Once Upon a Time in America...

 ...there were Republicans who would stand up to a criminal president even if he was the leader of their own party.   Even if they had agreed with him and campaigned with him and perhaps even owed their seat in Congress to him.  Even if it pissed off their constituents.  Even if their mommy told them not to.  That is was their duty to loyally stand by their man!

I know, I know.  That's crazy talk.  Bigfoot talk.   Or a bedtime story for very small children who still believe in Santa Claus and The New York Times.  But it's true I tellz ya!  I was there! I saw it on my teevee, in living color.    

This is a bit of the speech by congressman Larry Hogan, Sr. of Maryland's 5th Congressional District, who was moved nearly to tears by Nixon's lies and betrayal. He was the first and only Republican to vote for all three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon:

This is a key moment from this speech.  Hogan is angry.  Bereft:

The President didn’t, in righteous indignation, rise up and say, ‘Get out of here. You are in the office of the President of the United States. How can you talk about blackmail and bribery and keeping witnesses silent?’ . . . And then throw them out of his office and pick up the phone and call the Department of Justice and tell them there is obstruction of justice going on. But my President didn’t do that. He sat there, and he worked and worked to try to cover this thing up so it wouldn’t come to light.

And this was Hogan at a press conference:

The evidence convinces me that my President has lied repeatedly, deceiving public officials and the American people. Instead of cooperating with prosecutors and investigators, as he said publicly, he concealed and covered up evidence, and coached witnesses so that their testimony would show things that really were not true… he praised and rewarded those who he knew had committed perjury. He actively participated in an extended and extensive conspiracy to obstruct justice.

And there was Republican Congressman M. Caldwell Butler, who was a loyal Nixon man, but who did not hesitate to use the "S"-word -- shame -- when describing Nixon and Watergate. 

  

The Alert Listener will notice that when Representative Butler called Watergate "our shame", he was not referring to "Both Sides" or "politicians in Washington" or "congress" or any of the other lazy, cowardly elisions the legacy media and Independent/Centrist goofballs always uses to pretend that some colossal Republican atrocity is somehow everybody's fault.

Nope.

Representative Butler is explicitly referring to the "Republican in the White House", and anyone affiliated with the Republican party.

Nixon was a petty, paranoid, vindictive man who Americans thought, in more innocent times, had tested the upper limits of how much corruption, criminality and treason an American president could indulge in beneath the cloak of executive power and secrecy before the free press and the co-equal branches of government yanked him off his pedestal and drove him from office.

But compared to what Trump has been doing, openly and with the thunderous approval of the entire Republican party, Nixon was a piker.  Nixon was a saint.  Nixon would have been Diogenes' last stop when he took up his lamp and went walking the Earth looking for one honest man.  

And compared to the grovelers, fascists, imbeciles and lunatics that make up the Republican congressional majorities of today, the median 1974 Republican congressional knuckle dragger is Franklin Roosevelt.  Is John Lewis.  Is Eugene Fucking Debs.  

 In other words, they are exactly who we told you they were.  

Burn The Lifeboats