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President Richard Nixon’s chief domestic adviser during the 1971 launch of the “war on drugs” said that he invented the president’s drug policies so that the administration could neutralize its enemies, specifically “the anti-war left and black people,” according to an article in Harper’s Magazine.  

John Ehrlichman, who served 18 months in prison for his role in the Nixon White House’s Watergate scandal, reportedly bared his (dark) soul to journalist Dan Baum in 1994, and those words made it into Baum’s April Harper’s cover story, “Legalize It All.”

“ ... We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Sen. John McCain slammed President Donald Trump's attacks on the media this week by noting dictators "get started by suppressing free press."

CNN contributor Carl Bernstein, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, called Trump's words "treacherous."

"The most dangerous 'enemy of the people' is presidential lying -- always," he tweeted. "Attacks on press by @realDonaldTrump more treacherous than Nixon's."

serving in the minority on the Governmental Affairs Committee as the Republican-led panel exhaustively examined claims of an insidious Chinese plot to help President Bill Clinton in the 1996 elections.

Being in the majority matters, both in starting an investigation and, sometimes as important, in stopping one.

House and Senate Republicans remain unwilling to budge from their opposition to a special bipartisan inquiry into the extent of Russian meddling in the 2016 election

“VatiLeaks” has once again revealed how the Vatican is not only a global force with one billion faithful worldwide, but also a deeply Italian institution where connections and loyalty often count more than merit and Machiavellian power plays are the rule more than the exception.

“This isn’t Watergate. This isn’t ‘Vaticangate.’ This is a small game of power plays in which the ecclesiastical right wants to put the Ratzinger papacy in crisis,”

As the “VatiLeaks” scandal continues, the pope has appeared increasingly isolated, a lonely intellectual unable to rein in his infighting underlings.

Hillary Aides Knew of Private Email Risks

In one June 2011 email, recently-departed Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote that senior State Department officials, “routinely end up using their home email accounts” due to the antiquated nature of the State Department’s technology, and that someone inside or outside the department should issue a statement or op-ed on the “woeful state” of affairs.

Clinton aide Jake Sullivan also expressed concerns, according to the email thread, leading Slaughter to back off from the idea. “Perhaps a better approach is to make the point more quietly to legislators through H[illary],” she concludes.

The Idealist. The author’s revisionist thesis is that Kissinger was not in fact a realist, as he is so frequently portrayed

The ideals and deepest hopes of mankind? Kissinger and Nixon bombed Cambodia to pieces in a secret four-year campaign that annihilated some 100,000 civilians. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves,” were the parameters Kissinger gave to Alexander Haig. He countered African liberation movements by embracing the white supremacists of Rhodesia and South Africa, a policy known as the “Tar Baby option.” Kissinger facilitated the overthrow of the governments of Chile and Argentina by right-wing generals, and then worked tirelessly to deflect criticism of the new governments’ torture and murder. A declassified memorandum of his meeting with Augusto Pinochet in 1976 shows Kissinger in a particularly unflattering light: “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” In 1975 Kissinger and President Ford met with Indonesian strongman Suharto and authorized him to invade East Timor, which he promptly did the following day; another 100,000 lost their lives. “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger advised.

[A]rguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries—and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor—must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected U.S. relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?

They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy.

Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign

Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.

In 2010, the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court effectively blew apart the McCain-Feingold restrictions on outside groups and their use of corporate and labor money in elections. That same year, a related ruling from a lower court made it easier for wealthy individuals to finance those groups to the bottom of their bank accounts if they so chose. What followed has been the most unbridled spending in elections since before Watergate. In 2000, outside groups spent $52 million on campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. By 2012, that number had increased to $1 billion.

The result was a massive power shift, from the party bosses to the rich individuals who ran the super PACs (as most of these new organizations came to be called). Almost overnight, traditional party functions — running TV commercials, setting up field operations, maintaining voter databases, even recruiting candidates — were being supplanted by outside groups.

