the law is inherently ambiguous and something of a catch-22.
- Keeping the payment of the hush money secret from the American public is not illegal
- Trump never tried to hide the payment from the tax authorities.
- A CEO making a false description of some expense in order to avoid potential leaks and embarrassment of a business the CEO wholly owns is not illegal. The NY law is against making "a false statement with intent to defraud." This is used in cases where an employee is defrauding the CEO or shareholders, or the tax authorities, etc. Trump cannot make a false statement that is somehow defrauding himself.
So to get a felony conviction here, the prosecutor, judge and jury had to introduce multiple unprecedented or ridiculous leaps:
- Claiming that any false entry is inherently fraud against the state of NY. This is novel, no one gets tried for this.
- Claiming that the false entry was in furtherance of another crime ... without actually including that crime in the indictment and without that crime ever being adjudicated in court
- Hinting that the false entry was in furtherance of some kind of attempt at electoral fraud, but without that charge ever actually being adjudicated.
- Arguing that this crime corrupted the 2016 election even though the crime happened in 2017
- They had to infer that Trump actually intended to "defraud" someone, despite there being no direct evidence of this. Again, intending to make a false entry to avoid embarrassment is not a crime.
Here is an establishment liberal explaining why this prosecution was so unprecedented: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-was-convicted-but-prosecutors-contorted-the-law.html
Let me flip it around: can you honest to god hand on the Bible imagine a scenario in which Trump committed a crime and you don’t call the resulting prosecution “lawfare?”
Yes, of course.
The thing about Trump is that he is a sleazy guy who lies a lot, but he is ultimately a show-man Boomer business man who listens to his lawyers and doesn't do obviously criminal things. He is not mobbed up. His faults are those of a carnival barker, not of a Bernie Madoff. There has been an enormous media campaign to portray Trump has some kind of obvious fraudster criminal but that is not actually who he is.
Edit: I also suspect that the venn diagram of people calling for Trump to lock up Hillary over the made-up email thing and people calling the prosecution of Trump "lawfare" is close to a perfect circle.
I'm in the tiny sliver of people who thought Comey got it right. He was right to have the press conference explaining what she did wrong to the American people, but also right not to prosecute. Her violation wasn't serious enough to try warrant overriding the electoral process with a judicial process.
When it comes to prosecuting the highest-level politicians, I would use this rule of thumb: If you explained the crime in a few sentences to George Washington, would he say, "what? I don't even understand why that is a crime in your era." Or would he say, "Of course that is a crime." Actually taking bribes, deliberately leaking secrets to enemy powers, executing opponents, etc, are all real crimes and should be prosecuted regardless of the person. But prosecuting high-level officials for technical crimes and gray-area crimes and crimes invented in the last 80 years gives far too much power to the bureaucracy.
gorge
8d ago
One pound of a leanish steak (eg top sirloin) gets you to about 90g of protein and 1000 calories. I find a rare steak with salt to be perfectly satisfying and delicious, more satisfying than many more complicated meals and more satisfying than body-building foods like chicken breasts.
After that pretty much any other medium sized meal will get you an additional 50g of protein and 1,000 calories, whether that be a chicken burrito, mac&cheese or an 8oz cheeseburger.
Or you could do 20oz - 25oz of a fattier steak like rib-eye or chuck roast and 200-400 calorie supplementary meal of your choice.
gorge
1mo ago
I have the impression of NPR as their spin being similar to NYT: representing the most milquetoast "centrist" corporate Dem position possible,
This was true, but even then, NPR would be "too far to the left" since it is selling itself as a politically neutral, government funded non-profit and so ostensibly would be taking a position at the American political center, not the Democratic party center.
But even to the extent your critique was true, it is a stale critique.
The entire 'corporate Dem' position has moved sharply to the left in the past ten years (that is, it has moved left of where the American center was in 2010), and these political positions have enormous real world impacts. It's not just cheap signaling. For instance, the massive inflow of migrants we see are all downstream of NPR et al spending years denouncing necessary border enforcement as being inhumane in some way. We also see stats like how percent of white men among TV writers has declined from around 60% to 35% in the past 10 years. That is a major change with major impact for the media environment we all live in. There were many policy changes around police stops and bail reform and public order enforcement, etc, all downstream of NPR/NY Times media coverage on police shootings, and those policy changes have had massive real world impact. I could go on and on.
gorge
2mo ago
Main point is that the houses were not that much cheaper relative to now, and the interests rates were murderous. Enjoy!
