Finally Friday Reads: When Will It Ever End?

“Should have just went with this in the first place. Honest Don reflects on his achievements.” John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Every time we think about Orange Caligula, we have to think about what comes after him if he doesn’t make it through his second term. It’s not likely that someone reasonable will take his place in a party that no longer goes by reason. For all intents and purposes, we still have to put the Shillbilly at the top of that list. I’m not really feeling good about that at all.

This is a headline from the New York Times this morning. “Vance Downplays Watergate and Compares Himself to Nixon. The vice president said that the scandal that ended Richard Nixon’s presidency would be “like a 12-hour news story” if it happened today and that the “deep state” had taken down Nixon.” Be afraid. Be very afraid.  Emily Davies has the story.

Vice President JD Vance downplayed the significance of the Watergate scandal during a speech on Thursday, saying that the controversy that toppled President Richard M. Nixon would be “like a 12-hour news story” if it happened today.

“The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy,” Mr. Vance added, saying he had been joking backstage about the scandal before his appearance at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif.

Mr. Vance, who is widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential contender, compared himself to Nixon, who resigned in disgrace after his administration tried to cover up its involvement in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

“Young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media,” Mr. Vance said. “It kind of sounds like JD Vance. I’ve always liked Richard Nixon.”

Mr. Vance also conspiratorially compared the political forces that pushed Nixon out of office to President Trump’s opponents.

“If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon,” Mr. Vance said, “it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration.”

Mr. Vance’s remarks were notable in part because of how Mr. Trump and his administration have pushed to expand presidential power and test the boundaries of the law. Mr. Vance, a critic of Mr. Trump’s during his first presidential bid in 2016, has become a fierce loyalist and stood by the president through many controversies, casting him as the victim of an unjust political system.

The vice president’s defense of Nixon followed a similar playbook, seeking to rewrite the historical narrative of a scandal-scarred president so that he becomes the target of a witch hunt instead of the perpetrator of wrongdoing.

A spokesman for Mr. Vance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Vance was in California in part to promote his new memoir, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith” and in part to raise money for the Republican Party.

I never thought I’d see the day when a candidate desperately seeking the presidency would give an all hail to Nixon.  Those of us that remember all findingof those Senate hearings know that finding any one that supported him, especially once the cover-up became clear, were clearly few and far between.

This headline from the AP headline has me shaking my head that I may need a neck brace. “Vance says Watergate would be a ’12-hour news story’ today. Vice President JD Vance said the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon would have been a 12-hour blip in today’s news cycle, and he drew parallels between Nixon and President Donald Trump — arguing both were targeted by “deep state” forces.”

Yup, Arlen Specter was about as deep state as you could get.  Excuse me while I choke on laughter.

It’s obvious that these people have no respect for our Republic or it’s rule of Constitutional Law. This is democracy backsliding at its jaded worst.  This is the analysis by the Washington Post. “Vance dismisses Watergate scandal, says ‘deep state’ went after Nixon. The vice president said he admired Nixon and drew parallels between the past president, who resigned amid pressure in 1974, and Trump today.”  This is fascist level over-reach.

Vice President JD Vance on Thursday expressed sympathy for former president Richard M. Nixon, suggesting that Nixon was wrongly forced out as president in 1974 and comparing his political travails decades ago to those facing President Donald Trump now.

“As I joked … backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story,” Vance said in remarks at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California. “The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

A spokesperson for Vance did not immediately respond to questions about whether the vice president was being facetious and how he was defining Watergate.

… Naftali, a Columbia University presidential historian, referenced tapes that contained thousands of hours of Nixon’s Oval Office conversations.

“You can hear him suborn perjury on the tapes. He’s telling an intermediary, what to tell someone who’s about to be interviewed by the FBI, what to say and what not to say,” said Naftali, who oversaw the Nixon library’s Watergate exhibit. “You can hear Nixon being told that money had been found to hire teamsters to go and break the bones of demonstrators. That’s all illegal.”

“It’s not as if it’s a matter of partisan interpretation. The evidence is overwhelming,” Naftali said, offering additional examples of Nixon’s efforts to subvert legal protections. “If he does know all of this, he’s telegraphing the kind of president he hopes to be.”

