Not Punishing Nixon For His Crimes Led To A Worse Criminal

The following post is part of an excellent and thought-provoking article by Robert Reich:

America’s failure to hold Richard Nixon accountable for his attacks on democracy when he was president undermined the common good and paved the way for Donald Trump to mount even worse attacks. 

The scandal that came to be known as “Watergate” and led to Nixon’s resignation from the presidency was a shock to the American political system. Afterward (analogous to putting locks on the doors after a town’s first robbery), Congress enacted many reforms, but all were eventually watered down or found by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional. 

The Watergate scandal began the modern era of “whatever-it-takes-to-win” politics — blatant disregard of any and all norms and laws that interfered with gaining or keeping power. Trump is the logical and inevitable consequence. 

In 1974, in his last remarks about Watergate as a senator, 77-year-old Sam Ervin —who as chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee became widely revered for his fairness and deep respect for the Constitution — explained that President Nixon and his aides had “a lust for political power” that “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.” 

What was particularly chilling about Nixon’s behavior was his disdain for the common good and total obsession with himself. 

On the tapes of his White House meetings, Nixon can be heard to talk incessantly about himself — his needs, his place in history, and his animosities — but he never once mentions the nation’s needs. For Richard M. Nixon, there was no common good. Only Richard Nixon.

The details of what occurred still shock. 

In 1970, Nixon authorized break-ins or “black bag jobs” of people considered domestic security threats. An early goal was to destroy the reputation of Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked to the news media the Pentagon Papers, showing that the Johnson administration had lied to the American people about the Vietnam War. 

Nixon’s burglars broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, seeking information that might smear Ellsberg and undermine his credibility in the antiwar movement. “You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon told his assistant H. R. Haldeman in June 1971, referring to Ellsberg. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?”

In early 1972, Nixon launched a plan for spying on and sabotaging Democrats in the upcoming presidential campaign, including wiretaps and burglaries. 

His henchmen paid the chauffeur of Senator Ed Muskie, whom Nixon considered his most likely Democratic opponent, to photograph Muskie’s internal memos and strategy documents.

They paid others to dig up dirt on the sex life of Senator Ted Kennedy, a potential opponent in 1976. “I’d really like to get Kennedy taped,” Nixon told Haldeman. They inserted a retired Secret Service agent into the team protecting Kennedy who, Haldeman assured Nixon, would “do anything that I tell him.” Nixon replied, “We just might get lucky and catch this son of a bitch and ruin him for ’76,” adding, “That’s going to be fun.” 

Nixon ordered another assistant, John Ehrlichman, to direct the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax returns of all likely Democratic presidential candidates, including Kennedy. “Are we going after their tax returns?” Nixon asked. “You know what I mean? There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills.”

In the early morning of June 17, 1972, a team of burglars wearing business suits and rubber gloves broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building in Washington. The burglars were discovered and arrested, and the FBI immediately began an investigation. 

Six days later, Attorney General John Mitchell proposed to Nixon that he order the CIA to claim national security secrets would be compromised if the FBI didn’t halt its investigation. Nixon agreed. “Play it tough,” he directed. “That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we are going to play it.”

Six weeks after the burglars’ arrest, Nixon and Haldeman discussed paying them off to keep them from talking to federal investigators. “They have to be paid,” Nixon said. “That’s all there is to that.”

On March 21, 1973, Nixon counsel John W. Dean reported that the burglars were still demanding money. Nixon asked “How much money do you need?” Dean estimated a million dollars over the following two years. Nixon responded “you could get it in cash, and I know where it could be gotten.” They discussed using a secret stash hidden in the White House, laundering the money though bookmakers, and empaneling a grand jury so the burglars could plead the Fifth Amendment or claim memory failure. Nixon praised Dean’s efforts. “You handled it just right. You contained it. Now after the election, we’ve got to have another plan.” 

Four days after the tapes revealing much of this malfeasance were released, on August 9, 1974, Nixon was forced to resign.

I RELATE THESE DETAILS to remind you just how far Nixon went in violating norms and laws in order to retain power. Even though his actions led to his resignation and to some reforms, Americans’ trust in politics was deeply shaken. 

Nixon was never held legally accountable. 

Even before President Nixon’s resignation, speculation had swirled around a possible deal between Ford and Nixon in which Nixon’s resignation would be conditioned on Ford’s agreement to pardon him. Ford strongly denied that there was any such “deal.” 

