Steve McIntyre writes an historical comparison of how “fake-gate” is more like water-gate than one might realize. It just isn’t the name association, it’s about donor lists. And then there’s that interesting twist that Steve points out from WUWT that makes the connection even more interesting. Some excerpts below, and of course a splendid Josh cartoon done specifically for the story. I’ve located what I think are the two comments that inspired Steve to write this essay – Anthony
Gleick and the Watergate Burglars – by Steve McIntyre
We are approaching the 40th anniversary of the original Watergate burglaries. Although everyone has heard of the scandal, most people have either forgotten or are too young to remember that the purpose of the Watergate burglaries was to copy documents listing donors to the Democratic Party and their financial contributions, either hoping or expecting to find evidence of contributions from “bad” sources (the Cuban government).
Like the Watergate burglars, the objective of Gleick’s fraud against Heartland was to obtain a list of donors, expecting to find evidence of “bad” contributions to their climate program (fossil fuel corporations and the Koch brothers.) The identity of objectives is really quite remarkable. The technology of the Watergate burglars (break-in and photography) was different than Gleick’s (fraud and email). And the consequences of being caught have thus far been very different.
In today’s post, I’ll reconsider the backstory of the Watergate burglaries to place present-day analogies to the Watergate era in better context.
I was in mid-20s at the time of the Watergate events. Although it now looms large in contemporary history, it was a very minor story until relatively late in the chronology, when Nixon’s connections to the cover-up were finally established. (The Vietnam War was the dominant story of the day.) My own recollection of events (prior to researching) was mostly established by the movie hagiography of Woodward and Bernstein, though all of the names in the story (from Ellsberg to G. Gordon Liddy) were names familiar to me as a young man. Today’s post is written almost entirely from secondary sources (mostly Wikipedia articles unless otherwise cited), which seem accurate enough on chronological details.
Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
I’ll start my review of Watergate with Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, which have been cited in some quarters as precedents for Gleick.
…
Postscript
The topic of this post was inspired by a witty remark by a commenter at Anthony’s. He wryly observed that Gleick was increasingly being described by his defenders, not as a “climate scientist”, but as a “water scientist”, and that the logical analogue of “climategate” was therefore “watergate”. From this ironic reminder, I browsed easily accessible information on the original Watergate burglary, which immediately showed that it too was about a search for a donors’ list.
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Since Steve got his inspiration here, I thought it useful to highlight a couple of comments that likely contributed. I didn’t find any single comment that contained both points that Steve mentions, but I did find these two:
Tom_R says: February 21, 2012 at 7:31 pm
Since Dr. Gleick specialized in hydrology and was on a ‘water and technology’ board, maybe this should be called ‘WATERgate’.
What? That one’s already been taken?
Nevermind.
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Philip Bradley says: February 21, 2012 at 5:47 pmNote how at Daily Kos and other media, Gleick is no longer a climate scientist, now merely a water analyst.
Read the full story, well worth your time: Gleick and the Watergate Burglars – by Steve McIntyre
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Reblogged this on pindanpost.
There are two more similarities that Steve missed.
1. The money trail:
Gleick’s employment is funded by president Obama, through grants made by his climate czar over at the EPA. The Watergate burglars employment was funded by president Nixon through payments made by a fundraising group for the Nixon campaign.
2. The initial coverup:
The president and his EPA tried to distance itself from Gleick by removing all public reference to their connection to Gleick. Nixon and his campaign tried to also cover up their connection to the crooks.
Excellent cartoon by Josh , except for one small detail , Gleik is wearing gloves . In the initial “Whodunnit” phase several people detected Gleik`s “fingerprints” all over it (o:
They spent so much time and money on painting their balls trying to make it look like they hadn’t anything to hide nor done anything wrong. Christ, even a couple of simple sceptical bloggers got raided in the search for the supposed great “oil” conspiracy and some super duper computer villain.
Will they ever realize that they today are the financial behemoths they themselves so loved to loath 25 years ago? The very ones, they said, that had to take all the heat and crap, because of all the money? And here they are, the money themselves.
What a bunch of pansy puftahs, sniffing each others pants, never understanding it’s their own crap they’re smelling, ha ha.
They are also both about fear of what the other sides were doing.
So… just some rambling here… Does this mean we’ll see “Honk to Impeach” protestors outside the White House?
