Vance Minimizes Watergate

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

US Vice President JD Vance seems to finally have settled on a political role model in life and is beginning to transition out of the enormous and wobbly shadow of Donald Trump and into that of former President Richard M. Nixon.  Trump, who doesn't seem to have ever been much of an actual fan of Vance, has, of late, begun to demean his Vice President in public settings and say things that might lead an honorable person resign,  but neither Vance nor his mentor, billionaire Peter Thiel, would ever consider entertaining that option..

Trump's primary sustained insult toward Vance has been to openly suggest that he is considering others to endorse as his successor in the presidency, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become the person Trump most often brings up as an alternative to a Vance candidacy.   In their brilliant new compendium of the first year of the second Trump presidency, a book titled "Regime Change," New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recount an incident in which Trump asked media mogul Rupert Murdoch at a private dinner last October (in front of Vance and Rubio) to rate the two men against each other - undoubtedly an awkward situation for everyone in the room - except for Trump who has no feelings.

Murdoch responded (with both Vance and Rubio sitting in the room listening) by calling Rubio "brilliant? and saying that Vance had "the potential to be great."  Ouch.

Some of Trump's problem with Vance seems to be rooted in the fact that JD was never as enthusiastic about Trump's war on Iran as Trump felt he should have been.  Now that the war effort has stalled and is falling apart, and the US is in full withdrawal mode, Trump has made JD Vance the face of the surrender that Trump is trying to pass off as some ssort of victory.  Vance didn't like the war effort, and now Trump wants him to own its failure.

But Vance's situation is even more complicated than all of that.  In the midst of everything else, he is on tour trying to sell his new book, "Communion:  Finding My Way Back to Faith," in preparation for a presidential run that will begin eearly next year - and perhaps against Rubio in the Republican primaries.  Vance, a poor public speaker, has already had several embarrassing encounters with the press while promoting himself and his book, including one with the ladies of "The View" who almost ate him alive, and each day of the book tour seems to bring more headlines, often some that may play against the potential presidential candidate's long-term interestss.

This past Thursday at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, Vance took the opportunity to compare himself to Richard Nixon, saying:

"Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media."

A rather good summation, I thought, until he dropped a nugget that choked the horse - and chose to minimize the Watergate scandal, the story that eventually forced Richard Nixon to become the first, and so far "only," person to ever resign the office of President of the United States.   Vance said that if the same story (of the Watergate burglary and the President lying to the nation in an effort to cover up his administration's participation in it), came to light today, it would disappear after one 12-hour news cycle.

And you know what?  I think he's right.  We have become so jaded to presidential corruption happening right out in the open during the Trump years that Americans have lost the ability to be shocked and shamed.  With the Trump administration, corruption is what they do, it's their way of life.  It's a rare day when one presidential scandal manages to consume a full news cycle before it is overrun by another.

Only one scandal has managed to survive throughout the Trump years, and that is the one where our government is lying about and hiding the Epstein files.  That damned thing just WILL NOT go away - will it Donald?  

If JD is right, and again, I think he is, about the public's inability to maintain an interest in a major scandal - and his assertion that today, in these modern times, public interest in Watergate would have faded after just twelve hours, imagine how unbelievably huge the Epstein saga would have been if it had played out fifty years earlier.  Hundreds would have been jailed, thousands of careers ruined, multiple governments brought down, billionaires arrested, and even the House of Windsor might have fallen.

We are no longer shocked by the rich and powerful behaving badly, squandering our natural resources and buying "toys" like mega-yachts and private jets while children go to bed hungry every night - but there is still one moral barrier standing whose breach we will not tolerate - and that is child rape.

If Watergate would have been little more than the equivalent of a pimple on the ass of society today, the Epstein saga would have been a quadruple limb amputation back in 1972.

Thank you, JD Vance, for helping to show us how god-awful the Epstein mess truly is.  Maybe Trump will assign you the task of cleaning up that one, too.