On September 8, 1974, the new president, Gerald Ford, issued a full pardon to Nixon for any offenses he “has committed or may have committed.” . . .

Once norms and laws are broken without consequence, such actions invite further norm breaking and lawbreaking. Nixon’s willingness to do anything to retain power presaged Trump’s willingness to do anything to retain power. 

The shameful episode suggests that, if Trump is found guilty of seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election, it would be a profound mistake for Biden (or any future president) to pardon Trump on grounds that such a step would help the nation heal. It will not. The wound will fester and invite even worse abuses in the future.

THE LINE FROM NIXON TO TRUMP passed through Newt Gingrich. When Gingrich took over the House at the start of 1995, he brought “whatever-it-takes-to-win” politics to Congress. . . .

According to Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, two respected and nonpartisan political observers, “The forces Mr. Gingrich unleashed destroyed whatever comity existed across party lines.”

Donald Trump would take bitter conflict and political polarization to a new level.

EVEN BEFORE HE TRIED TO OVERTURN the results of the 2020 election, Trump used Nixonian tactics — lying to the public, seeking to punish his enemies with tax audits and prosecutorial probes, and obstructing justice. He also encouraged bigotry as a political weapon — urging travel bans on Muslims, enforcement raids on Latino communities, photo IDs to vote, a wall along the Mexican border, the purging of voter registration lists, and bans on transgender personnel in the military. 

Like Nixon, Trump was interested only in advancing his own personal agenda at the expense of the common good.

Meanwhile, over the last five decades, the Republican Party has lost any relationship to the common good. Increasingly, its goal has been to gain and keep power at whatever cost, even at the expense of the public’s trust in the major institutions of our democracy. 

A Pardon For Trump Would NOT Be Good For The U.S.

 Richard Nixon broke the law. It cost him his presidency, but he was never charged or convicted for his criminal conduct. That's because President Gerald Ford pardoned him. Ford said he did it for the good of the country -- so the country could heal and unite.

That pardon was a mistake, and it's likely the reason that Ford was not re-elected. Most Americans believe that no man is above the law -- not even a president. 

Now we have another president who has broken the law. Donald Trump committed a felony crime by intentionally taking government documents when he left the White House (many of them classified top secret). His crime actually endangered the national security of the country.

GOP officials have tried to defend him, but the indictment explaining his criminal conduct (and his admissions on audio and video tapes) have made that impossible. 

Now Republican officials are changing their tactic to defend him. They are beginning to talk about pardoning Trump. And even Trump himself (beginning to fear his conviction) is demanding that all GOP presidential candidates pledge to give him a pardon if elected.

Why would they pardon him. Candidate Nikki Haley said it would be for the good of the country since it would look bad for a former president to go to prison -- something she said only happens in banana republics. And other Republicans are beginning to say the same.

They are wrong. Pardoning a president who has committed a serious crime would NOT be good for the country. It would be disastrous!

Donald Trump got the idea that presidents were above the law when he saw the pardon of Nixon. If he was pardoned, it would just insure that all future presidents would know that could not be punished for breaking the law (because a pardon who happen if anyone tried to punish them). It would truly insure that they would believe themselves above the law.

Most Americans don't like that. They know that making anyone (even a president) above the law puts democracy in danger. A president above the law could break the law to create an authoritarian regime and thus end our fragile democracy. We cannot allow that to happen, and that means Trump should not be pardoned if convicted (which seems likely).

Pardoning Nixon was a mistake. Pardoning Trump would be disastrous!

U.S. Needs To Relearn The Lessons Of Watergate

The following editorial is by the editorial board of The Washington Post:

Fifty years ago Friday, burglars broke into the Watergate complex — and the rest is more than just history. The scandal that ended in President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation from office helped shape our modern politics, reforming the government, revitalizing the press and redefining the parties. Now, the country confronts another generation-defining crisis, and events half a century old feel as relevant as if they happened yesterday.

The Nixon White House’s illegal sabotage of its opponents and the coverup that followed were examples of government going wrong. What happened after these crimes showed government going almost exactly right: Congress investigated, the news media reported, the people read, watched, listened and spoke — and eventually, enough members of the Republican elite put country over party to lead to the departure of a corrupt, dangerous president.

Today, Congress is investigating again: A select committee in the House of Representatives is examining what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, when an armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol seeking to overturn the results of a lawful election — in part because a president, Donald Trump, exhorted them to. Yet most members of the GOP appear afraid to utter a word against the ex-president, who continues to hold their party in his grip. Worse still, most refuse to engage at all in this truth-seeking effort, or even to put much stock in the concept of truth itself. Not only do the two sides today share little when it comes to policy or philosophy. In many cases, they don’t even share a reality.