Remember when the media was actually on the side of the people, and tried to EXPOSE fraud and political wrongdoing? Oh, I keep forgetting… they still do, if the people involved have an (R) beside their name. Let the (D) people literally steal at will and it’s silence: whether they’re stealing documents in their pants or legislating theft from future generations.
And I can almost guarantee there won’t be a movie out of this… No “All the President’s Men”, although I’m pretty sure many of the coverup people would be perfectly happy to see “An Inconvenient Truth” shown in schools one more time. Because, see, that’s not anti-science.
Hadn’t thought about the details of these old scandals in years; just as most people now have forgotten the details of the Watergate break-in, we have also forgotten the details of Ellsburg’s case. Ellsburg is in no way comparable to Gleick, and in fact Ellsberg’s case seems very analogous to Climategate. Ellsburg was the insider with high clearance who decided to leak the documents (afterwards called the Pentagon Papers) to the public. *Everything* he leaked was unquestionably true, (no forgeries) and they were all government documents (not private documents) that were being hidden from the public. Now the documents he leaked were classified, BUT he has always maintained that the reason he leaked them was because he realized that the only reason they were classified was because they revealed that the Pentagon’s assessment of the war effort behind closed doors was the complete opposite of what they were saying about the war in public. They were lying to the public about a matter of vital public interest, and they were using their power to hide the documents that proved they were lying.
In other words, a lot like Climategate – those who were most strongly in favor of the policies in public were privately lamenting how their entire case was falling apart and wondering how to keep the public from finding out how much trouble they were in.
If today’s leftists, who still idolize Ellsberg for opposing Vietnam, remembered exactly what Ellsberg did, then they would realize that whoever leaked the Climategate docs did *exactly* the same thing. And they should realize that this man, whoever he is, deserves to be a hero in their book too.
I just sent a link and excerpt to the G Gordon Liddy show’s producer. Might be interesting if the G-man picks it up..
What the hell is Heartland doing?
http://blogs.kqed.org/climatewatch/2012/03/09/pacific-institutes-peter-gleick-breaks-silence/
What a disappointment another climate criminal goes free
afiyzzyfist,
The wheels of justice grind slow. So far I think Heartland’s actions have been appropriate, unless there’s something I’ve missed (?)
You tell us.
From afizzyfist on March 10, 2012 at 9:17 pm:
Huh? Bub, I don’t know what you’re enjoying right now, but it likely hasn’t been legalized in my state “for medicinal purposes”.
Heartland just assembled their legal team:
http://heartland.org/press-releases/2012/03/05/fakegate-heartland-announces-legal-team
They’ve barely begun getting to where they finalize what lawsuits they will file, for what specific reasons, for what specific damages, against what specific groups and individuals. As for “going free”, this federal administration has a noted reticence when it comes to prosecuting even marginal allies, especially when it can blow up into a larger investigation that focuses attention on the favored. It was a given from the start there wouldn’t be a criminal investigation for anything short of a major violent crime, or for a major financial misdoing where the favored have a piece of the action. We’ll have to wait for another administration despite the public confession, unless some brave state or municipality is ready to buck the feds and file charges anyway.
Interesting analogy
Steve says:
“Gleick and/or (less probably a mysterious associate) then forged a more damaging 2012 Confidential Climate Strategy memo,which he then distributed to sympathetic environmentalist blogs”
but i don’t know that the forged memo went ONLY to blogs. i suspect some of the 15 “friends” were from the MSM/MSM blogs. funny how sceptics all owned up about receiving the Climategate cache, yet we haven’t heard a peep from most of the 15.
OT. About fonts
Anthony
I think it is something to do with ‘data parity check’, somewhere in the system, started two days ago. It flips between good and bad on refreshing a page. It happens only on WUWT as far as I can see, no other wordpress blog or any other website.
It does seem as though the law moves slowly in the case of the [expletive deleted] Gleick. He has, after all, shown himself to be a [multiple expletives deleted].
Just trying to recapture the spirit of Watergate. 🙂
Some one, Ms. Curry, questioned Gleick’s “Rationality” (:-}) so, perhaps…..
FLAKE-gate!
(Waiver–syntax and spelling errors do not necessarily mean Gleick wrote this note!)
It is interesting to an observer that old stories are being dredged up to maintain the myth that Nixon was a bad person when he did the almost impossible and made the most important strategic Foreign Policy changes that have made the world unrecognisable.
