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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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nixon did not stage the watergate burglary and didn't even know about it in the first place

your version of events isn't supportable any longer (and wasn't supportable at the time either for anyone in the know), it's time to update your understanding of what happened

The whole reason why there was a scandal is that the Watergate burglars were paid to do it by the Nixon campaign. I agree with you that Nixon didn't know that that specific burglary was being committed until the burglars got caught. But Nixon would have known about and approved of the high-level decision to hire Liddy and Hunt to ratfuck the McGovern campaign. Given their history as part of the Plumbers, he would also have known that they would commit crimes in order to do so. That is the decision I don't understand - why did Nixon (or his loyalists on the CRP) organise a criminal conspiracy to run up the score in an election they were going to win anyway.

One possible answer is that Liddy has claimed that the Watergate burglary was ordered for personal reasons by John Dean, but this doesn't make sense because the money came from the CRP, which Dean didn't sit on, and the only evidence for it is the testimony of crooks.