Let me just be honest here about ‘Watergate.’

I see stuff like this:

Watergate, of course, stands alone in the pantheon of presidential scandals. Despite the tendency of the opposition party to hype any presidential hiccup over the past four decades as “bigger than Watergate,” there really is only one Watergate.

…and I scratch my head.  Seriously, people.  There was a break-in by enthusiasts who thought that they were invincible.  They got caught.  Lots of people in the Nixon administration lied about it – far, far beyond the level needed or desired.  They got caught.  The President himself got caught up in it all.  He got caught.  He resigned. We added the -gate suffix to our political vocabulary list.

The end.

Generally speaking, I can think of any number of situations that were worse than Watergate, because I can think of any number of occasions where the President did something stupid and somebody died as a result.  Somebody who we didn’t want to die.  I know that Watergate is the story that parents tell their kids when they want them to grow up to be news media personnel*, but gimme a break.  It’s not the defining moment of American political chicanery.  It’s a moment of nostalgia – or, worse, that weird kind of faux-nostalgia that people who were too young to be there for the original event sometimes exude.  Either way: stop living in the past, Democrats.  This is, like, the twenty-first century, dude.

Good.  Glad to finally get that off of my chest.

Moe Lane

*Thank you, Douglas Adams.