THE STUPIDEST THING EVER WRITTEN ABOUT WATERGATE

Spoiler Alert: It’s by Ben Stein

The 46th anniversary of President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation seems like the perfect occasion to celebrate the 36th anniversary of the publication of what is very likely 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, in case he has flown below your radar screen, 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 the 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…