With the advent of Citizens United, any players with the wherewithal, and there are surprisingly many of them, can start what are in essence their own political parties, built around pet causes or industries and backing politicians uniquely answerable to them. No longer do they have to buy into the system. Instead, they buy their own pieces of it outright, to use as they see fit. “Suddenly, we privatized politics,”

Obama's fifth year in office ranks as the fourth-most polarized presidential year in Gallup's records, which date back to the Eisenhower presidency. In fact, all five of Obama's years in office rank among the 10-most polarized, with his fourth year edging out George W. Bush's fourth year in office for the top overall spot.

Four of Bush's years in office rank among the 10-most politically polarized in terms of presidential job approval.

Each year since 2004, the average party gap in presidential job approval has been 60 percentage points or greater. The only other two years with that degree of polarization were Ronald Reagan's and Bill Clinton's re-election years.

STRASBOURG, France — When Edward Snowden disclosed details of America’s huge surveillance program two years ago, many in Europe thought that the response would be increased transparency and stronger oversight of security services. European countries, however, are moving in the opposite direction. Instead of more public scrutiny, we are getting more snooping.

France recently adopted a controversial law on surveillance that permits major intrusions, without prior judicial authorization, into the private lives of suspects and those who communicate with them, live or work in the same place or even just happen to be near them.

Meanwhile, Austria is set to discuss a draft law that would allow a new security agency to operate with reduced external control and to collect and store communication data for up to six years. The Netherlands is considering legislation allowing dragnet surveillance of all telecommunications, indiscriminate gathering of metadata, decryption and intrusion into the computers of non-suspects. And in Finland, the government is even considering changing the Constitution to weaken privacy protections in order to ease the adoption of a bill granting the military and intelligence services the power to conduct electronic mass surveillance with little oversight.

When a Hollywood filmmaker portrays a famous figure from the past, critics often express outrage over the portrayal. They denounce the filmmaker for taking too many artistic liberties and distorting the historical record. Oliver Stone came under that kind of attack in 1995 when he released Nixon, a dark and disturbing portrayal featuring actor Anthony Hopkins as President Richard M. Nixon.

In the years following Watergate, Richard Nixon worked assiduously to improve his public image. To a considerable degree, he succeeded in shaping a revised perspective on his place in history. By 1995, many Americans remembered Richard Nixon as the architect of bold foreign policies and as a surprisingly liberal leader in domestic affairs, exemplified by his support of environmental reforms.

In view of the late President’s improved standing since his embarrassing resignation, Oliver Stone’s movie struck many viewers as heavy-handed and disrespectful.

The sustained determination on the part of the conservative movement has paid off in an unprecedented realignment of power in state governments.Seven years ago, Democrats had a commanding lead in state legislatures, controlling both legislative chambers in 27 states, nearly double the 14 controlled by Republicans. They held 4082 state senate and house seats, compared to the Republicans’ 3223.Sweeping Republican victories at the state level in 2010 and 2014 transformed the political landscape

By 2015, there were Republican majorities in 70 percent — 68 of 98 — of the nation’s partisan state houses and senates, the highest number in the party’s history. (Nebraska isn’t counted in because it has a non-partisan, unicameral legislature.) Republicans controlled the legislature and governorship in 23 states, more than triple the seven under full Democratic control.

“How the Right Trounced Liberals in the States,” by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol, in the Winter edition of the journal Democracy, documents the failure of the left to keep pace with the substantial investments by the right in building local organizations.

Bush’s life and presidency “can be a reminder that what we’ve got is profoundly abnormal,” said Eliot Cohen, who served as a senior official in George W. Bush’s State Department. “The great danger of the Trump presidency is the normalization of character traits and behaviors that would have been an absolute abomination to his predecessors.”

Most presidential funerals have provided an opportunity for presidents past and present to stress their shared sense of patriotism, mission and purpose.

