By ANDREW KLAVAN | The Dailywire
The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and
LBJ, then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised.
I was reflecting this week on my brief stint, many years
ago, as a newspaperman. It was a job I loved. I signed on not too many years
after the Watergate scandal, and journalists were still flush with heroic ideas
about themselves. Woodward and Bernstein — and all reporters by extension — had
toppled a corrupt presidency and saved the republic and the Constitution from
the kind of behind-the-scenes government tyranny dramatized in such thriller
films as "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the
Condor".
So we took ourselves very seriously. We felt we mattered.
If you didn't believe us, you just had to go see the film "All the
President's Men." Robert Redford played one of us. How much
more could matter than that?
I look back now and the whole thing seems a sham, a
self-congratulatory illusion created by leftists in both the news media and in
Hollywood.
Recently, reading Mark Levin's "Unfreedom of the
Press", I was reminded that, before reporters went on their great crusade
against Richard Nixon, they had overlooked a whole lot of corruption in the
Democrat presidents who preceded him.
Levin tells how John F. Kennedy, with the knowledge of
his brother and Attorney General Robert, nudged the IRS into auditing
conservative groups. With Kennedy's approval, the FBI was also employed to
investigate those the administration disliked, including Martin Luther King Jr.
Lyndon Baines Johnson would later increase the politically motivated auditing
and spying. None of this was uncovered until later on.
Ben Bradlee — the editor of the Washington
Post, where Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story — was
well aware of his pal Kennedy's misuse of the tax and investigative agencies.
Not only did he not report it, he allowed himself and his paper to be manipulated
by information JFK had wrongly obtained.
This totally changes the Watergate narrative. Nixon's
dirty tricks and enemy lists may have been creepy and wrong, but the press
exposure of these misdemeanors came after years of ignoring similar and worse malfeasance
by Democrat administrations.
That changes what Watergate means. That transforms it
from a heroic crusade into a political hit job, Democrat hackery masquerading
as nobility. The press turned a blind eye to the corruption of JFK and LBJ,
then raced to overturn the election of a man they despised — despised in part
because he battled the Communism many of them had espoused.
What is it Karl Marx said: History repeats itself, the
first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?
Journalism today is a corrupt shadow of even its biased
former self. Competition, cutbacks and desperate attempts to appease a
dwindling audience have turned former newspapers like the New York Times into
little better than college rags run by starry-eyed leftist children and answerable
to an audience that demands to have their prejudices confirmed.
As a result, the reportage on the Donald Trump
administration has been a two and a half year hit job. The constant, breathless
reporting of the incipient end of the administration — this is a tipping point,
the walls are closing in, the president will be impeached! — has been nothing
but the out-loud infantile fantasies of under-read underage make-believe
radicals who are not equipped to do the job they are paid to do.
As Obama aide Ben Rhodes told a weirdly sympathetic Times reporter:
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting
experience consists of being around political campaigns. That's a sea change.
They literally know nothing."
Like the Nixon takedown, the attacks on Trump come after
years of turning a blind eye to the corruption of a Democrat. Obama's IRS
campaign against the Tea Party? His lies about Benghazi? His Fast and Furious
fiasco? His shutdown of a massive drug investigation to appease Iran? No big
deal. Obama was, as almost every mainstream outlet has declared, "scandal
free."
And yet unlike during the Watergate years, a virtual army
of conservative bloggers, podcasters and talk show hosts have given voice to
the opposition. As a result, the only actual scandal that is close to being
exposed is the possible misuse of federal agents and spies by Barack Obama in
an underhanded attempt to keep his opponents out of office.
This time, "Watergate" may have backfired. This
time, perhaps, we will be able to say: History repeats itself, once as leftist
deception, and once as the truth.
