Matt Cloud

@conzmoleman @drposhlost @as_a_worker twitter.com/realmattcloud/… Meet "our KGB interlocutor" #MoynihanWasDeepThroat

Those not young enough to know of him from the Hiss-Chambers days, that is. Or you could just say none of that makes any sense. x.com/realmattcloud/…

If you're disappointed in Nixon having failed to actually get tough on crime, it might help to know that he had been encouraged to crack down by the very liberals who were responsible for Watergate so that he would be even more resented by the young kids and the hippies.

@PincherMartin8 @realBobWoodward At least I tried.

@realmattcloud @realBobWoodward LOL! Dear Mattie, you once were an important person that other important people cared about enough to write letters for. Now you're just a nutball. When the fall comes, it comes hard.

You can't even give away secrets.

@PincherMartin8 First things first. So the answer by you is no? You don't know about Kay Graham and Moynihan and the heroin problem being the ostensible reason behind Liddy, Hunt and The Plumbers. Gotcha. That's important to know. x.com/realmattcloud/… (I love the synchronicity of the date.)

@realmattcloud Who cares? Tell us, dear Matt, how George H. W. Bush did Kennedy in. That's the burning question of the hour.

Nixon didn't crush crime, though. Violent crime was higher in 1974, the year Nixon left office, than it was in 1968, when he was first elected. That includes homicides, robberies, aggravated assaults, and forcible rapes. All of those categories were way up during Nixon's presidency. Of course the swing upwards in crime began before Nixon ran for president and he did run on "law and order" in both 1968 and 1972, but he was not effective at curbing it once in office.

@PincherMartin8 I learned it from my boss, Moynihan. Things are more fun that way, when dropping clues. Ask @realBobWoodward .

I have not mischaracterized your posts. You're just a bad writer. And that comes down to being a poor thinker. You certainly are not "tight and specific." You don't understand the implications of your own words. This is probably why you misread "defensiveness" into my first comments and why you're inclined to the conspiratorial in your political thinking. This was your very first sentence to me tonight. Look at it. Study it. Understand the mistaken implications a reader would take from it based on how you presented it: "Here's the kicker, the genius behind Watergate: getting the Left to hate Nixon ensures that Nixon's liberal policies are protected from being dismantled from the Right for a generation." Whose genius and why is it "behind" Watergate? Do you mean a controlling influence? Whose? Who got the left to hate Nixon? I assume the same controlling influence that is the "genius" behind Watergate, but since you never named it, how can I or anyone else tell? And since the Left hated Nixon long before Watergate, the chronology here is all fucked up anyway. And how is that related to ensuring Nixon's liberal policies are protected from being dismantled by the right for a generation? Forget the bad history. Just look at the bad writing. The lack of clear subjects with verbs to match them. The huge jumps in logic. You want to blame others for their misunderstandings of your writing when you should be blaming yourself.

@PincherMartin8 ... come on, serious guy ...

@PincherMartin8 What of Kay Graham's request in 1969 that Nixon garrison DC in light of the heroin problem? Are you familiar with this?

@PincherMartin8 2/ entirely cogently to you. You have not followed and worse, have, to repeat, mischaracterized my thesis repeatedly. This has been fruitful only to the extent I have discovered I have exceeded your capabilities. Thank you. I am sorry for bothering you.

@PincherMartin8 1/ You've mischaracterized virtually every sentence I've made to you here tonight. I was happy to keep things tight and specific. Discussing the ways Watergate preserves Nixon's legacy, in an ironic, counterintuitive way, is a topic that I am exploring. I have defended it

@PincherMartin8 I love this: "you can't give away secrets" did not mean you, Pincher Martin, can't give away secrets, you dolt. The "you" meant "me." Utter ...

@realmattcloud I don't mind giving away secrets but can we keep the conspiracy theories to the plausible, please. If your next move is to place Bush père at the scene of the crime in Dallas, November 22nd, 1963, I'm ducking out.

