December 20, 2021

Carl Bernstein doesn't sugarcoat it.

On Sunday's "Reliable Sources," host Brian Stelter asked Bernstein if this week, with "Text-Gate," felt familiar to the OG Watergate reporter. "Did this week feel similar to you at all?"

Bernstein said, "No, because the really important thing to remember about Watergate is that courageous Republicans cast their vote for articles of impeachment in committee against Richard Nixon."

Bernstein didn't stop there:

CARL BERNSTEIN: Republicans are doing nothing of the sort in the Trump era, they have become the party of voter suppression, they have embraced a seditious conspiracy, led by the President of the United States, Donald Trump, by his chief of staff, Mr. Meadows, and also by a gang of constitutional thugs, such as Jim Jordan.

So what we have now is ongoing, a conspiracy, looking toward the next election in 2020 for the President of the United States, in which the Republican Party is committed to voter suppression, which is really a seditious enterprise.

So it's becoming a party of sedition, such as we have never seen since the Civil War. And even then, no President of the United States ever committed the kind of seditious acts as Trump did on January 6 and through his -- the end of his presidency.

Stelter then asked, "What do you want the press and the public to do?"

Bernstein said the assault on our democracy has to be covered like the war that it is.

BERNSTEIN: I think that we need to start covering the most important story for us to cover. Yes, we need to continue giving huge prominence to COVID and whatever breaking stories there are, but probably, as in World War Two, and as in the Civil War, the coverage has to be of the real war.

And that could be four or five years as it was in World War Two and the Civil War. And that is the fight against Americans who want to vote a party committed to keeping Americans from voting.

I covered the civil -- the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when it -- when it was passed. This party of seditious undermining of American democracy and our electoral system is trying to undo that Voting Rights Act, which guaranteed all Americans the right to vote.

So this is the big story that we cannot lose sight of. We need to cover it like the war that it is, every day, every important battle.

Yes, we need to cover all stories. But this story is ongoing and must be the focus of our attention because it is about the undermining of American democracy at its most basic level. And it's been embraced by one of our two political parties.

ONE of our two political parties. He left unanswered a really important question: Will the mainstream press get their heads out of their both-siderist butts long enough to cover this accurately?

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