Again, I’m just gobsmacked. How do you even get through university or high school, let alone law school and come up with this shit of an interpretation of Nixon?  Speaking of  Orange Caligula and his tendency to pick lying bags of scum who are only interested in power and grifting, here’s an NBC headline to bring back some memories of his last ugly term. “Ex-Trump adviser John Bolton pleads guilty to mishandling classified information.  Bolton served as White House national security adviser during Trump’s first term.”

Former national security adviser John Bolton pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to mishandling classified information related to his work during the first Trump administration.

Bolton, who served as White House national security adviser during President Donald Trump’s first term and has since been a frequent critic of the president, appeared Friday morning for a re-arraignment in Greenbelt, Maryland, before Judge Theodore D. Chuang, an appointee of then-President Barack Obama.

Bolton pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorized retention of national defense information out of the 18 with which he was initially charged. He faces a prison sentence of up to 60 months and has agreed to pay $2.25 million, prosecutors said. He is set to be sentenced Oct. 28.

Abbe Lowell, Bolton’s attorney, said in a statement Friday that the former national security adviser and U.N. ambassador “did what real leaders do. He took responsibility for a mistake he made, thereby saving the government resources to pursue a case that could expose additional sensitive information.”

Hayden O’Byrne, acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s national security division, said in a statement that the plea agreement “ought to send a message to other public officials whom the public has entrusted with classified, national defense information. If you willfully mishandle these state secrets, the Department of Justice, led by the National Security Division, will investigate and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law.”

Bolton was originally indicted in October 2025, charged with eight counts of transmission of national defense information and 10 counts of retention of national defense information.

He pleaded not guilty to the charges and faced up to 10 years in prison, a $250,000 fine per count, and three years of special release.

Sigh, “special release.” Why to punish this truly evil people courts!  Then there’s this guy. This is from PBS News. “WATCH: Stephen Miller says ‘America’s doors are closed fully to asylum seekers’ after Supreme Court rulings.”

The Supreme Court voted 6-3 on Thursday to allow the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria, exposing hundreds of thousands more people to potential deportation.

The Department of Homeland Security can now end temporary protected status, a program that protects a total of 1.3 million people from 17 countries.

The Supreme Court also voted 6-3 to clear the way for the Trump administration to potentially revive an immigration policy once used to turn back migrants seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. The court overturned a lower court order blocking the practice that limited the number of people who could apply for asylum each day.

EThis crap doesn’t reflect the American Values I grew up with.  This makes the Guilded Age look like a Socialist Picnic. “Elon Musk’s zero accountability life. Elon Musk goes berserk if you talk about USAID.” This is from the magazine The Argument. Kobe Yank-Jacobs provides the news and analysis.

Elon Musk really doesn’t want you to say he’s responsible for the deaths of millions.

Earlier this week, Musk threatened to sue Rep. Ro Khanna for charging him with destroying the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and putting millions of lives at risk around the world:

“There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk,” Khanna said. “You know, they’re celebrating that he created 4,400 millionaires [with his SpaceX IPO], but they don’t talk about the 4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USAID.”

In response, Musk called Khanna a liar, threatened to sue, and said he should be in prison.

But Khanna is making a perfectly reasonable claim here. In that quote, he is (carefully) citing a peer-reviewed study that estimated the effects of dismantling USAID. It found that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will result in 14 million deaths overall by 2030, of which 4.5 million will be children under the age of 5.

This is probably a high-end estimate, but even lower end projections with different methodologies sit between 670,000 and 1.6 million annual deaths compared to a fiscal year 2023 baseline.

In other words, the toll from USAID cuts by seems to be at best around two-thirds of a million people annually1; that’s about as many people as were killed during the Civil War. At worst, Musk is tied to the deaths of 14 million.

If DOGE had managed to cut tens of billions of dollars from the federal budget, Musk and his defenders would certainly have taken credit. It’s bizarre then to disclaim responsibility for the tragic consequences of the cuts they did make.

Yet Musk and his defenders insist that Khanna is somehow slandering him.

There are a couple of interlocking issues worth separating here: one is the factual question of what actually happened to USAID, where Musk is now downplaying his actions. A second question is what is likely to happen out in the real world to real people without USAID. And the final issue is whether Musk should be subject to basic Congressional oversight for wrecking whole government agencies as an outside adviser to the president.

So, I’m cutting it short today because frankly, I can’t read any more of this myself, and I’m still working on the house. I just hope the election is as clean as possible and that people come out in droves.  I’ve really had enough of this.

What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?