nixon administration admits fake lunar landing

Dark Side of the Moon - Stanley Kubrick and the Fake Moon Landings

The Death Toll of Watergate

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

18 November 12

epublicans are fond of comparing their scandal-mongering - like the current hype over the terrorist assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya - with genuine scandals, like Watergate, which sank Richard Nixon's second term, and Iran-Contra, which marred Ronald Reagan's last two years in office. The GOP's false equivalence represents both an effort to puff up their latest accusations against Democrats and an attempt to minimize the misconduct of those two Republican presidents. For instance, one favorite GOP comment about Benghazi is: "No one died at Watergate. Four brave Americans died in Benghazi."

This apples-and-oranges sophistry misses the point that Watergate and Iran-Contra were complex conspiracies that required intensive investigations to unravel their secrets (many of which remain hidden or in dispute to this day) while the Benghazi affair boils down to an easily resolved question as to why the U.S. intelligence community withheld some of the details in the immediate aftermath of the attack last Sept. 11.

The answers seem to be that the Benghazi consulate had evolved into a CIA base for secret operations and that U.S. intelligence didn't want to tip off the attack's perpetrators regarding how much the agency knew about their identities. So, the word "extremists" replaced specific groups and the CIA affiliation of two slain Americans was withheld.

By contrast, the history of Watergate is still substantially misunderstood even by supposed experts.
  READ MORE

How the Right's Smear Machine Started

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

09 March 12

mericans sometimes wonder how the nation’s political process got so unspeakably nasty with vitriol pouring forth especially from right-wing voices like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Michael Savage, to name just a few. Yet, whenever called on this ugliness, conservatives insist that they are the real victims, picked on by the Left.

This destructive and whiny dynamic has existed at least since the late 1960s when angry passions spilled over from the Vietnam War and grew worse after Richard Nixon exploited Democratic dissension on the war to win the White House in 1968 – and then continued the war for another four nasty years.

As president, Nixon also responded to the fury splintering American society with wedge issues, appealing to the "silent majority" and denouncing anti-war protesters as "bums." He rode that divisive formula to a landslide victory in November 1972 but soon ensnared himself in the Watergate political spying scandal that drove him from office in August 1974.

Out of all that anger emerged an American Right that believed, as an article of faith, that the Democrats and the "liberal press" had turned Nixon’s run-of-the-mill indiscretions in Watergate into a constitutional crisis to undo Nixon’s overwhelming electoral mandate of 1972.

So, over the next two decades – with Nixon in the background egging on Republican politicians – the Right built an attack machine that was designed to defend against "another Watergate" but also was available to destroy the "liberal" enemy.   READ MORE