This is much closer to boomer average, and in fact, is more than what some boomers had to pay.
Think about it: so much griping for measly $200/month difference. But hey, maybe the millennials are so whiny because of no wage growth, so this actually means a lot to them? Let’s look into that.
You are missing something big: as soon as interest rates dropped, boomers could refinance to a lower rate. So that high interest rate was not paid during the entire 30 years of the mortgage. Someone really needs to do the boomer versus millennial home-payment comparison taking refinancing into account. When a millennial is buying the home at rock bottom interests but still having the same payment as a boomer paying a 12% interest rate, the millennial has no prospect of further reducing the payment in a future refinancing.
gorge
2mo ago
I'm pro-life and believe life begins at conception, not just as a Christian, but much more importantly because I consider it the cleanest and most sane policy from a secular perspective.
I don't think there is a perfectly clean policy here.
There are many evils in the world which due to prudence may not be made illegal, either because the state is not the correct level at which to deal with the problem; or because the state simply lacks the capacity to enforce the law; or because the state lacks the legitimacy to enforce such a law.
I believe that life begins at conception, but I think that the parents have sovereignty over the child while it is in the womb. Murder is evil, but there is no international law or federal law against murder, because we believe that the state government has sovereignty over murder committed within a single state. If the state does not want to punish someone, or wrongfully punishes someone, there is no recourse to a higher sovereign. Analogously, I think that the parents have sovereignty over the unborn child. To kill the child is evil, but they answer to God for that evil, not to the state. However, I am ok with regulating what doctor's can do, since they are already regulated by the state in every aspect. So I think it would be reasonable to rescind the medical license of doctor's who perform D&E's for women with non-medical reasons for wanting an abortion. Doctors have their license to heal, not to kill. But I don't think it would be prudent to pass a law mandating life-in-prison for women who take an abortion pill.
The problem with legally treating the unborn child the same as a two-year-old child is that it opens up a whole can of worms of "child protective services" over-reach. It's not crazy to image a a world where a mother who is on a carnivore diet, or doing something else medically controversial and unconventional gets prosecuted for negligent homicide if she has a miscarriage. Or we could imagine the state simply micromanaging what pregnant women do and eat, the same way the state micromanages what kinds of cribs and baby formula and cars-seats you can buy. (Did you know its basically impossible in America to buy baby formula with animal fat instead of seed oil fat in it, due to government regulation?). There are also some more far out philosophical and legal questions -- for instance imagine a woman who's uterus simply cannot support a baby so all fertilized eggs fail to attach and are passed out of system. Is she committing crimes by having sex since it will result in fertilized eggs that are certain to just die? Catholic morality has some well-developed answers here, but the government bureaucracy does not run on Catholic morality.
Once you start introducing 'exceptions,' you're just immediately back to condoning all abortion. "My health is at risk because if I'm not permitted to abort I might harm myself" is a free at-will golden ticket as long as you're able to memorize and repeat a sentence of that length.
I think it is better to be prudent and play the long game. I think it would be better to have more lose laws that minimize the chances of cases that produce really bad PR. Cases that produce really bad PR are going to undermine support the law and ultimately produce more abortion. There is only so much you can do to prevent evils that happen in private.
gorge
2mo ago
This just gives the administrative state unlimited power over politicians. Which, to be fair, is basically already the case. Already we see that people in bureaucracy are not held to the same standard. For instance, even though it is technically a crime to make a material lie to any government official, the FBI can lie to other government officials they are investigating and never be charged for it, while the FBI can set perjury traps for other government officials and go after them. The FBI routinely uses tactics that for any other person be obstruction of justice, and never gets charged for it. Etc. etc.
gorge
2mo ago
Other men are competition. Unless a nation is facing a strong external threat, and the nation wants its men to be stronger in order to make the nation stronger at resisting, there is little incentive for "society" to give accurate information to men about how to be strong, or how to actually win sexual-attraction, or how to actually win at the power-game. In the first generation, the incentive is to spread public lies about how to be a man, while privately teaching your kid the truth. But public lies in one generation lead to the classic "kids don't get the joke" problem and the next generation simply does not know the truth. "Society" couldn't even tell the truth if it wanted to.
gorge
4mo ago
Feminism is more a product of the washing machine, the pill and air conditioning than it is political organizing.