Nixon’s historic trip to China 40 years ago is being submerged in a raft of stories designed to perpetuate the myth that had been generated about Nixon. The often repeated cop out is that there is a mountain of documents to wade through such that the observer has to reply on the writings of those who stand to benefit only if they kept to the well-worn political line. Are we missing the wood for the trees? Is this a deliberate mis-direction? I have read many such books and it is my opinion that the direct quotations of Nixon are open to very different interpretations. He is a very complex man. Which great leader was not a complex person? Of course the meme that Nixon is a bag egg has been popularised and who would dare to be unconventional and go against the grain and risk being labeled a laughing stock? Especially when one’s career is on the line.
Why do we not think for ourselves and question the inconsistencies and contradictions in the official story? After all we are supposed to have been taught to do so in our schooling.
Why would Nixon order a raid on Watergate when he was already 26 points ahead of Senator McGovern?
Why did the Watergate raiders persist in a risky and dumb project so that they would be arrested at the THIRD attempt?
Why did the dollar bills found on the arrested raiders have consecutive serial numbers? How was this observation made and who popularised it?
Why were H Hunt’s details that led to the White House found on the address books of TWO of the four arrested Cubans?
The raiders were supposed to be ex-CIA; why were they so incompetent?
What has Richard Dawkin’s memes got to do with Watergate?
If Nixon had wanted to order the Watergate raid, why did he pass the FEC Act that brought about greater transparency in campaign funding? It was not perfect but was a step in the right direction.
Nixon was against the Zionist lobby influencing US Foreign Policy in the Middle East. Was this another reason for his downfall? Another accusation is that Nixon was anti-Semitic.
Although anti-bussing, he was responsible for the desegregation of the Southern States, a carry over from President Johnson. He appointed Connolly, a Democrat to be his Secretary of Treasury and Kissinger who was an advisor to Rockefeller.
He formed the Environmental Agency, thus he was years ahead of his time.
He alone among the political elite wanted to withdraw from Vietnam not at any price but though ‘Peace with Honour’. He did end the Vietnam War; the principal cause of all the trouble of the US in the 60s and 70s.
He was right wing, but a patriot, doing everything for the US of A, the country that he loved.
It is my hypothesis that the Watergate plot was a right wing false flag operation that the liberals would run with, once the trap was sprung. http://uftpress.com. Have we been hoodwinked for so many years? Can someone please explain the contradictions and inconsistencies of the official and conventional account to me? Please don’t be lazy and try to fob me off. Do your own research.
@Patrick Guinness:
> but i don’t know that the forged memo went ONLY to blogs. i suspect some of the 15 “friends” were from the MSM/MSM blogs. funny how sceptics all owned up about receiving the Climategate cache, yet we haven’t heard a peep from most of the 15.
How do you know there were 15?
Gleick didn’t make the To field visible – in which case people could have just counted. He used blind copies apparently.
In which case none of their recipients would have any idea how many other recipients there were or the 15 – except Gleick said there were 15 in the body of the email.
Since Gleick has apparently made a habit of lying in emails, including in the email to the “15” – identifying himself as a Heartland insider, and mixing documents of 3 different origins as all being from Heartland – there is no real reason to believe that there actually 15.
In the same way that their perception of the Climategate leaks as hacks provides them internal (and within the left) moral justification, the Watergate burglars justified their actions based on an earlier burglary by the Democrats.
CodeTech says:
March 10, 2012 at 9:13 pm
So… just some rambling here… Does this mean we’ll see “Honk to Impeach” protestors outside the White House?
Remember when the media was actually on the side of the people, and tried to EXPOSE fraud and political wrongdoing? Oh, I keep forgetting… they still do, if the people involved have an (R) beside their name. Let the (D) people literally steal at will and it’s silence: whether they’re stealing documents in their pants or legislating theft from future generations……
________________________________________
CodeTech, the media has not been on the “Side of the people” for close to a hundred years. That is why we are in the mess we are in The media has been nothing but a propaganda machine since 1917 when J. P. Morgan bought controlling interests in the leading news papers.
“…In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, ship building and powder interests and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press in the United States.
