Josh Marshall really hits the nail on the head:
There’s this old line the wise folks in Washington have that ‘it’s not the crime, but the cover-up.’
But only fools believe that. It’s always about the crime. The whole point of the cover-up is that a full revelation of the underlying crime is not survivable. Let me repeat that, the whole point of the cover-up is a recognition that a full revelation of the underlying bad act is not survivable.
Don’t ever forget that. When talking heads tell us that it’s about the cover-up, they’re trying to make us believe that the problem here is that the administration was flummoxed by an awkward question, gave a bad answer, and subsequently found itself boxed into an embarrassing cover-up. You know, the sort of thing that could happen to anyone.
But that’s not what’s at issue. At issue is the alleged takeover of the Justice Department by the political arm of the White House. You know, the sort of thing that pretty much could only happen to an unusually corrupt administration.
It isn’t the cover-up. It’s the crime.
ArchPundit
Not necessarily. The phenomenon at work here usually is that someone has a choice of quickly coming clean, getting out in front of bad news, apologizing, knocking heads together and so on….or trying to help it all go away. Watergate is the classic example. Nixon would have survived Watergate if he’d thrown the right people under the bus on Day One — said “I deplore these illegal, rogue tactics…I have fired everyone involved.” Or Monica-gate. Had Clinton come clean right away, not lied to the grand jury (which, yes, come on, he sure as hell did) and taken his lumps as a horndog, he never would have been impeached. It comes from a misapprehension of the public’s ability/willingness to forgive those who appear contrite. The “recognition” that Josh writes of is often a false impression.
I think there are two different phenomena here. With Clinton, you’re absolutely right, and the reason you’re right is that the cover-up was actually worse than the crime. Josh’s point, I think, is that this state of affairs is in fact quite unusual.
With Watergate, though, saying that Nixon should have just thrown certain people under the bus is just another version of Josh’s “recognition.” In other words, Nixon actually was responsible for Watergate, and he couldn’t afford to take responsibility. He could have — maybe — gotten away with unfairly foisting responsibility on somebody else, but that’s just another way of saying what Josh said, namely that “a full revelation of the underlying act [was] not survivable.”