So in 2022, as Congress tries to get to the facts when facts have gone out of fashion, is there anything to be learned from 1972? Scandals happened in the decades before, from the Red Scare, to the Bay of Pigsinvasion, to the misguided decisions that mired the nation in the Vietnam War; scandals happened in the years after, from the Iran-contra affair, to the claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to the mental and physical torment of prisoners during the war on terrorism. All surely contributed to the erosion of trust in government to its depressing low of 20-some percent today.

Yet Watergate shook the nation as little else before and changed it — in some ways for better, by encouraging the press to hold government to account and the public to pay attention, as well as by ushering in legislation that served the same goals in areas such as campaign finance and intelligence, and in some ways for worse, by planting the seed of anti-government sentiment that has since grown like a strangling weed.

Jan. 6 has shaken the nation, too. The environment for needed change — whether updates to the Electoral Count Act and safeguards for voting rights, or a broader attempt by both parties to reconcile over common causes such as democracy and the rule of law — looks, admittedly, hostile. But enough people — from those in the chambers of Congress to those in any spot in the country near a television set or a newsroom desk — cared 50 years ago to make government work again when it appeared to have broken. The worst mistake anyone can make today is to give up on it because it has broken again.

We Thought Nixon Defined Corruption - Then Came Trump

The following is just a small part of an excellent article on our two most corrupt presidents by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in The Washington Post:

President George Washington, in his celebrated 1796 Farewell Address, cautioned that American democracy was fragile. “Cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government,” he warned.

Two of his successors — Richard Nixon and Donald Trump — demonstrate the shocking genius of our first president’s foresight.

As reporters, we had studied Nixon and written about him for nearly half a century, during which we believed with great conviction that never again would America have a president who would trample the national interest and undermine democracy through the audacious pursuit of personal and political self-interest.

And then along came Trump.

The heart of Nixon’s criminality was his successful subversion of the electoral process — the most fundamental element of American democracy. He accomplished it through a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and disinformation that enabled him to literally determine who his opponent would be in the presidential election of 1972.

With a covert budget of just $250,000, a team of undercover Nixon operatives derailed the presidential campaign of Sen. Edmund Muskie of Maine, the Democrats’ most electable candidate.

Nixon then ran against Sen. George McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat widely viewed as the much weaker candidate, and won in a historic landslide with 61 percent of the vote and carrying 49 states.

Over the next two years, Nixon’s illegal conduct was gradually exposed by the news media, the Senate Watergate Committee, special prosecutors, a House impeachment investigation and finally by the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ordered Nixon to turn over his secret tape recordings, which doomed his presidency.

These instruments of American democracy finally stopped Nixon dead in his tracks, forcing the only resignation of a president in American history.

Donald Trump not only sought to destroy the electoral system through false claims of voter fraud and unprecedented public intimidation of state election officials, but he also then attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power to his duly elected successor, for the first time in American history.

Trump’s diabolical instincts exploited a weakness in the law. In a highly unusual and specific manner, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 says that at 1 p.m. on Jan. 6 following a presidential election, the House and Senate will meet in a joint session. The president of the Senate, in this case Vice President Mike Pence, will preside. The electoral votes from the 50 states and the District of Columbia will then be opened and counted.

This singular moment in American democracy is the only official declaration and certification of who won the presidential election.

In a deception that exceeded even Nixon’s imagination, Trump and a group of lawyers, loyalists and White House aides devised a strategy to bombard the country with false assertions that the 2020 election was rigged and that Trump had really won. They zeroed in on the Jan. 6 session as the opportunity to overturn the election’s result. Leading up to that crucial date, Trump’s lawyers circulated memos with manufactured claims of voter fraud that had counted the dead, underage citizens, prisoners and out-of-state residents.

We watched in utter dismay as Trump persistently claimed that he was really the winner. “We won,” he said in a speech on Jan. 6 at the Ellipse. “We won in a landslide. This was a landslide.” He publicly and relentlessly pressured Pence to make him the victor on Jan. 6.

On that day, driven by Trump’s rhetoric and his obvious approval, a mob descended on the Capitol and, in a stunning act of collective violence, broke through doors and windows and ransacked the House chamber, where the electoral votes were to be counted. The mob then went in search of Pence — all to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Trump did nothing to restrain them.

