I’ve been thinking lately about Richard Nixon (I know, I know, now some Paleocon or leftist is going to start shouting about the “demoralization of the neocons”). The thing that strikes me the most about the downfall of Dick Nixon is how he was punished and shamed for sins which, compared to those of his predecessors, were actually rather minor. Watergate wasn’t an example of Richard Nixon’s self-destructive personality or an outgrowth of the rising power of the Presidency during the Cold War- but rather an exercise of power by a rising left. If ensuring the defeat of America in Vietnam was the Baptism of the New Left then Watergate was its First Communion.

Strip away all the rhetoric about Watergate and move down to the basics. What really happened? In essence, it was nothing more than a bungled burglary of little consequence carried out by overzealous aides of the President. Not something to be commended, to be sure, but something to bring down a President? Lyndon Johnson stole his first election to the Senate, enriched himself via nearly criminal business dealings, and himself ordered all manner of break-ins and harassment against his enemies. Those who rant about who the FBI “wiretapped Martin Luther King” would do well to recall that the Presidents during his time of prominence were Kennedy and Johnson- men who happened to have a “D” behind their names. Of course, the ranting individual typically doesn’t get around to that.

John Kennedy was involved in rampant electoral corruption, carried on an affair with a mobster’s girlfriend, and deliberately concealed a debilitating health condition from the public. The media was aware of this and kept is largely secret. Certainly, I would argue, all of those things merit worse censure than a single break-in.

The obvious problem is that the media, then as now, is controlled by liberals who are largely sympathetic to the Democratic Party and who will, therefore, display a greater degree of discretion and reverence in dealing with a Democrat President than they will in dealing with a Republican one. Does anyone think that, had Bill Clinton been implicated in a break-in at the Dole Headquarters in 1996, he would have been forced to resign? After all, he was caught taking cash from the Chinese Communists in 1996 (in my opinion a far worse sin than a little failed political espionage) and pretty much no one cares. Conversely, does anyone really believe that had Ronald Reagan or George HW Bush been exposed as having had a “Monica” of their own they would not have been swiftly forced from office and banished into disgrace?

Watergate is, to this very day, the political sin by which we measure all other political sins. However, I put it to you that it is an invented sin. No one has ever argued that the break-in did anything to turn the election or that it had any real intention beyond discovering information on the McGovern campaign. It was then covered up by the President and those around him. That’s the extent of the thing. From the fuss made about it in history books (where more space is often devoted to it than to major wars) you’d think that, in 1972-1974, Nixon had placed the country under Martial Law and sent Death Squads out in a reign of terror to wipe out all the members of his alleged “enemies list.”

Watergate is also another good example of how often Republicans end up being kneecapped by the weak-sisters in their own party, who flail about and cry about supposed Republican misdeeds which the average Democrat would not turn from were they committed by their own party. By holding their colleagues to a higher standard then their opponents, this group constantly undermines any Republican effort. Had the GOP maintained the same level of unity in 1973-74 as the Democrats did in 1998-99 then Nixon never could have been forced from office. For all the shouting of the Democrats and the partisan media, had the Republicans held in the Senate, he’d have been fine.

We need to fight back against the myths of Watergate (just as we must fight the myths of Vietnam) because those myths are integral to the modern left’s vision of itself. To the leftist of a certain age Vietnam and Watergate are the model of their gloried youth, where they stood up and changed the world. That is why they are obsessed with recreating them, just as Kevin Spacey’s character in American Beauty was obsessed with recapturing his nihilistic youth by ignoring his family, smoking pot, and pursuing a teenaged girl.

This is why every new American war becomes the new Vietnam and why, every time there’s a scandal on the watch of a Republican (Iran-Contra being the most notable example) all the old clichés are chipped and repainted to make themselves ready for renewed service. It isn’t even political for these people anymore, it’s innate- it’s something else. Primal, in its own way.