Sorry, Ben Stein, but this is a stretch. Nixon wanted POWER!!
He wasn't framed. He deserved a forced resignation and infamy. And would Nixon have prevented the killing fields? I tend to doubt it.
Then your historical ignorance is the equal of your snarky arrogance.
EOM.
OMG! Really? They should have hung him.
Of course, if "wanting power" is a crime, then every elected and non-elected official in Washington, as well as every member of the MSM is also guilty.
I know -- let's have a mass lynching party!
Sorry, Ben Stein, but this is a stretch. Nixon wanted POWER!!
Sorry, but Nixon had power. He was President of the United States and had been reelected in 1972 with an overwhelming mandate, i.e., 49 states (520 electoral votes, which was almost 97% of the total) and 61% of the popular vote. Nixon received a higher percentage of the popular vote than even Reagan in 1984.
The reason that the White House "Plumbers" got started was to plug up security leaks (hint - leaks/plumbers!!) where sensitive intelligence information was being leaked out, some of it going directly to the Soviet Union.
Remember Daniel Ellsberg, who LEAKED the Pentagon Papers. Other information would get to the Democrats (sort of like having Senate Intelligence Committee meetings in secret, but the secrets would leak over to the Soviet Union ...)
Much of what the Plumbers were doing, while "questionable", was designed to protect our country's secrets (unlike Clinton's goon squad that protected his sorry little head.)
Nixon didn't want POWER .... he had the power he wanted as the President. He didn't want our country being sold down the river. He didn't want a repeat of the Korean War experience where Red sympathizers leaked military plans to UN personnel, who would then advise the Soviet Union of what the plans were. Nixon wanted to win the war in South Viet Nam, with honor .... but the Democrats in the U.S. would rather see us defeated.
BJK: Ben Stein is fairly accurate with his article. Your supposition is just plain mean . .. and wrong. If Nixon wanted power, he would have acted the way Clinton did (who wanted power to puff himself up) ... and he would have persuaded 1/3 of the Senate to hand tough and fight the articles of impeachment ... and he could have prevailed (like Clinton did). But he chose to do the right thing, and he resigned.
Mike
Wrong! As is your assumption of 'the killing fields'. Nixon knew the extent of the communist infiltration into all of our institutions. When he was forced to resign, in infamy, it was a communist victory. Your observation has been noted. What shocked Tricky Dick wasn't the extent of the communist infiltration into our institutions; what shocked him was the extent of communist indoctrination into the minds of Americans.
Keeping on drinking the kool-aid!
..flame suit on..BULL SH!T..read post #61
Neither the South Vietnamese or the Cambodian government would not have fallen if not for Watergate. The Soviets, looking for "Detant" would have backed off their assistance to the North Vietnamese, the radical congressional class of 1974 would have not been elected, and 3 million people in Southeast Asia would not have been butchered.
That is the real legacy of Watergate.
You can even take it a step further. If the US had not decayed both militarily and diplomatically under Ford/Carter (nether would have ever been in the WH had Nixon survived) would the Soviets have invaded Afghanistan, and without that, would we be fighting in the Mideast today? The latter is of course speculation, but not at all unreasonable.
I prefer Stein's appraisal to yours. His has facts and logic, yours just emotion and opinion. If you aren't a liberal you share those traits with them.
By the way, the Watergate break-in was about a call-girl sex scandal that the Democrats were having call-girls come to DNC headquarters, had some on DNC payroll to handle delegates "needs", and Nixon intended originally to bring this forward but needed concrete proof. The initial offenses by the individuals directly responsible were only low-rent breaking and entering charges, which the ones involved could easily have got dropped. He could have stopped everything by simply pardoning them there, and nothing further would have went from it..
Do you know any history other then what you were taugh by the main stream media?
Were you alive during this time?
Do you remember the total control the main stream media had on "the news"?
Do you know Proportionality?
The press weakened the President at at time we still had a lot of enemies. By the time he resigned, the United States was a paper tiger on the world stage. From President Nixon, we got President Ford and then the Mayaguez incident where we could not even perform a simple military operation against some pirates at sea. Following President Ford we had four years of President Carter. If it was not for Watergate we would not have had Carter and I doubt if Iran would have took over our Embassy.
We are all still too close to make good judgement about Watergate, and the role of the media in bringing down a President, and so I will leave it up to history to decide if the punishment inflicted on Nixon for the crimes Nixon was accused of (and which could have been condemed by a censure from Congress) was worth the price this nation paid.