By legal definition this is clearly sedition — conduct, speech or organizing that incites people to rebel against the governing authority of the state. Thus, Trump became the first seditious president in our history. . . .

“A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits,” Nixon wrote in a note to himself in 1969. It was a classically Nixonian adage — embraced by Trump, who had been defeated in the 2020 election but, armed with falsehoods and a scheme to hold on to power, refused to quit.

Even before the election, Trump relentlessly tried to maneuver and claim that the electoral process was rigged against him, laying the groundwork for an assault on the legitimacy of its outcome, which he continues to this day.

On June 22, 2020, for example, nearly five months before Election Day, he tweeted: “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”

At 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, as the presidential vote count solidified Biden’s path to victory in the electoral college, Trump told the nation and the world: “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”. . .

Both Nixon and Trump created a conspiratorial world in which the U.S. Constitution, laws and fragile democratic traditions were to be manipulated or ignored, political opponents and the media were “enemies,” and there were few or no restraints on the powers entrusted to presidents.

Both Nixon and Trump had been outsiders, given to paranoia, relentless in their ambition, carrying chips on their shoulders. Trump from the outer boroughs of New York City, not Manhattan. Nixon from Yorba Linda, Calif., not San Francisco or Los Angeles. Even after achieving the most powerful office in the world, these two men harbored deep insecurities. . . .

Both Nixon and Trump have been willing prisoners of their compulsions to dominate, and to gain and hold political power through virtually any means. In leaning so heavily on these dark impulses, they defined two of the most dangerous and troubling eras in American history.

As Washington warned in his Farewell Address more than 225 years ago, unprincipled leaders could create “permanent despotism,” “the ruins of public liberty,” and “riot and insurrection.”

Trump's Impeachment Support Versus Nixon's

With the public impeachment hearings about to start regarding Donald Trump, we don't yet know whether he'll be impeached and removed or resign (like Nixon did). I doubt he'll resign. His ego and narcissism will probably prevent that. The opinion of most political pundits is that he will be impeached by the House, but not removed from office by the Senate (thanks to Republican senators).

I found this chart interesting. It is from the Gallup Poll. They questioned 1,506 adults between October 14th and 31st, and that survey had a 3 point margin of error (5 points for Independents, and 6 points for Democrats and Republicans). They compared Trump to Richard Nixon (right before he resigned to avoid impeachment).

Among all adults, 51% want Trump impeached and removed from office. That number was 58% for Nixon. Among Independents, the numbers for Trump (53%) and Nixon (55%) were very close. But there is a significant difference among Republicans and Democrats.

About 31% of Republicans wanted Nixon impeached and removed, while only 7% want that for Trump. About 71% of Democrats wanted Nixon removed from office, but an even larger 87% want Trump removed.

Frankly, I think it's remarkable that so many already want Trump removed, before any public hearings have happened. It took much longer and public hearings to get a majority wanting Nixon removed. Of course, Nixon wasn't as unpopular as Trump is before the public hearings.

Support For Trump's Impeachment Higher Than For Nixon/Clinton As Official Proceedings Start

The chart above and post below are from Axios.com. It's not good news for Donald Trump.

Public support for President Trump's impeachment is higher than it was for Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton when the House launched impeachment inquiries against them.

• Why it matters: Support for impeachment of Trump is still less than half the country — 44% in the Monmouth University poll shown here; 47% in a CNN poll. And the polling reflects a 50-50 country. But the Ukraine scandal is pushing the numbers up.
• Per CNN: "The change since May has largely come among independents and Republicans. ... [S]upport for impeachment and removal has risen 11 points to 46% among independents and 8 points to 14% among Republicans."

Keep in mind: A majority of the public didn't support impeaching Nixon until a few weeks before he resigned.

Trump Is Guilty Of A Nixon-Like Abuse Of Power

 (The picture of Postmaster General Megan Brennan is from a USPS website. The photos of Trump and Nixon are in the public domain.)

Richard Nixon tried to have an imperial presidency -- taking to himself more power than the Constitution gave him. He tried to obstruct justice by interfering with a government investigation, but went even further.

He abused the power of his presidency by creating an enemies list -- and then tried to use agencies of the federal government (IRS, FBI, Secret Service, Justice Dept., etc.) to damage those he considered to be enemies (Democrats, journalists, etc.). That abuse of power became one of the articles of impeachment lodged against him, and contributed to his being forced to resign.

