Watergate scandal

"A journalist for the Nation, Greg Mitchell, who has also written about us, wrote a book about the mainstream media called So Wrong for So Long. And that title is basically it. Yes we have these heroic moments with Watergate and so on, but actually, come on, the press has never been very good. It has always been very bad. Fine journalists are an exception to the rule. When you are involved in something yourself, like I am with Wikileaks, and you know every facet of it, you look to see what is reported about it in the mainstream press and you see naked lie after naked lie. You know that the journalist knows its a lie, it is not a simple mistake. Then people repeat lies and so on. The condition of the mainstream press nowadays is so appalling I dont think it can be reformed. I dont think that is possible. I think it has to be eliminated, and replaced with something better."

"As a young man, Bill Clinton was one of thousands of leftist students who benefited from KGB funds, earning one of those trips to the USSR which were the preferred means for the recruitment of Soviet agents in the universities of the West. In the 60s, that would be deterrent enough for any application for town mayor of the interior. In the 90s, after three decades of Gramscian cultural revolution, the dangerous links did not prevent Clinton from being elected US president with the support of the American Communist Party. Thanks to a well-calculated "politically correct" speech, the new ruler became an idol of the left, which moved heaven and earth to keep him in office despite a range of charges, including sexual frivolities, financial imbroglios and a multitude of small Watergates, including something perfectly serious and terrifying: the suspicion of favoring Chinese nuclear espionage. The well-thinking press resisted any investigation of the matter."

"In the post-Vietnam War era the need for Communist abuses has been no less pressing than before. More facts have come to light on the scope of U.S. violence in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the extent of which U.S. officials lied to the public with regard to their programs and methods, and the brazenness with which these officials defied treaty obligations and international law. Much as the government and the media tried to isolate the scoundrelism of Watergate from the much more profound immorality of the “secret” devastation of Cambodia, the linkage between the two could not be entirely concealed and therefore tended to discredit still further the campaign to bring “freedom” to South Vietnam. Counterrevolution, torture and official murder in Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, and other U.S. satellites was also reaching new peaks. Thus, if Cambodian terror did not exist, the Western propaganda systems would have had to invent it, and in certain respects it did […]."

"Faking the Moon Landing is easy. You need dirt, wardrobe, a sound stage, a lot of black paints, and some stupid suits. The hard part is shutting people up. Its been 36 years! You think the technicians, and prop people, camera people, directors, everyone who works at NASA, and the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, and all the nice folks at Cape Carnaval in Florida, plus members of the U.S. Congress and the White House all shut up about this amazing cover-up for all that time? The Government couldnt even fucking cover up a break-in to a psychiatrists office in a fucking cheesy hotel! Watergate is the answer to all this shit. If they couldnt cover that up, they fucking cant do anything."

"It turned out eventually that President Nixon had secretly been informed that I had copied material beyond the Pentagon Papers from his own National Security Council. He plausibly feared that I could reveal and document his secret threats to North Vietnam of escalations, including nuclear attacks, aiming essentially to win the war. To avert my possible exposure of his secret demands and threats—which had already prolonged the war for two years, widened it to Cambodia and Laos, and which would ultimately add twenty thousand American names to the Vietnam Memorial—he had set in motion a variety of criminal steps to keep me silent about his secret policy. These crimes against me—including warrantless wiretaps, burglary of my former psychoanalyst’s office seeking blackmail material, illegal use of the CIA, and an abortive effort to “totally incapacitate” me—when they were revealed, were a critical part of the impeachment proceedings that led to Nixon’s resignation, which made the war endable nine months later. Since these same crimes would have tainted a second prosecution for distribution of the Pentagon Papers, the Boston grand jury was abruptly terminated, and the second trial was averted."

"Maybe [Watergate] is like the Old Testament. It was visited upon us and maybe were going to benefit from it."

"There are these and other great causes that we were elected overwhelmingly to carry forward in November of 1972. And what we were elected to do, we are going to do, and let others wallow in Watergate, we are going to do our job."

"How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!"

"What made Stone stand out in that tawdry scene was his utter shamelessness. He bragged about being a 19-year-old bit player in the Watergate scandal and about his friendship with , Joe McCarthy’s notorious henchman. Along with his partners, among them Trump adviser Paul Manafort, he engaged in campaign tactics no one else would admit to and took lobbying clients no one else would represent, including murderous foreign dictators."

"What an age of innocence it was, the Watergate era... way back in the halcyon days when the US could be contrasted with totalitarian regimes on matters of surveillance."

"We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate."

"Now the leaders are more deadlocked. If they can’t decide, nothing happens. In America, if you’re corrupt you have to resign. Look at Nixon. He had Watergate and had to resign. In China does that happen? No. Why? Because everyone is in one boat. If that boat turns over, everyone ends up in the water. When I say “everyone” of course I mean the people in power. So in China everyone helps each other out. If you are in trouble, I’ll help you out and if I’m in trouble you help me out. So only in an extreme case like Bo Xilai can someone be pushed out."