Quoth the craven.
Never more.
I started to write a brief review of Rosemary Woods' part of Watergate yesterday as a kind of morals tale but didn’t have much of a vehicle to carry it into the Bridgegate story, though I think there are great similarities in terms of what an overly loyal and at
least some what amoral staff will do to support their "leader."
If you have not listened to Friday’s Morning Joe it is pretty funny. Joe et al. tried to make Bridgegate, perpetrated by Christie’s office staff and closest aides equivalent to the IRS scandal (which isn’t a scandal) because Obama was punishing political enemies (who weren’t punished), and Benghazi/Obama, and the ACA/Obama etc. All of which just about anybody who has a brain can see are not equivalent.
Step over The Sign of Four
That was the first segment with Joe gong on and on and on like he usually does, getting further off topic and talking about himself. And of course everyone at the table agreed absolutely with Joe. They all thought Christie’s presser was great. I did, however, notice the word “performance” kept popping up in reference to it.
Somewhere along the way they did acknowledge Christie never apologized to the people who were stuck in the grid lock. But it took the round table a long time to get to that admission.
In the second segment they all agreed that Christie is responsible for creating an atmosphere in which dirty tricks (my Nixonian term) were acceptable.
Then Donny Deutch knocked me for a loop.
He actually pointed out that Christie had not said he was sorry for an atmosphere that allowed his closest aides to play dirty tricks to get revenge on thousands of civilians. What Donny said that has been recognized by many on the left was that Christie was “sad” that he had created an atmosphere in which his closest aides lied to him. And he apologized for that atmosphere. Mica got really pissed at Deutch, who kept pressing the difference, and told him to stop or he would “have to leave the room.” Seriously, she said that.
The “guests” also all grudgingly acknowledged that personally controlling one’s personal staff is not really like a POTUS personally controlling various departments of the vast federal government. But that was half an hour after the whole table had compared Bridgegate to IRS notagate.
So, going back to the "Bridgegate is equivalent to the IRS scandal" that Joe kept saying over and over.
Bridgegate reminds me of what Rosemary Woods either did not did not do as Nixon’s long time secretary and friend, during Watergate, than IRS, or Fast and Furious etc.
When Sam Ervin’s committee began to deal with the tapes made in Nixon’s office they found an 18.5 minute stretch that was blank. (The 18 minutes has it’s own Wikipedia page. I find that hilarious as well as telling.)
There were other convolutions surrounding the tapes and lots of litigations and the Midnight Massacre. The story of the tapes deserves an entire chapter in the history of the Watergate hearings (The WH tapes has its own page in Widipedia with a section on Nixon).
18.5 minutes of a conversation between Nixon and H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s Chief of Staff and one of his chief hatchet men was erased.
When the question arose of how the tape came to be erased, Rosemary Woods claimed she must have done it while she was transcribing the tapes. Rosemary was not a political aparatchik of the party or for Nixon, she was his secretary, had been his secretary for years and continued to be after his resignation. She was considered a close family friend.
Investigators from Ervin’s committee and members of the press came to Nixon’s outer office to watch Rosemary stretch (The Rosemary Woods "stretch" also has it’s own Wikipedia page. <"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Mary_Woods"> (Nixon could have saved her that page in infamy.) from her typewriter to a phone on the far corner of her L shaped desk while keeping her foot on the forward/reverse/erase pads under her typewriter.
A member of the press noticed her foot came off the pad, presumably proving that she had not caused the erasure, at least not the way she claimed, thus leaving the more obvious conclusion that Nixon, or possibly Haldeman had erased something that would have gotten him impeached and convicted in the Senate.
Poor Rosemary became a laughing stock. She apparently took the secret of who erased the tapes with her to the grave. I'm not sure why she was not prosecuted except there were so very many others to choose from.
Rosemary only claimed to have erased about 5 minutes of the tape and never took responsibility for the other 13 minutes. Nixon never stood up for her, never absolved her of things she probably did not do, or if done were done to protect Richard Nixon. She took a bullet for him and he did nothing to stop the bleeding and the public ridecule. She risked going to jail for him.
It does not speak well of a leader when they set an atmosphere where their loyal aides feel either the need or the desire to act in amoral and or mean and or illegal ways in order to serve their boss, and then to have that boss turn around, when those acts backfire and either leave them twisting slowly in the wind, or stab their loyal aides in the back.
That is not the act of a leader. That is the act of a craven
Christie proved in his presser that he is not an upstanding kind of guy. He has little or no loyalty to those from whom he expects loyalty. He is out for Christy and if others go into the political frey and fight for him he is just about a likely to slay them on the political battle field as the enemy is.