In modern terms, Watergate is the most scandalous incident in this country's history. There have been plenty of scandals from our earlier history -- Burr-Hamilton duel, slavery, separate but equal, the Teapot Dome scandal, Monica Lewinsky -- but none reached the depths of Watergate, and for good reason. The burglars in Watergate tried to subvert the democratic process, gaining an unfair advantage in an election that was likely to go to Nixon in any event. It's a black mark on our history that is always used as a yardstick when another scandal appears, with the suffix -gate is appended to any scandal to link it to and measure it against Watergate.
The Obama administration seems to be trying to overtake Watergate with the number of incidents in which it has been involved, questionably. Benghazi mirrors Watergate in that it appears to be an attempt to color public opinion in advance of an election. After cries were heard about the inconsistencies of the official story and what later revelations showed were the true motivations for the attack, the administration did its best to release information and documents in an excrutiatingly slow fashion so that the public would lose interest in the story. In fact, later incidents involving the administration, not the passage of time, overtook the Benghazi scandal and pushed it to the back of the room.
The IRS scandal broke after Benghazi and it continues to resurface every so often. So far, it's encompassed targeting of conservative groups with audits, refusal to process not-for-profit applications, the pleading of the Fifth Amendment by Lois Lerner in a congressional hearing, hearings at which officials promised to provide all documents -- including all emails from Ms. Lerner and six other officials -- and now the revelation that all emails from Ms. Lerner for a two-year period were inadvertently deleted.
Needless to say, skeptics are having a field day with this latest announcement.
The question begs whether this was incompetence, corruption or a mixture of the two. Time will tell, as the tangled web is slowly and unsurely being untangled. Either way, confidence in the American people is not being inspired. The government was either involved in perverting the democratic process or it was so stupid that it begs the question how it was ever elected into office. If it was both corrupt and incompetent, then all bets are off.
There are, whatever the case, some interesting commonalities between Watergate and the IRS scandal. First, both involved corrupting the democratic process. The IRS was putting pressure on conservative groups, hamstringing their ability to support conservative candidates. Watergate involved stealing the opponents' playbook. Watergate involved a missing segment of eighteen and a half minutes of tape of conversations in the Oval Office between President Nixon and his advisors. The IRS scandal now involves two years' worth of missing emails from the woman who pleaded the Fifth in front of the congressional hearing. At the same time, the President has said that there wasn't a smidgen of corruption earlier this year. How can one of his appointees plead the Fifth when there's not a smidgen of corruption?
The old saw is true, typically: Where there's smoke, there's fire. I have no doubt that there will be something actionable uncovered, eventually, in the IRS mess. It may not be as bad as Watergate, but I have no doubt that something criminal was done. That no independent investigator, no special counsel, no one without ties to the administration that is able to investigate the claims that the IRS unfairly and illegally targeted conservative groups is shameful. During Watergate, the Congress had the testicular fortitude to investigate the wrongdoing. Now, there is no spine in Congress that will initiate a similar process.
History will render its verdict. Historians with no political sinecures to protect will conduct thorough examinations and unearth what was done. The trouble with that is that by the time they gain access to the materials they need to piece the story together accurately, statutes of limitation will have run and the malfeasors will get away with their crimes.
Power corrupts. Unfortunately, time waits for no man, even corrupt men.
(c) 2014 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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