I think there is a strong case to consider that the pill is a result of feminism. From to Will Durant's citing Roman sources, it appears that the Romans had abundant access to various herbs and knowledge of practices that could basically prevent pregnancy. And if that all failed, there was always exposure. The Roman elite died out, and were replaced by more very fertile Christians who had a very a hard-line against contraception. And then only after feminism took hold in the 1920s, the Lambeth conference legitimized birth control for the most powerful Anglo-American denomination, states started legalizing birth control, etc. Only after that did companies start investing in research on contraception. In previous eras, they would have simply been forbidden from doing so.
gorge
4mo ago
Agreed except that I want to point out that the "serious person" Trump alternative Nikki Haley is every bit of the crackhead that Trump is, in her own way. Saying something "Hamas attacked because it was Putin's birthday" is unhinged and betrays an attitude that would be really dangerous to have in the nation's chief diplomat. Of course, Trump chose as diplomat once, so a pox on him too :-P
MBD of National Review told a story recently of asking his driver why he supports Trump. The driver said he thinks military experience is important and Trump went to a military style school for a while. MBD asked him if he knew that DeSantis actually served in the Navy for six years (as a lawyer) and the driver admitted that he knew this. He just counted Trump's boarding school experience as more relevant than active duty service.
I'm going to with grug-brain more correct than the midwit on this one -- being a JAG lawyer is not relevant military service in the sense that any historical citizen would care about, when thinking about wanting a leader who had proven themselves in the military. In fact, it is probably a net negative, it is anti-military service, in that a JAG lawyer is going to be trained in a way of thinking and operating that is inimical to historically how successful wars were fought and won.
Ideally, you would have a bona fide military veteran and successful general to choose from. But if you have to choose between frauds, the bombastic, even winking, fraud of the Trump is more appealing to some than the sophisticated and self-serious fraud of pretending that being a lawyer gumming up the military operations is something that counts as being a successful warrior for your country.
gorge
4mo ago
Maybe the appeal is this: the default politician behavior is to converge with the establishment hive mind on all issues, either actively or passively. A politician who has no firm principles, but who has a proven ability to thumb his nose at the establishment hive mind and to go with his common sense or his gut, would be a huge improvement from the point-of-view of a anti-establishment voter.
gorge
4mo ago
If you care about the things that Trump's base cares about (immigration, America first, bringing industry back, stopping the 'woke' agenda, curbing the establishment/Cathedral-state, etc. ) , then for all of Trump's faults, the other options may be even less unappealing:
Haley -- do I need to even explain why she is bad? She is an awful combination of 1) having the worst of neocon foreign policy 2) being an authoritarian on free speech issues 3) being weak against the woke agenda 4) being cynical 5) being dumb as bricks. Desantis -- naive boy scout who is going to be eaten alive. He simply doesn't have the charisma or the guts to take on the establishment. Ramaswamy -- I think he has a lot of trouble overcoming the "who is this guy" problem. Both in the sense of having low name recognition and no history of being a public figure, but also in the sense of how did this Harvard/Yale/Goldman Sachs guy come to be giving Trumpist talking points -- is he sincere or does he think there is a market to be tapped?
The bet with Trump is that maybe he learned from his mistakes and won't staff his administration with GOP establishment types who wanted to cave in on issues and stab Trump in the back.
Is it likely that Trump can learn from his mistakes at age 77 and be a better president this time around? Is it likely that he can overcome is own personal history of not having the back of the people who supported him or worked form him? Very doubtful.
The basic reality is that right now all the presidential options are terrible.
The Catholic Church has always maintained:
- same-sex marriage is an impossibility
- same-sex sexual/erotic relationships are disordered, immoral and sinful.
- Priests should not bless sin
- Priests have wide discretion to give blessings to anyone and everyone, for mundane things and important things, even and especially to sinners. Eg you have the priest bless your pet or your hunting rifle or many other things. It would be possible to ask for a blessing in a business partnership or a promise of livelong brotherly love and friendship.
