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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bonefish who wrote (1021664)	6/19/2017 7:15:20 AM
From: SeachRE	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573092

John Dean on Trump vs Nixon: "Dean is having a moment, again.Everyone — the BBC, Der Spiegel, the New York Times, MSNBC and on — wants to know what he thinks of Trump, of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, about the cascade of investigations that threaten to bury Trump’s presidency. He hasn’t been in this great a demand since his call for President George W. Bush’s impeachment — for condoning torture, among other perceived abuses of power — and, before that, as a ringside commentator during the Clinton-era Monica Lewinsky scandal. First, Nixon vs. Trump. “Nixon was much better prepared for the job than Trump,” Dean said, citing the former president’s service in the House, the Senate and then eight years as vice president. Trump “just doesn’t know anything about the job, and it shows,” Dean said as a gas-fed fire flickered nearby. (It was a touch that Nixon, who famously kept a blaze going even during Washington’s blistering summers, might have appreciated.) Both men have authoritarian personas, Dean went on, though Trump is far more narcissistic and easier to read: “We wouldn’t know Nixon as well as we do but for his taping system, where his guard is down. He reveals who he is. Trump is the same in public as he is in private.” Dean was careful to say he has no inside information on the Trump administration, no Deep Throat, the famous Watergate leaker, funneling him tales of intrigue from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. But, he said, he knows the odor of malfeasance, even from 3,000 miles away. “I’ve been inside a cover-up. I know why we could make certain things go away and other things not go away. And that’s because some things, you just couldn’t make them disappear,” he said. He might have been roughing out a verbal draft of “Scandal Containment for Dummies.” “I feel that’s true with the Trump people. If they could make this go away, they would. I mean, they’re not stupid. They would hire good P.R. people who would say: ‘This is how you deal with this. You make mistakes, you go out and you explain them, and people are very forgiving.’” Dean was raised in a Republican family, and acquired his political coloration thus, but he no longer belongs to the party, calling himself an independent. “My political beliefs have not changed very much in the last 45 years,” Dean said, describing himself as a fiscal moderate and social liberal. But “just by staying in one place, today I’m way left of center.” He hasn’t voted for the GOP candidate for president since George H.W. Bush ran against Michael Dukakis in 1988, backing President Obama and, last year, Hillary Clinton. So his observations on Trump and his cohorts and their alleged wrongdoing may be judged accordingly. Dean firmly believes the truth about any misdeeds, if they took place, will come out much sooner than the many years it took for the full nature of the Watergate scandal to be revealed. Unlike Nixon, “Trump is surprisingly candid about himself,” Dean said. The president’s admission that he fired FBI Director James B. Comey to relieve the pressure of his investigation into Russia and the 2016 election was, to Dean’s mind, “basically CONFESSING obstruction of justice.” (latimes)