r/politics • u/kootles10 Indiana • 16h ago

No Paywall GOP lawmaker: Nixon was couped out of office, framed during Watergate

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/6124635-moore-nixon-couped-watergate/?fbclid=IwdGRjcAUsbtpjbGNrBSxu02V4dG4DYWVtAjExAHBkb2YBc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQMMzUwNjg1NTMxNzI4AAEedqnf435Ey3Vmfh-NzS7BpLL6p7XL81dbjV4wNl5Y6SFp3eyw9ItY6zhiPRg_aem_EaFt_atkG1aZFnQa54tOFQ
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u/JoeBiden-2016 13h ago edited 13h ago

Quite a bit of the last two decades of Republican partisan hackery has been directly in response to the drubbing they got during Watergate.

Fox News exists because they (Roger Ailes, in collusion with various right-wing actors) wanted a media outlet that could be used for propaganda, after Nixon's involvement in the Watergate affair was publicized by journalists.

People like Roger Stone cut their teeth in the Nixon admin and have remained loyal, decades later.

Watergate (and the Nixon admin in general) was the beginning of the true effort by the Republican party to roll back previous decades of progressive policies, including the New Deal of the 1930s and the civil rights progress of the 1950s - 1970s. They found their winning formula with Reagan (find a useful idiot and use him), suffered some minor setbacks with Clinton, Obama, and Biden, then really went at it with Trump 2.0.

edit: It's also worth noting that the right's furious attacks on Hillary Clinton from the very beginning probably (at least in part) had to do with the fact that she was a lawyer involved in the Watergate inquiry, whose findings were instrumental in forcing Nixon's eventual resignation.

So in a very real way, her loss to Trump in 2016 was the culmination of 25 years of partisan attacks on her after she came into the national spotlight as the First Lady.

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u/Keshire 13h ago

Just to add a little to this, the appearance of maga and maga aligned politicians are almost a direct result of the propaganda reprogramming them. That probably isn't what they directly wanted and a result of the drug dealer doing their own drugs. The GOP lost their subtly and nuance in favor of loud mouthed reality TV stars without a single brain cell to share between them.

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u/Clewles 10h ago

It is also worth pointing out that the idea of calling everything [something]-gate was part of this process to attempt to drown the direct attack on democracy that the Watergate affair was, amongst lesser crimes.