4 ms·

The case against Tom Drake was beyond the pale for me. Every circumstance surrounding that case was just horrid. You only need one Watergate to bring down a p

by Nrsolis 13y ago

The case against Tom Drake was beyond the pale for me. Every circumstance surrounding that case was just horrid. You only need one Watergate to bring down a president.

hga 13y ago
"You only need one Watergate to bring down a Republican president." Fixed it for you.
- tptacek 13y ago
  Anybody who compares Nixon to any subsequent US president, even Reagan, is betraying a lack of understanding of how serious Watergate was. There was, at the time, the possibility of a military coup --- and that coup would have been in defense of the Constitution.
  - hga 13y ago
    Ummm, I was politically aware during all of Watergate and followed it closely, except for the month of camping in Colorado when we heard, upon coming down from the mountain, that Nixon had resigned. Things were nowhere near that bad---I think you're confusing a coup with refusing illegal orders, and no doubt relaying them to the Congress, and I note that Nixon simply resigned, didn't even have to be formally impeached---and while it's again just my unsupported opinion, the threat to the Republic from the Watergate break in et. al. (which included the IRS refusing to follow Nixon's demands) is much smaller than this IRS scandal, which very possibly threw a presidential election, and has pushed a large fraction of the polity out of the public square. With no one believing any of this will be corrected; heck, the IRS abuse is still going on. Frankly, I'm reluctantly coming to the opinion that unless the IRS is clubbed like a baby seal, the Republic has fallen.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      I think it should be evident at this point that we're in the wrong venue for this conversation.
      - hga 13y ago
        One of the reasons I discuss stuff like this on Hacker News is that the rule of law and stability are important to the kinds of things we do (look at what the end of the IPO exit has done in the last ~ 10 years). If the Republic truly falls, it's going to have serious knock-on affects to startups in the US, whatever the path that follows, e.g. tyranny and/or civil war. All the productive action in the PRC tells us the rule of law not as critical as many think, then again, there are limits to what they're achieving, and it took the ending of the period of endless "revolution" for all that to get started (Mao/The Gang of Four being replaced by Deng). There's also this detail about investing and doing business, from Richard "Wretchard" Fernandez (http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/05/16/the-lying-king/?singlepage=true http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/05/16/the-lying-kin...): "[...] The president may not realize the cost of reducing the trust content of his actions. Perhaps they teach that lying has no cost in Chicago, but in reality trust’s absence exacts a very definite price. "The first thing to remember is that trust exists for very good reason, even among gangsters. In ordinary commerce its value is obvious. Many products rely on trust: the security of our communications and data storage; the integrity of accounting; the impartiality of the public institutions. Whether we are using Office 360, email, or Google Drive, a medical storage device that stores our sugar levels and blood pressure numbers or files an income tax return, the presumption is that the information we generate is reasonably private. Once that expectation is destroyed, once we are certain that a political hack whose principal qualification is snooping has been appointed to head Obamacare, then an economic cost is inevitably incurred. "Lying isn’t free. "One of the reasons that the United States has remained the last refuge for money fleeing instability abroad is that those investors trust its institutions. They believed — reasonably until now — that in America the rule of law reigned supreme. They thought — until the administration cast the question into serious doubt — that America was not the banana republic that the possessors of those fortunes sought to flee. That’s why the money comes to America and not, let us say, to the Congo."

by Nrsolis 13y ago

The case against Tom Drake was beyond the pale for me. Every circumstance surrounding that case was just horrid. You only need one Watergate to bring down a president.

hga 13y ago

"You only need one Watergate to bring down a Republican president." Fixed it for you.

tptacek 13y ago
Anybody who compares Nixon to any subsequent US president, even Reagan, is betraying a lack of understanding of how serious Watergate was. There was, at the time, the possibility of a military coup --- and that coup would have been in defense of the Constitution.
- hga 13y ago
  Ummm, I was politically aware during all of Watergate and followed it closely, except for the month of camping in Colorado when we heard, upon coming down from the mountain, that Nixon had resigned. Things were nowhere near that bad---I think you're confusing a coup with refusing illegal orders, and no doubt relaying them to the Congress, and I note that Nixon simply resigned, didn't even have to be formally impeached---and while it's again just my unsupported opinion, the threat to the Republic from the Watergate break in et. al. (which included the IRS refusing to follow Nixon's demands) is much smaller than this IRS scandal, which very possibly threw a presidential election, and has pushed a large fraction of the polity out of the public square. With no one believing any of this will be corrected; heck, the IRS abuse is still going on. Frankly, I'm reluctantly coming to the opinion that unless the IRS is clubbed like a baby seal, the Republic has fallen.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    I think it should be evident at this point that we're in the wrong venue for this conversation.
    - hga 13y ago
      One of the reasons I discuss stuff like this on Hacker News is that the rule of law and stability are important to the kinds of things we do (look at what the end of the IPO exit has done in the last ~ 10 years). If the Republic truly falls, it's going to have serious knock-on affects to startups in the US, whatever the path that follows, e.g. tyranny and/or civil war. All the productive action in the PRC tells us the rule of law not as critical as many think, then again, there are limits to what they're achieving, and it took the ending of the period of endless "revolution" for all that to get started (Mao/The Gang of Four being replaced by Deng). There's also this detail about investing and doing business, from Richard "Wretchard" Fernandez (http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/05/16/the-lying-king/?singlepage=true http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/05/16/the-lying-kin...): "[...] The president may not realize the cost of reducing the trust content of his actions. Perhaps they teach that lying has no cost in Chicago, but in reality trust’s absence exacts a very definite price. "The first thing to remember is that trust exists for very good reason, even among gangsters. In ordinary commerce its value is obvious. Many products rely on trust: the security of our communications and data storage; the integrity of accounting; the impartiality of the public institutions. Whether we are using Office 360, email, or Google Drive, a medical storage device that stores our sugar levels and blood pressure numbers or files an income tax return, the presumption is that the information we generate is reasonably private. Once that expectation is destroyed, once we are certain that a political hack whose principal qualification is snooping has been appointed to head Obamacare, then an economic cost is inevitably incurred. "Lying isn’t free. "One of the reasons that the United States has remained the last refuge for money fleeing instability abroad is that those investors trust its institutions. They believed — reasonably until now — that in America the rule of law reigned supreme. They thought — until the administration cast the question into serious doubt — that America was not the banana republic that the possessors of those fortunes sought to flee. That’s why the money comes to America and not, let us say, to the Congo."