2024-08-09 THE STUPIDEST THING EVER WRITTEN ABOUT WATERGATE

“NIXON RESIGNS!” Fifty years ago today — it was even a Friday — we woke up to that historic headline. So what better occasion than the golden anniversary of that glorious event could there be to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of what is, in my experience, the stupidest thing ever written about Watergate: an op-ed column for The Washington Post by one Benjamin J. Stein. This was a screed so cretinous that even its author seems to have recognized what an embarrassment it was, if asserting his right as a freelancer to keep the column out of the Nexis archives constitutes an acknowledgment of its idiocy.

Stein, for those blissfully unaware of him, is variously known as: a) a game show host (Win Ben Stein’s Money); b) a shill for a dozen or so products who gave up his gig as a New York Times business columnist rather than bow to that paper’s stuffy our-writers-don’t-do-commercials policy; c) a Jew — one of the very few — who scoffs at evolution, championing the crackpot theory of “intelligent design” (i.e. creationism with a smarter-sounding name); d) a writer who regularly creeps readers out with TMI about his fixation on beautiful young women a fraction of his age (check out this shudder-inducing column in The American Spectator); e) an actor best known for the monotonic movie line, “Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?” (he has reportedly said that he wouldn’t mind having that as his epitaph, and in truth it would be better than “Craven Nixon Apologist”) or f) a craven apologist for Richard Nixon, whom Stein worked for until his abjectly disgraced boss fled the White House in a helicopter.

Stein, to be sure, is no stranger to spouting foolishness. In the midst of the 2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn sex scandal, he wrote a column positing that Strauss-Kahn’s education, wealth and standing in the world community made his guilt unlikely. His alleged expertise on economics failed to keep him from making bullish financial predictions — the foreclosure problem would “blow over” and “we’ll all wonder what the scare was about” — until he was forced to stop because ‘08 Crash. He co-wrote a lunatic documentary called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which blamed the Holocaust on evolution. (In promoting the film, Stein actually declared, “Science leads you to killing people.”) All of this — and so, so much more — is decidedly mock-worthy, but how does it stack up against Stein’s magnum opus, his 1984 treatise, “Was Watergate Really Such A Big Deal?” You decide.