by Ed Brodow
Carl Bernstein is a Washington reporter who, along with Bob Woodward, gained fame for his role in the Watergate scandal. He was portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the popular movie, All the President’s Men. Lately, people have been asking Bernstein if there is a comparison between the current news and Watergate. His answer is shocking. Bernstein disgraced himself and the media he serves by comparing President Trump to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
McCarthyism, said Bernstein on CNN, was all about “smearing American institutions for self-political gain.” Sen. McCarthy, Bernstein argued, “accused people of treason, exactly like Donald Trump.” In the early 1950s, Sen. McCarthy led a political witch hunt with massive allegations that communists had infiltrated the state department. Trump, according to Bernstein, is doing the same thing when he points an accusatory finger at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the mainstream media.
Trump has no right, according to Bernstein, to show disrespect for organs of the government—to “poison” our most iconic institutions. “We have never had a president of the United States who was an authoritarian demagogue who issues these kind of smears and lies daily,” said Bernstein. Trump’s motivation is simple, Bernstein implied. The president wants to avoid the consequences of a legitimate investigation. Bernstein is apoplectic: “We may well have not seen such dark days for American democracy and its institutions since the days of Joe McCarthy.”
Ignoring the evidence that the intelligence apparatus of the federal government was corrupted in support of the Democratic candidate for president, Bernstein referred to the memo released by the House Intelligence Committee as a “disingenuous partisan document” intended to discredit the Mueller investigation. Funny. I had the impression that the memo was a powerful indictment of the Swamp.
Bernstein’s world is completely upside-down. The threat to American democracy comes not from the president but from the Swamp that Trump has sworn to destroy. The Swamp attempted to sabotage the entire political process. We now know that the Justice Department and the FBI conspired with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party in a cabal to put Hillary in the White House and to spy on the opposition party in a presidential election. The intelligence arm of our government has been politicized. This is the kind of frightening politics that we associate with dictators like Joseph Stalin. What McCarthy did pales in comparison.
To further deflect attention from the truth, Bernstein alluded to the coincidence that both McCarthy and Trump retained pit bull attorney Roy Cohn. And so Bernstein feels justified in saying that “Donald Trump mimics, reembodies to a large extent, the tactics, techniques, and methodology of Joe McCarthy.” Bernstein is not a stupid man. He must be aware that his outburst is designed to support the efforts by the Swamp, the Democrats, and the Left to discredit Trump.
I guess I was wrong about Bernstein. He struck me as the kind of old-school reporter who could transcend politics. Sadly, Bernstein’s assault is another example of a phenomenon that has been clear for some time: The Left accuses the Right of doing precisely what the Left has been getting away with all along. If there are “dark days for American democracy,” they emanate from the corruption displayed by the Democrats and the Left. Another example of leftist chicanery is the ongoing accusation by the Democrats and their media allies that Trump is a racist. The truth, as pointed out by Rep. Mo Brooks, is that Barack Obama was the most “racially divisive” president America has seen since slavery was abolished. Yet when you listen to CNN, the impression you get is that Trump is the racist.
It makes a lot of sense for the Democrats to deflect attention away from the almost daily revelations pointing to massive corruption in the Obama administration. Bernstein has played right into this strategy by allowing himself to pimp for the Left, destroying any credibility that he may have had as a result of his reportage on Watergate.
Ed Brodow is a political commentator, negotiation expert, and author of Tyranny of the Minority: How the Left is Destroying America.
Copyright © 2018 Ed Brodow. All rights reserved.