@PincherMartin8 Again -- you don't understand. I'm trying to get rid of you. You won't leave. Bush was in Tyler at 1:00 on 11/22. He had been in Dallas earlier. And here's W on Chrstmas break from Andover on the beach in Florida. And people wonder why the right loses. x.com/realmattcloud/…

@PincherMartin8 And Bush (and his counterpart Strauss of course) has everything to do with Watergate.

Not directly, but it amounts to the same thing. Nixon's original sin was being dumb enough to get caught in Watergate. You call it "genius", but there was no genius in either the original crimes, the larger coverup, or the political opposition to Nixon from it. You then claimed it "ensured" that later Republicans wouldn't be able to deviate from Nixon's policies. But Watergate was irrelevant by the late seventies, both for the Republican Party and the conservative ideology. The GOP suffered no lasting damage because of it. Ford lost a close election in 1976, but by 1978 the conservative movement was stronger than it had ever been and the GOP was only getting stronger, even with liberal Republicans threatening to leave the party. I can give two reasons why Reaganism didn't consolidate more policy victories, but they have nothing to do with Watergate. First, Reagan was an older president with a clear vision that broke from the past, but little executive vigor in implementing it. Second, he selected George H. W. Bush as his running mate. Bush's moderation - and later his son's - would hamper the party consolidating around more conservative policies. Both Bushes ran under the mantle of Reagan while undermining the conservative movement with their more eclectic policies. There was still enough self-respect in the conservative movement to fight back against the father's direction, but by the 2000s, the movement's strength had petered out and it largely went along with Bush's "Big Government Conservatism."

Nixon was moderate to liberal on civil rights, liberal on government spending, and eventually became an accommodationist with the global communists (Mao, Brezhnev) for the sake of peace. So why did liberals hate Nixon so much? Because the early Nixon was probably the most effective politician in the country at using the red issue to both target his political opponents and root out genuine communists. And the left never forgave him for it.

@PincherMartin8 x.com/realmattcloud/…

@PincherMartin8 No, I didn't call it Nixon's genius. You're not understanding. Watergate was the work of Kissinger to get Nixon out of office in time (a decent interval) before South Vietnam fell. Moynihan was Deep Throat, guiding Woodward on the coverage. Where to go and where not. See ya.

@FedSoc @ilan_wurman, for realz.

The Federalist Society is pleased to announce “The Meese Prize for Excellence in Originalist Scholarship,” a $15,000 annual award recognizing new scholarship that makes a distinct and significant contribution to the field of originalism. The inaugural prize will be awarded to the best originalist article or book published or accepted for publication in 2025. FedSoc will announce the winner at the National Lawyers Convention in November. Just as Attorney General Meese did in 1985, we hope this prize will inspire and promote new groundbreaking originalist scholarship. Nominations are due April 15! fedsoc.org/opportunities/…

@ilan_wurman @steve_vladeck 3/ It's your Thunder. Well done.

@ilan_wurman @steve_vladeck 2/ on of course on the amnity-emnity distinction. No one could be on the King's land without the King's permission in the first place; if they were, it was curtains. Allegiance was a pre-condition to jus soli, not an exception. I hadn't read or even see your ny times op-ed.

Steve Vladeck totally misconstrues my invocation of general relativity, interprets my reply to critics as uncharitably as humanly possible, and somehow claims that I'm the one no longer entitled to a presumption of good faith. Just amazing. If you want to see what the Einstein thing is referring to btw, here it is, judge for yourself: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

@PincherMartin8 And BTW, any threat from a radical or reactionary right was put to a stop here, with McMahon as CIA no. 2 in 82. But I've said enough for tonight.The broader takeaway is that the Cold War enabled, required actually, secrecy and an inversion of truth. This is still not understood.

@realmattcloud I think the early Reagan years saw a genuine movement to try and repeal parts of the Great Society, but it was hampered by a Congress which didn't want to revisit those policies and by a president whose executive vigor didn't match his ideological fervor.