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.
===============================================================
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.
=========================================
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
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Like most people who attempt to smear the reputation of a man who needs no extra help in destroying his own reputation, you have resorted to inventing a fallacy, much like Gleick. The President of the United States (POTUS) lacks the Constitutional and de facto power to legislate the creation of OSHA, the EPA, and the DEA, whether or not he ever wanted to do so. Those governmental organizations were created by the legislation of the U.S. Congress, and that Congress was controlled by the majority votes of the Democratic Party. The Republican Party lacked the majority of votes necessary to block such legislation, even if they wanted to do so. Like so many other people, you have attempted to shift the blame from the Democrat controlled Congress to a Republican President who lacked the power to commit the acts you claim he committed as if he were supposed to be some all powerful and dictatorial king. In other words, you act like Gleick to misinform public opinion.
WWS and Gail,
……My point is simply that there must be (and always used to be) a bright line regarding national security (state and military) secrets. Crossing this line means you are flirting with the executioner. We are now in a situation where we are practically rationalizing steal them first, and sort them out later. That is not how a sane state survives……
_______________________________
I am not advocating releasing military secrets. All I am pointing out is the difference in how the Media treated Ellsberg and how the media is treating the Climategate Whistleblower. Indeed I pointed out that Ellsberg WAS TECHNICALLY GUILTY and the Climategate Whistleblower is NOT yet the treatment is the exact opposite of what it should be.
Again we are not looking at the Rule of Law. If we were we would not see the favoritism by the press just because of their admitted bias. We would not be seeing Nixon treated as a convicted criminal and Glieck as a “Hero”
It is this type of bias that I was trying to point out.
BTW Here is a relatively new article by Daniel Ellsberg in the guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 June 2011 that you might want to read http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/13/pentagon-papers-daniel-ellsberg
What he has to say is quite interesting.
….. Senator Morse – one of the two senators who had voted against that unconstitutional, undated blank cheque for presidential war in 1964 – told me that if I had provided him with that evidence at the time (instead of 1969, when I finally provided it to the senate foreign relations committee, on which he had served): “The Tonkin Gulf resolution would never have gotten out of committee; …
…Had I or one of the scores of other officials who had the same high-level information acted then on our oath of office – which was not an oath to obey the president, nor to keep the secret that he was violating his own sworn obligations, but solely an oath “to support and defend the constitution of the United States” – that terrible war might well have been averted altogether….
The statement, “terrible war might well have been averted altogether….”, is yet another example of the political deception and oxymoron in which Ellsberg and others indulged. The “war” was ongoing long before the U.S. committed its own armed forces in 1965 in defense of human lives, the “war” continued long after the U.S. armed forces were withdrawn from the “war” in 1970-1973, and the “war” continued for many years after the Republic of South Vietnam was overrun and surrendered. Far more civilians were killed and murdered by the million after the surrender in 1975 than had died in the conflict in the years from 1945 to 1975. The MSM (MainStream Media) in its faux anti-war and real socialist pro-war reporting turned a blind eye and suppressed news and editorials that revealed the scope of the loss of human life AFTER the communist conquests of South Vietnam and Cambodia. Nothing the United States did or could do was going to “avert” the war, so Ellsberg is either incredibly self-deluding and/or outright dishonest in his statement about his actions being able to “avert” the war and the losses of human life. The North Vietnamese government was determined to destroy millions of human lives no matter what the United States government did or did not do. The only way in which the North Vietnamese efforts to destroy those millions of lives could be “averted” was to defend them with effective military force, which Ellsberg and his fellow travelers opposed.
Gleick behaves like Ellsberg when he blindly ignores the real world facts to promote his political agenda in the false claim of preserving human life while in fact aiding the destruction of human life inumbering n the millions through the destruction of their life supporting economies.