Donald Trump doesn't learn from history -- either because he is ignorant of that history, or doesn't care about the Constitution or the law. Like Nixon, he is trying to establish an imperial presidency. He wants to have the kind of absolute power enjoyed only by monarchs or tyrants. He thinks he should be able to use the federal government to damage those he sees as an enemy -- and the biggest enemy in Trump's sights is The Washington Post.

The Washington Post has had the temerity to public the truth about Trump (including keeping track of the thousands of lies he tells the American people). He has tried endlessly, through tweets and public statements, to damage the reputation of that newspaper. But he has not succeeded. His loyal trumpista base believes his lies, but no one else does.

So he decided to play a dirtier game. Since Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos also owns Amazon, he decided to use a government agency to hurt Bezos by hurting Amazon. He called Postmaster General Megan Brennan into his office several times (each time in secret, leaving her visit off the official schedule), and asked her to raise the postal rates on Amazon. He had publicly claimed that the U.S. Postal Service was shipping Amazon packages at a loss, and now he asked Brennan to double the cost of Amazon shipping with the Post Office.

It was a lie. The Post Office has given Amazon a good contract to get their business, but the Post Office is NOT losing money on those shipments. That would violate federal law.

Brennan is a trumpista, but she is not stupid enough to break the law so Trump can get back at people he doesn't like. Each time, she explained that the USPS could not arbitrarily raise rates because they had a contract, and that must be reviewed by a regulatory commission. She would be breaking the law to do as Trump asked.

What Trump did is abuse the power of his office. It doesn't matter that Brennan refused to do it. Just asking her to do it was an abuse of power -- and that is an impeachable offense. It wasn't legal for Nixon to do it, and it is not legal for Trump to do it.

How can the Republican Party continue to support and cover for this criminal?

Most Expect Trump To Be The Worst President Since Nixon

The chart above was made from information in a new Public Policy Polling survey -- done on January 23rd and 24th of a random national sample of 1,043 registered voters, with a margin of error of 3 points.

It shows that the general public has some very low expectations of the Trump presidency. In fact, they think he will be a worse president than any president between Obama and Ford. The only president they view Trump as possibly being better than is Nixon (who was impeached and had to resign).

Personally, I wouldn't give Trump that much credit. I think he will be worse than Richard Nixon.

The Unwarranted Rehabilitation Of Richard Nixon

All of these charts were made from information contained in a recent YouGov Poll (conducted on August 6th and 7th of a random national sample of 1,000 adults, with a margin of error of about 4 points).

Richard Nixon became the first (and only) president to resign that office on August 9, 1974 -- forty years ago last Saturday. He really had no choice. The House had already impeached him, and with the criminality that had already been exposed at that time, it was a foregone conclusion that the Senate would find him guilty of "high crimes and misdemeanors" and remove him from office. He left office in a well-deserved aura of humiliation (which considering his personality, was probably the worst punishment he could receive).

So I was a bit surprised when I saw the results of this survey. It looks like time is rehabilitating the perception of Nixon. Note in the charts above that back in 1999 about 72% of the population still thought Nixon's actions were serious enough to warrant his resignation, but by 2014 that percentage had dropped to 59%. Frankly, I don't understand that. Have too many young people just ignored this bit of history?

But it gets even worse. The chart below asked people if Nixon's actions were more serious, less serious, or about the same as the actions of many other presidents. Amazingly, only 33% of the current public says Nixon's actions were more serious than those of other presidents, while a majority of 51% said they were about the same. That's outrageous!

I have been unhappy with the actions of some other presidents, and personally think Ronald Reagan and George Bush were terrible presidents who did a lot of damage to this country (and I can understand how conservatives would be unhappy about some Democratic presidents) -- but I would never put any other president in a class with Richard Nixon. There is a huge difference between instituting bad policies (domestic, foreign, or economic) and criminal behavior.

Richard Nixon was a criminal. He ordered others to commit criminal acts (felonies), and then went to great lengths to cover those criminal acts up (which is also a felony). Bad policies may make us think less of a president, but Nixon's actions could have sent him to prison. There is no way that the actions of any other president (Republican or Democrat) were as bad as the criminal actions of Richard Nixon. His actions weren't just wrong, but brought shame to the office of the president.

Anyone who thinks the actions of Richard Nixon is no worse than the actions of other presidents is a fool, and is letting his/her politics get in the way of their good sense.

