Watergate resurrected

Dec 22, 2019 Editorial

Nixon had his plumbers and smoking gun (that tape recording) and today’s White House incumbent came up with a real doozy of a business deal in what is supposed to be a wise foreign policy management.
The man, in 1973, resigned in disgrace, and when he departed this vale, he was fondly remembered by the faithful as a man of honour, though he besmirched both himself, the high office of the presidency, and his place in history.
In that time of Watergate, there were men from his own party, who were prepared to stand by him all the way down to the wire, but on one condition only. It was that he did not know, that he did not order the Watergate break-in, and that he was not involved in any way at all.
There were such congressional men of honour in those days: give us something with which to fight and there are no brick walls that can impede, that cannot be overcome. But to a man, they told Nixon to his face not to lie to them, not to leave them with a bucket lacking a bottom.
And war it was, until they discovered that he did deceive them; that he left them no option but to abandon (him), the president from their own party. When it was revealed that he had left them hanging, they left one by one: some in tears, some in anger, some with shame and pain, and with the deepest of regret.
In terms of the latter, they knew what was required of them, what they had to do, where their duty congealed with unbreakable steeliness. It was the same sturdy way with advisors and counsel, who had no option but to throw in their hand.
In sum, that was of listening to, and then answering to the insistent call of the sacred Constitution of the United States. There are not many documents like that revered and much bandied about Constitution around, not even the groundbreaking Magna Carta that was forced upon an obstinate King John.
But prevail the English barons did, and so did the stirrings from that United States document, which comes alive when men of rare calibre find the personal internal constitutional fiber to rise up and let the chips fall down to wherever they lead, including a president of their own, if a falling was what it had to be.
Today, there is a Chief Executive in America who is the laughing stock of the world; one who is feared and recoiled from by ranking members within his own political party; one who increasingly exhibits the symptoms of being unhinged or, at the very least, in the throes of crippling delirium.
For there at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a president, who is consumed by personalities (all seen as enemies), while conveniently ignoring the underlying issues that mean so much. He is focused on those frills at the periphery, while dismissing the tough, demanding matters and troubles that constitute the broad deep middle. This is bad.
It was one thing to have had and to allow a Joseph McCarthy in the US Senate back in the 1950s to run amok. It is an altogether dreadful reality to have his reincarnation in the White House itself.
And yet men and women from his party say they are unfazed, men and women of some prowess but, at the core, overpowered by a greater and narrower political calculus that first freezes and then negates the evidence of their eyes and ears, the reactions of world leaders who mock and scorn, and of indications that there is so much that is wrong.
All that maybe so, but they still do not rise to the level of impeachable offenses, as defined in the US Constitution.
But clearly, and unimpeachably so, what took place in the Ukraine affair is an impeachable offense. For if using the funds of the taxpayers as leverage to coerce a foreign leader to, in effect, provide dirt with which to blackmail a political adversary is not, then what is?
For if that isn’t, then nothing is. And with that said, where does this kind of leadership recklessness, if not outright lawlessness, stop?

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