- Priests should not give blessings to same-sex unions, or give any blessings to same sex couples in a way that would be scandalous (ie make it seem it is giving approval to sinful behavior) or that would create confusion with a sacramental marriage or confusion about church doctrine.
The recently released document reiterates all those points. The ABC headline is simply false
However, the thing that the liberals in the church are excited about is the changing emphasis in terms of pastoral care:
Paragraph 12. One must also avoid the risk of reducing the meaning of blessings to this point of view alone, for it would lead us to expect the same moral conditions for a simple blessing that are called for in the reception of the sacraments. Such a risk requires that we broaden this perspective further. Indeed, there is the danger that a pastoral gesture that is so beloved and widespread will be subjected to too many moral prerequisites, which, under the claim of control, could overshadow the unconditional power of God’s love that forms the basis for the gesture of blessing.
Paragraph 13. Precisely in this regard, Pope Francis urged us not to “lose pastoral charity, which should permeate all our decisions and attitudes” and to avoid being “judges who only deny, reject, and exclude.”[11] Let us then respond to the Holy Father’s proposal by developing a broader understanding of blessings.
So previously maybe two gay men walk into the church and ask the priest, "Can you bless our dedication of life-long love to each other?" The priest is wary and says, "Wait ... love 'amore' or love 'caritas'?" So the priest asks some questions, figures out they are asking him to bless a marriage-like relationship, a sexual relationship, and the priest would refuse it because such a blessing would be scandalous.
After this document, a liberal priest now has a winking approval from a Vatican that he is allowed to play ignorant and not "subject the couple to moral prerequisites" and avoid "being a judge who rejects." So instead of asking about the nature of their relationship or telling them to go and sin no more, he may give a blessing like, "may all that is true, good, and humanly valid in their lives and their relationships be enriched, healed, and elevated by the presence of the Holy Spirit."
gorge
5mo ago
Intelligence agencies didn't care enough to fake them, or actively chose not to. This explanation also seems unlikely because of the predictable and dire consequences, as I cover above, for the CIA's operational reach, of the intelligence failure and the subsequent extreme reluctance by future administrations to commit ground forces to regime change operations.
Why on earth are you modeling the CIA as a unified, rational agent?
The question is: what individuals inside the CIA would personally have the incentive or motive to organize a conspiracy to fake the WMD? Seems like there would be very little upside to any individual, and quite a bit of downside (if you try to induct into your conspiracy someone who then spills the beans and gets everyone in big trouble).
In the dissident circles I travel in, I've seen the phrase "sex positive traditionalist" as an alternative to both progressive sexual attitudes and to sex-negative conservative attitudes. The sex-positive-traditionalist would rather men and women not be promiscuous, we would rather see people only have sex in marriage and to have children. However, this view differs from the "purity culture" conservatives of the 00's. That culture -- especially the more wordly moderately conservative Christians and the more worldy Catholics -- told teens to wait until marriage but then put their kids on the college->grad school->career track at the expense of the marriage track. They would also encourage very long engagements. Following such a plan forced adherents to either be very sex negative, they would have to wait for a long time to get married and have sex, or, more likely, the kids would get tired of waiting and drop the religion. Whereas a "sex positive traditionalist" would prioritize early marriage over going to college.
Specifically in terms of Catholic pastoral care, "sex positive traditionalism" would mean giving long-dating or cohabitating couples a shotgun marriage and telling them to go forth and make babies, rather than telling them to move out of the same apartment and live chastely for a year as they go through a lengthy "pre-cana" process.
The sex-positive-traditionalist is also very pro sex within marriage, believing in that there is moral an obligation to perform the "marital act", even when one spouse perhaps has not been feeling it for a few days. Whereas the contemporary progressive is horrified at the idea that a married woman be pressured into sex or have some obligation to give sex.
gorge
6mo ago
I'm almost inclined to view Napolean as a force of nature rather than as "good" or "bad."
He was a man of incredible talent, incredible will, he was both a man of action and intellectually a total mensch. Thus, anyone who wants to achieve something in the world, can profit from studying his life.
But, what he accomplished, he accomplished for his own visions. The results were in the end catastrophic for the men who followed him, as they starved and froze to death in the Russian winter. The results for France itself were a mixed bag.
