When Nixon Sent Dean To Camp

Once again, the fiery wreck of President Stupid's administration parallels the fall of Richard Nixon in eerie ways.  Today, specifically, I am reminded of that day in April of 1973 when Nixon -- who knew damn good and well exactly what Watergate was about because he was ass-deep in the cover-up from the very beginning -- dispatched White House Counsel John Dean to Camp  David to "write him a report about everything he knew about the Watergate matter."

So why would Nixon do that?  Why send Dean off to prepare a report on a subject with which Dean knew Nixon was already intimately famliar.

Deniability.

Nixon wanted to be able to wave that report around and claim that "This is the first I ever hear of Watergate!" and then scapegoat Dean for withholding this vital information from his august self.  And then, more in sorrow than in anger, blame Dean for everything and sack him for betraying Nixon.

And now, 44 years later...

...

At his golf course in Bedminster, N.J., Trump groused over Comey’s latest congressional testimony, which he thought was “strange,” and grew impatient with what he viewed as his sanctimony, according to White House officials. Comey, Trump figured, was using the Russia probe to become a martyr.

Back at work Monday morning in Washington, Trump told Vice President Pence and several senior aides — Reince Priebus, Stephen K. Bannon and Donald McGahn, among others — that he was ready to move on Comey. First, though, he wanted to talk with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, his trusted confidant, and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, to whom Comey reported directly. Trump summoned the two of them to the White House for a meeting, according to a person close to the White House.

The president already had decided to fire Comey, according to this person. But in the meeting, several White House officials said Trump gave Sessions and Rosenstein a directive: to explain in writing the case against Comey...

There is no way to look at the nearly-identical scheme that President Stupid and his minions hatched -- get some trusted stooge to reverse-engineer his hare-brained plan to fire Comey and cauterize the accelerating FBI investigation into the incompetence and treason of his administration into some publicity-friendly rationalization and then blame that trusted stooge for precipitating Comey's firing -- without seeing the spirit Republican president Richard Nixon...

...and Republican president Ronald Reagan...

..and Republican president Dick Cheney...

...looming over the proceedings, laughing their hell-bound asses off:

And although veteran Nixon henchmen like Chuck "I'd walk over my own grandmother to re-elect Richard Nixon" Colson are mostly dead and Alabama's racist Citizens Council is no longer a going concern (from the NYT, January 13, 1974) --

Mood of Deep South Is Against Impeachment
...

For here, as in many other parts of the Deep South, the talk about Watergate and the possible impeachment of President Nixon is subdued. The few who raise the subject dismiss It as little more than a Northern liberal plot —some even suggest it is a Communist inspired plot—to embarrass the President.

A local leader of the antiblack Citizens Council called to complain that Watergate had been invented by the news media. A woman called to say that the news media “is just looking for bad things to say about our President.”...

-- don't worry for one minute that we'll be running out of dead-eyed, morally-bankrupt wingnut apologists anytime soon.  America's strategic reserve of paid Conservative liars who will robotically repeat ridiculous, debunked Republican talking points over and over again until their batteries run down has never been more amply stocked.

In fact you can see them almost every day, plying their despicable craft on what we once laughably called our "Liberal" teevee: