At least Nixon went to China
'I do not think," Nixon campaign aide Jeb Magruder told the Senate Watergate committee in the spring of 1973, "there was ever any discussion that there would not be a coverup." Mr. Magruder's lament aptly described the bureaucratic impulse to hide inconvenient facts that seizes every modern White House at some point.
This is bad. Today, the issue is not so much the withholding of information as the denial of the obvious: The stubborn insistence by top Obama administration officials on an interpretation of events starkly at odds with the plainly correct conclusion of terrorism. When White House Press Secretary Jay Carney finally acknowledged that the terrorism conclusion was "self-evident" after he had spent the previous eight days pressing a wholly different account of events, Mr. Carney's admission carried strong echoes of Nixon-era Press Secretary Ron Ziegler declaring that his earlier Watergate statements were "inoperative."
Really bad. Read the whole thing.
This is bad. Today, the issue is not so much the withholding of information as the denial of the obvious: The stubborn insistence by top Obama administration officials on an interpretation of events starkly at odds with the plainly correct conclusion of terrorism. When White House Press Secretary Jay Carney finally acknowledged that the terrorism conclusion was "self-evident" after he had spent the previous eight days pressing a wholly different account of events, Mr. Carney's admission carried strong echoes of Nixon-era Press Secretary Ron Ziegler declaring that his earlier Watergate statements were "inoperative."
Really bad. Read the whole thing.