Andrew Coyne: If Nixon had lied the way Trump does, he might never have had to resign

[applegrove]

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/andrew-coyne-if-nixon-had-lied-the-way-trump-does-he-might-never-have-had-to-resign

SNIP..............

Richard Nixon was a liar, but he was a liar in the conventional sense: he told lies that were intended to be believed. He paid truth the compliment of trying, with increasing desperation, to conceal it. To that extent, at least, the truth mattered to him, if only because he knew it mattered to others. That’s why the Watergate tapes, when they were finally released, had such impact: because they revealed, definitively, that Nixon had not been telling the truth. And the “smoking gun” on the tapes was the conversation in which Nixon talked of tampering with the FBI investigation into the affair.

But what if Nixon had not bothered to conceal his lies? What if he’d said things that were obviously untrue, then denied he’d said them, then said them again, then substituted other, conflicting lies in their place? What if he’d done this not once, or twice, or a dozen times, but hundreds of times — until it seemed that no one cared any more whether he was telling the truth or not? And what if, rather than go to such lengths to conceal it, he’d publicly shrugged that, yeah, he’d called off the FBI “because this Watergate thing is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”

Then you’d have a situation not unlike the one we have now. And, I fear, he might never have had to resign.


...............SNIP

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. And without tapes, trump will lie forever, no way to prove he is lying as to Comey

Half of our political population is willing to support treason to make america white again.

As to proving he is lying, that has been done already to adults, patriots. But sadly half the alleged adult population of this country are neither.

[gordianot]

2. Elections are our only hope.

Time for the high ground is long gone we need hard truth.

[sharedvalues]

3. Trump's lies are autocratic, Nixon's were not

Perhaps the most important article of the past few months, from Masha Gessen

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/05/13/the-autocrats-language/

Dictators lie like DJT does intentionally, to break our link with truth. We must fight this.

[onlyadream]

4. Pence has to be paying close attention

As a religious man, he must feel that he's the better man for the job (in a sanctimonious self righteous way). I wonder if he's working it, behind the scenes trying to gain leverage.