Dole Believes The GOP Has Lost Its Way

I have posted several times about how far to the right the Republican Party has moved recently. It is now so far to the right that it wouldn't be recognizable to many famous Republicans -- and very likely wouldn't accept those men as being "good" Republicans. Presidents Lincoln and T. Roosevelt would be considered liberals by today's party, and totally unacceptable. Eisenhower and Nixon were moderates -- also unacceptable. Even such conservative icons as Reagan and Goldwater held views that would make them unacceptable to todays teabaggers.

Goldwater believed in equal rights, even for the LGBT community -- and he was opposed to the party giving in to the religious views of the fundamentalists. Reagan supported a ban on assault weapons, raised taxes when it was needed, and believed the rich should pay more in taxes than the middle class. The party still reveres the memory of Reagan, but they have to ignore many of his views to do so.

And this is not just my view -- the view of a progressive leftist. It is also the view of some respected life-long Republicans. One of those is former senator and Republican nominee for president, Bob Dole. This is what he told Chris Wallace on a Fox News Sunday interview this week:

WALLACE: What do you think of your party, the Republicans today?

DOLE: I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says “closed for repairs” until New Year’s Day next year — and spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas.

WALLACE: You describe the GOP of your generation as Eisenhower Republicans, moderate Republicans. Could people like you, even Ronald Reagan — could you make it in today’s Republican Party.

DOLE: I doubt it. Reagan couldn’t have made it. Certainly Nixon couldn’t have made it, cause he had ideas. We might have made it, but I doubt it.

Republicans Are The Biggest Spenders

It seems like one of the Republican mantras I've been hearing for decades is that the Democrats are big spenders (while Republicans are more "conservative with government spending). The GOP has even come up with a phrase to convince Americans of this -- they call Democrats "tax and spend liberals". I guess that sounds good, if you're a right-winger. There's only one problem with it. It's just not true.

Economist Mark Thoma, who teaches at the University of Oregon, decided to find out just who the biggest spenders really were. The chart above shows what he found when he looked at the figures for the last forty years. It turns out that the presidents that increased spending the most were all Republicans (and a couple of the worst offenders had claimed to be conservatives).

The presidents who increased per capita spending the most were Republicans: (1) Nixon-Ford, (2) Reagan, and (3) "W" Bush. And the presidents who increased per capita spending the least were Democrats: (1) Clinton and (2) Obama. That exposes the current Republican claim of President Obama's enormous increase in government spending as an outrageous lie. Both his predecessor George W. Bush and conservative demi-god Ronald Reagan increased per capita spending far more than President Obama has.

Don't get me wrong. I personally believe President Obama should be spending much more than he is currently spending. That's because of the massive unemployment and faltering economy we are currently cursed with (and which was caused by Republican de-regulation and mismanagement). The government should be spending more to create jobs (even if it has to create government jobs) and prime the economic pump. I just want that money spent to help ordinary Americans, rather than how the Republicans spent it (on wars, military build-ups, corporate giveaways, etc.).

Now we know the truth. It is not the Democrats who are the big spenders, but the Republicans. The sad part is that the big-spending Republicans refused to spend any money on things that would actually help ordinary Americans.

Death Of An American Hero

Last Thursday, a true American hero died. That hero was 95 year-old W. Mark Felt. Although almost all Americans know what this gentlemen did to save and serve his country in a time of crises, I doubt if most Americans could tell you who W. Mark Felt was. That's because he is much more widely known by a nickname he was given by two young reporters. Mr. Felt was "Deep Throat".

During the Nixon administration, Felt was the second in command at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He was the anonymous source that tipped reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to the criminal actions of Nixon and his cronies, and guided them in their investigation of that administration.

Felt put his job and his reputation on the line because he felt that no one, including the president, is above the law. To protect Felt, Woodward and Bernstein gave him a nickname and never referred to him by anything except that nickname. They called him "Deep Throat" -- taking the moniker from a popular porno movie of the time.

The anonymous "Deep Throat" became famous after Woodward and Bernstein published their book All The President's Men, and a popular movie was made from the book. But Felt never tried to capitalize on that fame, and did not reveal that he was "Deep Throat" until 2005.

He didn't help the reporters to become famous or make a lot of money. He did it because he loved America and the Constitution she is built on. Our nation could use more men like W. Mark Felt.

This is what Carl Bernstein has to say about Felt:

"Watergate was a constitutional crisis in a criminal presidency. And he had the guts to say, 'Wait. The Constitution is more important in this situation than a president of the United States who breaks the law.' It's an important lesson, I think, for the country and for people in our business, as well."

Our nation could have used a "Deep Throat" from the Bush administration, which has turned out to be even worse than the Nixon administration.