Right-wing media have been laying the groundwork for Trump's acquittal for half a century (NYT)

[dalton99a]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/opinion/sunday/impeachment-fox-news.html

Scandalize! Minimize! Repeat as Necessary
Right-wing media have been laying the groundwork for Trump’s acquittal for half a century.
By Nicole Hemmer
Jan. 24, 2020

... But it was President Lyndon Johnson who came in for the most brutal attacks, primarily for the sin of running against the conservative darling Senator Barry Goldwater. Books that centered on Johnson’s advisers — like Bobby Baker, caught up in a series of bribery and tax evasion charges — had trouble gaining traction, even though Mr. Goldwater brought it up regularly on the campaign trail. One book, though, found an avid conservative audience: “A Texan Looks at Lyndon.”

J. Evetts Haley, a Texas rancher, self-published the book in 1964. In it, he offered unsubstantiated accounts of bribery, stolen elections and even convenient deaths that helped pave Johnson’s road to the White House. As I wrote in The Atlantic in 2014, Mr. Haley’s conspiracy theories could have easily been pulled from a 1990s anti-Clinton screed. He called Johnson an “inordinately vain, egotistical, ambitious extrovert” and claimed that Lady Bird Johnson mirrored “Lady Macbeth’s consuming ambition for the growth of her husband’s power.” About the presidential assassination that put Johnson in the Oval Office, he hinted darkly, “What a strange coincidence.”

Johnson won the election in one of the largest landslides in American presidential history. But the scandal-mongering mattered. In the early 1970s, when the next Republican president was under investigation for corruption and abuse of power, the monstrous image of Johnson that conservative media helped to paint became part of President Richard Nixon’s defense.

Conservative media figures did their best to downplay Nixon’s crimes, especially in relation to Johnson’s. Nixon himself called Watergate “a crappy little thing” in his private (but secretly recorded) Oval Office conversations. Henry Regnery dismissed the accounts of Watergate, writing, “I can see no grounds for impeachment, or even to get worked up about.” National Review called the crimes “objectively trivial” and dismissed “the media’s daily spasms of moral indignation” as “a gleeful put-on.”

Even after Nixon had resigned, the magazine still argued that he had been persecuted for actions far less serious than Johnson’s. Hedging even as they accused, the magazine’s editors pointed to “the belief, though not the proof, that Lyndon Johnson greatly surpassed Nixon in venality.” After running through the litany of Johnson’s sins, the editors expressed hope that one day people would look more kindly on Nixon “as the shady deals of previous presidents become known.”

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[scarletwoman]

1. Kick for more eyes. (nt)

[malaise]

2. Off to the greatest page

They sure have invested in their beliefs