Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Both of Connecticut’s U.S. Senators, Joe Lieberman and Dick Blumenthal, would seem to have a great deal in common with besieged U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Mr. Lieberman, due to retire from the Senate at the end of his term, clawed his way into the U.S. Senate from his previous position as Connecticut’s Attorney General, as did Mr. Blumenthal. Mr. Holder was cited for contempt by the two senators’ congressional colleagues in the House on Thursday, June 28. The charge brought against Mr. Holder is that the Attorney General has refused to surrender to Congress documentation the Congress has determined it must review to discover what role Mr. Holder’s Justice Department may have played in “Fast and Furious,” a disastrous scheme in which agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, a department under the supervision of Mr. Holder’s Justice Department, facilitated the purchase of guns by Mexican drug dealers. One of the guns, it was later determined, was use...

The important thing to remember about Watergate – other than the notorious cover-up, the stonewalling, the raft of lies told to the media, the imperious claims of “executive privilege” – is that nobody died there. Some of the principal presidential miscreants responsible for Watergate were rounded up, paraded before various congressional committees and suitably harassed by the media. Some of them sang to avoid a term in jail, others went to the hoosegow. A grand jury indicted the “Watergate Seven” – President Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Attorney General John Mitchell, Charles Colson, Gordon C. Strachan, Robert Mardian and Kenneth Parkinson -- in March of 1974, and Mr. Nixon was secretly named as an unindicted co-conspirator. Mr. Nixon, Time Magazine said, was undergoing “daily Hell and very little trust.” The fires of Hell were stoked and the trust disappeared altogether when a “smoking gun” tape was produced showing Mr. Nixon approving a plan to cover...