It’s hard to envision Trump even sitting in a room with Clinton, whom he has attacked as a corrupt abuser of women and a “hypocrite” or Obama, whom he labeled “bad (or sick) guy.” The two Democrats have been just as critical of Trump, branding him as a threat to American democracy. Trump’s relationship with George W. Bush has been similarly strained

In most histories of how Americans became so polarized, the Great Inflation of the 1970s is given short shrift

Inflation was as pivotal a factor in our national crackup as Vietnam and Watergate

nflation changed how Americans thought about their economic relationships to their fellow citizens — which is to say, inflation and its associated economic traumas changed who we were as a people.

it’s a serious question. Does it matter if the president did bad things as long as he’s not a criminal? Should presidential character count?

In the modern age it seems to have been completely subsumed into the cant of hyper-partisanship. Republicans denounced Bill Clinton as a sleazy huckster whose behavior spoke to a larger disqualifying character flaw. But they dismiss Donald Trump’s transgressions as peccadilloes that shouldn’t be allowed to detract from a record of achievement. Hillary Clinton fans, who now say that a woman who accuses a powerful man of sexual impropriety must be believed, spent a good deal of time trashing the reputations of her husband’s many accusers.

Recent history tells us that there have been important moments when character has counted.

hat hyper-partisanship is wrecking American democracy is a truism of our times. But there is a lack of consensus about what to do about it. One challenge is that many pundits and would-be reformers lack historical understanding of the problem

reformers should read Sam Rosenfeld’s new book, The Polarizers, a timely and valuable guide explaining how our current political divisions came to be

Rosenfeld, a Colgate University political scientist trained as a historian, goes through the historical record to recreate two parallel stories—the intellectual debate over whether to have two distinct political parties, and the on-the-ground intraparty battles in which activists triumphed over insiders in restructuring party organizations and coalitions. Told together, these stories add important context to our present dilemma, reminding us that party politics are so different today from the 1950s

During a conversation with David Letterman on his new Netflix program, former President Barack Obama issued a stern warning for the current commander in chief: "One of the things that Michelle figured out, in some ways faster than I did, was part of your ability to lead the country doesn't have to do with legislation, doesn't have to do with regulations, it has to do with shaping attitudes, shaping culture, increasing awareness."

It would be a mistake to dismiss the comments as a "distraction" because, with Trump, they are the main show. His rhetoric sends a message to the nation and to the world about the values that we treasure and that the nation will stand for in 2018.

President Trump, who launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, was reported to have said that all Haitians "have AIDS" (the White House denied the statement) and that Nigerians "live in huts."

The president of the United States reportedly sought the help of a foreign government against an American citizen who might challenge him for his office. This is the single most important revelation in a scoop by The Wall Street Journal, and if it is true, then President Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office immediately.

If this in itself is not impeachable, then the concept has no meaning. Trump’s grubby commandeering of the presidency’s fearsome and nearly uncheckable powers in foreign policy for his own ends is a gross abuse of power and an affront both to our constitutional order and to the integrity of our elections.

The story may even be worse than we know. If Trump tried to use military aid to Ukraine as leverage, as reporters are now investigating, then he held Ukrainian and American security hostage to his political vendettas. It means nothing to say that no such deal was reached; the important point is that Trump abused his position in the Oval Office.

Democrats respond to Trump's wiretapping claim

Democrats are pushing back on President Trump’s Saturday morning claims that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower offices before the election.

While at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida for the weekend, Mr. Trump fired off a series of early morning tweets accusing President Obama, without citing evidence, of wiretapping Trump Tower. He described this as “Nixon/Watergate,” calling Mr. Obama a “bad (or sick) guy.”

FBI Director James B. Comey asked the Justice Department this weekend to issue a statement refuting President Trump’s claim that President Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump’s phones before the election

“There was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time as a candidate or against his campaign

“Is it legal for a sitting President to be 'wire tapping' a race for president prior to an election?” Trump asked in another tweet. “Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!”