Who does this sound like?

From this excerpt from an interview with Dan Rather: "let me make it exquisitely clear . . ." Doesn't that remind you of "let me be perfectly clear", and wasn't that phrase a staple of Dan's old bete noir Richard Nixon? Or Bill Clinton's famous finger-wagging statement about "that woman--Miss Lewinsky"? Could it be that pressure after getting caught in a great misdeed brings out the worst in all of us?

I've always thought that Nixon's downfall was the result of his correct decision not to contest the 1960 election after it was stolen from him, followed by the disparity he saw between the way the press toadied to Kennedy, and practically canonized him after he was killed, and their hostility and goading of himself. Nixon was a shrewd politician and has been conceded to have been a master of foreign policy, but he couldn't catch a break from the press corps, who seemed to hate him. I remember a famous press conference when Nixon got tired of Dan Rather's badgering and asked him if he was running for something, to which Rather replied dramatically, "No, Mr. President. Are you?"

Nixon, and everybody else associated with the Watergate burglary and coverup, got hammered. After you've been forced to resign in the face of certain impeachment and conviction, I don't think that prison offers much to fear. Still, people were incensed when Ford pardoned him, a decision that probably lost the 1976 election for him. (That was the good old days of bipartisanship, which means that Republicans join Democrats on a normally partisan issue. It hardly ever goes the other way.)

I wonder if Dan has had the thought yet, "What goes around, comes around."

Hubris, toujours hubris.