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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26562 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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So…is that credible?

Because it sounds a lot less likely than Nixon actually trying to cover it up.

I've never done a deep-dive on Watergate, I've never read competing accounts and compared who's footnotes are getting everything right versus who is being dishonest. I did do a deep-dive on Trump's Russia-gate scandal, and basically my conclusion was that Trump was innocent of any sort of "collusion" or obstruction of justice, albeit he did lie to the public on certain things and that the special prosecutor team was on a malicious fishing expedition. So I am predisposed to believe Shepard's account, that the same thing was done to Nixon.

From the limited amount of I've checked up on Shepard's account:

  • I haven't seen any liberal de-bunkings of his book, mostly they seem to ignore it.
  • On a key point (the "smoking gun" tape conversation being not about Watergate at all) Shepard quotes John Dean's book from 2014 and it seems like the original quote does partly corroborate Shepard but that also Shepard cut pieces from the quote in order to make it seem more exonerating than John Dean intended.

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