This NY Times story about the Brooklyn company printing the inaugural invitations warmed my heart. The employees, all union members, are working overtime to produce the invitations, using traditional printing processes that require real craftsmanship. They cheered when they heard their company had been awarded the job. I read the story and felt happy for all of them, including the paper supplier (in Wisconsin) and the ink supplier (from Chicago). This will give some good working people a merry Christmas.

The story said,

According to Mr. Donnelly, Precise Continental was selected over rival printers because it is a union company, it uses recycled paper and it is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, which promotes responsible forest management.

What’s not to like? Nevertheless, some people managed to turn this quote into another excuse to express their pathological hatred and resentment of Barack Obama.

BTD: You’re sick. Get help.

In the Washington Post, Leonard Downie Jr. looks back on the Post‘s glory days of Watergate and wonders how the same story would play out today. He says the basics of investigative reporting haven’t changed much, but media certainly have.

Then, Woodward and Bernstein worked alone for several months before the story became the center public attention. “Nixon was re-elected five months after the burglary in 1972,” Downie writes, “and Watergate was not much of an issue during the campaign. That would not happen today.”

As Downie says, everything happens faster today.

Now, from day one, the story would be all over the Internet, and hordes of reporters and bloggers would immediately join the chase. The story would become fodder for around-the-clock argument among the blowhards on cable television and the Internet. Opinion polls would be constantly stirring up and measuring the public’s reaction.

However, all manner of travesties have come out of the Bush Administration that make Watergate seem almost petty. Iraq intelligence manipulation, war profiteering by corporations connected to the Vice President, the U.S. Attorney scandal, torture, etc. etc. etc. And yet Bush hasn’t suffered the public humiliation that Nixon did (yet).

I think that if Watergate had happened five years ago, the Right-Wing Noise Machine would have drowned out whatever Woodward and Bernstein found, and both reporters would have been swift-boated into resigning. They might have written a book that made a little splash, but by now they’d be out of journalism altogether.

Now, I think the story would be getting more respect, and the Right would be less able to crush Woodward and Bernstein and destroy their careers. We still haven’t gotten to a point that a news story about wrongdoing in the White House has the impact it ought to have, however.

In 1973, I had the sense that people realized Nixon had done something wrong, but the average person might not have been able to articulate exactly what it was. Right-wingers today, of course, brush off Watergate as a simple burglary — no big deal — utterly ignoring the implications of what the burglars were up to and the other shenanigans, such as money laundering, that were traced back to the White House.

And today, for example, they refuse to acknowledge what the U.S. Attorney scandal actually is about. They huff that a President has the authority to fire attorneys, and of course he does, but that isn’t the issue. And you can explain the issue to them until you are purple, but it will do no good. It’s like talking to a wall.

But does the rest of the public really understand why the U.S. Attorney firings are significant? Has anyone sat them down and said “This is a big deal, because the Bush White House corrupted the Justice Department and the U.S. justice system in order to help Republicans win elections”? I doubt most people fully understand that.

Some things have changed; some things are the same.