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The Dean of House Conservatives
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The Dean of House Conservatives

John Dean was not a whistleblower, but liberals love it when he says any scandal is “worse than Watergate.”

Jonah Goldberg
Jun 22
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The Dean of House Conservatives
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John Dean. (Photograph by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.)

Hey,

So, I’ve got to have it out with Hayes about the lack of blogging opportunities at The Dispatch. It’s one of our biggest disagreements, second perhaps only to the question of restoring the Bulgarian monarchy. (Steve is a huge fan of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha-Koháry for some reason.) I spent two decades building up the blogging center of my brain, and I constantly see things that are worth maybe a few hundred words, but may not be worth a whole column or “news”letter.

For instance, this morning Joe Scarborough made an offhand analogy that clanged off my forehead like a spoon bouncing off a dartboard. Talking about the January 6 hearings yesterday, he said the testimony from Rusty Bowers, Brad Raffensperger, and Gabriel Sterling was a little like having a panel of John Deans testify.

For you youngins, John Dean, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, was a key witness in the Watergate hearings. He’s often described as a whistleblower who heroically helped expose Nixon’s crimes. More on that in a second.

But first, I should say that Scarborough’s intended point was fine. The hearings were compelling, like the Watergate hearings, and one reason they were compelling was that the first round of witnesses were all conservative Republicans telling inconvenient truths about their own side.

But here’s the problem. Comparing Bowers, Raffensperger, and Sterling to John Dean is a heinous insult to them.

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