But it is hard for me to cry too many tears about the fate of his followers or of his victims. The institutions that fell were old and rotting. The men who followed him, chose to do so, if they were captivated by his amoral visions of conquest and were willing to subjugate themselves to his vision, then I cannot say they deserved better. We all die in the end.
I, an amateur to the Napoleonic wars, wandered away from Ridley Scott's Napoleon feeling more or less pleased with my night.
I haven't seen the movie and don't intend to after reading the American Sun review and others. From what I've heard the main problem is that they turned one of the most charismatic men in history into a mumbling bumbling clingy loser.
gorge
6mo ago
Last year I did a big Shakespeare read and discovered to my surprise that many of the famous quotes, in context, mean something very different than how they are popularly used. For instance, when Mark Antony says, "I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" he is lying and goes on to praise him and foment a revolution. Now, when I see someone playing on that quote in a title, I never know if they are using the surface meaning or the in-context meaning.
gorge
6mo ago
- Large conspiracies like faking the moon landing would require so many people to be in on it as to be impossible to maintain. So concepts like “The Cathedral”
The whole point of "The Cathedral" is that it is not a conspiracy. It is a phenomenon of distributed, public coordination -- there is no inner-party doing the coordination.. It is a herd. A very powerful, important herd, and one that continually defies any attempt to be named. There are microconspiracies within the Cathedral (journolist, Climategate, etc.) There are super-influencers who to some extent can move the herd. But the overall phenomena is a herd phenomena that is not generally based on secret coordination, but rather everyone looking to their left and to their right to stay in line. "The Cathedral" has a very enviable ability in that every time someone tries to coin a term for it "The System" "The Establishment" "The Uniparty" they manage to make associate usage of the term with being a kook or "conspiracy theorist."
gorge
6mo ago
People with a classical education could also talk all about the Roman Republic and French Revolution. We can't teach everything, and I'd much prefer to double down on stuff that's real than stuff that's fiction.
In general I'd agree, there was way too much fiction -- especially bad contemporary literary fiction -- in my high school curriculum. But certain works of fiction are of such cultural importance that they keep getting referenced by historical figures, so it is very helpful to have read the original so you know they talk about. Perhaps part of the problem with Shakespeare is that schools spend too much time over-analyzing it (badly). And often, they don't even watch a good production of it. It should be possible to get through a play in about 10 hours, including both reading it, watching it, and reading a commentary on it. Spending 60 hours total out of 6,000 hours of total schooling on Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo & Juliet, and two comedies seems like a good use of time to me. I'd throw in a few histories as well, integrated in with a history course on that subject.
I think the podcast was this one:
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/06/podcast-everything-you-know-about-watergate-is-wrong-part-1.php
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/07/podcast-everything-you-know-about-watergate-is-wrong-part-2.php
Shepard covers this in chapter 11 of his book, available on libgen, if you are interested.
From reading Caro's LBJ series, Flynn's book on FDR, skimming Lasky's "It didn't start at Watergate", reading an establishment history of the FBI, etc, it seems like there was a much higher-level of criminality and dirty tricks in politics from FDR onward than what the American people were aware of. The FBI performing break-ins, for instance, was something they had been doing for a long-time. I remember talking to a Trump-hater about how he stank of corruption due to all his dealings with foreigners -- she had simply no idea of that this kind of stuff is par for the course for any modern elite, see the Clinton Foundation, or Bush dealings with the Saudi's, etc. I suspect that Nixon, like Trump, was actually more law-abiding than average because he knew he was in less of a position to work the system in his favor. That is why Nixon did not just simply destroy the tapes early on (and he did not destroy them because he thought he was innocent and thought there was nothing incriminating on them).
This is an interesting case because under classical international law a 'neutral' country forfeits its rights of sovereignty if it cannot prevent one of the fighting powers from using it as a base of operations. USA was fully justified in entering Cambodia to get the Vietcong. However, it certainly makes me queasy to use bombing to get the Vietcong, a method of warfare with a very high rate of collateral damage, especially when that collateral damage is on peasants in a country that wanted to stay out of the war. I'm not sure what I would have done if I was President in that situation. Maybe just build a big concrete wall from the sea all the way to the Mekong at the 17th parallel?
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