LittleSis – following the money never felt so fun

Ok, so we all remember the line from All the President’s Men where Deep Throat (Hal Holbrook) tells Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) to “Follow the money” in order to get to the root of the Watergate cover-up. In case you don’t, here’s the dialogue.

Deep Throat: No, heh, but it’s touching. Forget the myths the media’s created about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.
Bob Woodward: Hunt’s come in from the cold. Supposedly he’s got a lawyer with $25,000 in a brown paper bag.
Deep Throat: Follow the money.
Bob Woodward: What do you mean? Where?
Deep Throat: Oh, I can’t tell you that.

Woodward must of been thinking, “How’d you like a brown paper bag over your head Mr. Almighty Deep Throat?”

Though Woodward eventually traced all those brown paper bags back to Tricky Dick, this clip shows his initial, cumbersome, but unbelievably lucky, attempts to piece together the tangled web that was CREEP (the Committee to Re-elect the President).

Unfortunately, the “brown paper bag”-esque relationships that these days come in the form of speaking fees, PAC contributions, and close lobbyist ties, can still be a tough puzzle to snap together. Yes, the immediate post-Watergate period led to the creation of the FEC and there now exists a plethora of disclosure documents that detail these relationships Many of these documents have been aggregated and re-aggregated on mirror sites for years.

Palin implicated in ethics probe… Wouldn’t it be nice to see a Checkers speech?

Who could have predicted that this news would break when I wrote the Palin v. Nixon piece two weeks ago, but hey it looks as if the two have even more in common than I thought. Wouldn’t it be great political theater to see Sarah give one of these?

And now, part two.

Palin v. Nixon: Why you’ll probably have Sarah to kick around for awhile

Last week, Sarah Palin declared her independence from the Alaska Governor’s Office just in time for Independence Day. While the move wasn’t enough to drown out a final news weekend in malaise en route to MJ’s funeral, it did set the politicos abuzz.

Most of the headlines read some paraphrase of: What will Palin do next? After all, she gave no clear reason for her resignation and ended her lakeside speech (she never forgets to add that rural homespun background) with a mysterious sounding quote of General Douglas MacArthur’s, “We are not retreating, we are just changing directions”. Although, we must assume that MacArthur had some vague idea of the new direction he was going in when he made that quote, otherwise they’d probably be speaking a tad more Japanese in the Philippines.

As part of the hypothetical onslaught, some of Palin’s remarks against the press have led many pundits to compare Palin’s dropout to that of Richard Nixon when he gave a quite embittered speech in November of 1962 after losing the California Governor’s race to Pat Brown. Even Nixon’s former aide, Pat Buchanan, made the comparison.

Jonathan Allen (more proof that Jonathans are a mental force to be reckoned with) published a piece chastising Buchanan for the comparison and arguing that Palin could never hold a candle to Nixon as a foreign policy expert or a political strategist. While I agree completely, I don’t think that just because she doesn’t get up to Nixon’s talent level means that she could not make a similar political comeback. She will probably spend the time off earning a significant amount of money through book deals, etc., perhaps even more than Nixon was able to earn during his interim gig as a Manhattan attorney. This could give her an ample purse (hopefully, one she buys for herslf this time) come 2016 or 2020, or if she decides to challenge Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski next year.