“These 12 men worked the problems out by selecting 179 newspapers, and then began, by an elimination process, to retain only those necessary for the purpose of controlling the general policy of the daily press throughout the country…..” U.S. Congressional Record February 9, 1917, page 2947 http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Morgan-Buys-Newspapers9feb17.htm
This was followed by the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird conducted under Dulles http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmockingbird.htm Info (???) on Dulles. Seems he was also a part of the same “Old Boy” network: http://www.enter.net/~torve/trogholm/secret/rightroots/dulles.html
It is STILL a propaganda machine ~ He who owns the press controls the press:
JP Morgan: Our next big media player?: http://newsandtech.com/dougs_page/article_f3a45be0-4717-11df-aace-001cc4c03286.html
What I find absolutely hilarious is Chris Hedges in his book Death of the Liberal Class names the five pillars of the liberal class ; the press, universities, unions, churches and the Democratic Party. This is the Christians that are now attacked by the “Liberal Media” as gun toting right-wing nuts. The Democratic Party that is the party that gave use Fractional Reserve Banking, the Federal Reserve and then compounded the crime by confiscating the common man’s gold (real wealth) to be given to the bankers. The “Liberal Press” that is controlled by the bankers and “captains of industry” (checkout General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt & NBC Universal ) But try telling a liberal any of this and you get cognitive dissonance followed by the usual spouting of the party line. (I am an equal opportunity politician hater BTW)
References:
Louis T. McFadden’s Speech In the House of Representatives 10 June 1932: http://www.afn.org/~govern/mcfadden_speech_1932.html
The Great American Disaster: How Much Gold Remains In Fort Knox?: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig11/weber-c1.1.1.html
(There has still not been an independent audit of the gold in Fort Knox. Why does the Fed fiercely resist a physical audit of the gold at Fort Knox and in the vaults of the New York Fed? Did far more U.S. gold flow overseas under LBJ and Nixon than is admitted?)
Now where is Jim to rush to the bankers defense and call me looney tunes? http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/09/friday-funny-bonus-kenji-gets-mail/#comment-917873
wws says: @ur momisugly March 10, 2012 at 9:14 pm
“….Ellsberg’s case seems very analogous to Climategate….”
Nice catch you and Steve McIntyre are correct the similarity in the two events are incredible and the response of the media very telling.
OT this would have to be the most important AGW news for some time
http://www.real-science.com/arctic-fraud-worse
BTW very very difficult to find “post under new items” here please put on top where we can see it. Cheers
This scandal seems to be worse than anything we’ve seen so far. needs to be published. If already done my apologies
Was just stirring the hornets nest to find out we are with the legal stuff, good to hear something is being done in any case…
CodeTech says:March 10, 2012 at 9:13 pm
So… just some rambling here… Does this mean we’ll see “Honk to Impeach” protestors outside the White House?
No.
Richard Nixon had Spiro Agnew, Baraq Obama has Joe Biden.
It’s called “Impeachment Insurance.”
From McIntyre’s post:
Gleick: “Scientists are used to debating facts with each other, with the best evidence and theory winning. Well, this is a bar fight, where the facts are irrelevant, and apparently, the rules and tools of science are too. But who wins bar fights? As the Simpsons cartoon so brilliantly showed, bullies. Not always the guy who is right.”
The above statement reflects five fundamental misunderstandings driving them all crazy. 1) The IPCC never accepted honest debate and forced an initial conclusion where the science had concluded that science was unclear. They’ve been scientifically committed to an unscientifically derived position ever since. (Out on the illusion of a limb) 2) Scientific fact is independent of what is perceived as best evidence at the time. 3) Scientific fact develops over time. 4) A scientific debate is never about which human being wins. 5) The scientific bully is the one who fails to understand and accept 1 -4.
This is not about what seems to be the slightly best guess at the time (especially in a debate where the questions are being controlled by those who feel a personal and ideological need to win). What is required is proof of an adequate description of how CO2 works in the climate compared to all other variables under known past and present conditions. The description is entirely inadequate and there is no proof. And after that, there is still the science related to what effects both positive and negative that warming will bring and why the earth cannot withstand climate change when that is all the climate has ever done.
I recall Trenberth co-authoring a screed with Gleick and Abraham. What’s his connection and who are all the climate activists with science titles that are open only to how to stop the public inquiry so that they may implement action – any action and drastic reaction regardless of the sense it makes? An easier question and shorter list, who are the scientifically honest warmists that place fact and an honest appraisal of what is both known and unknown before the precautionary principle and worst-case leveraging?