History of a Third-Rate Burglary

On June 17, 1972 at 2:30 in the morning, a third-rate burglary took place.

Well, it didn't get very far. The team of burglars did a sloppy job of breaking into the offices they targeted, the guy with the walkie-talkie had turned down the volume so he couldn't hear the lookout warn them of any cops arriving, and when the cops caught them in the act the burglars had a lot of incriminating evidence on them pointing to other people being involved with the attempt.

It turned out the burglars had broken into those offices a month prior, and had gone back in to take more photos of sensitive documents and replant illegal listening devices (aka "bugs") they felt weren't working properly.

With all that, the cops took the burglars to jail, charged them on whatever crimes related to their break-in, and brought them before a judge for arraignment and bail.

That's when one of the burglars informed the judge he had worked for the CIA, one of the major spy/intelligence agencies in the United States government.

And that's when the third-rate burglary into the Democratic National Committee's offices at the Watergate complex started to turn into a big story, one that the federal government couldn't silence, growing until it engulfed a Presidency and scarred the public trust for fifty years.

Today, Watergate is viewed as the greatest political scandal in American history. All the others that came before - Andrew Jackson's Spoils system, the graft of U.S. Grant's administration, Tammany Hall, Warren Harding's collective scandals topped by Teapot Dome - and after - Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, Bill Clinton's Whitewater - none of them can match the hubris, reach, and tragedy of Richard Nixon's self-inflicted political downfall. Any other scandal that comes along, one of the first things the media does is add the suffix -Gate to it. Even other nations picked up on it.

I've tried analyzing scandals throughout my years of blogging, wondering about how to measure out what was a legitimate scandal and what was a nothingburger. Over time, anything the Far Right screamed about turned into nothingburgers, while any scandals involving them - especially after con artist trump moved into the Oval Office - were ranking right up there between Watergate and Teapot Dome in terms of corruption, abuse of office, open acts of insurrection, and straight-up graft.

On the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Watergate scandal, we're neck-deep into investigating the scandals brought about by trump's rage, idiocy, and greed. 

As I've said before: history is repeating, first as tragedy and second as farce.

I wonder if I'll be around in fifty years to honor the anniversary of Trumpgate.