If that scenario sounds familiar, it sounds doubly familiar to those of us who were around and plugged into politics around 1986-87, when a scandal called the Iran-Contra affair nearly toppled the 40th presidency of Ronald Reagan — until abruptly, it didn’t.

What’s so interesting is that despite all the similarities between the Iran-Contra mess and President Trump’s Ukraine affair, in which an American president used the immense clout of his office in a scheme to extort an election-interfering political favor from a foreign leader, it’s a comparison that almost never gets made in today’s 24/7 hotbox of cable TV news. America decided to forget Iran-Contra back in 1987. It’s a pledge we’re still keeping in 2019.

At the end of the tumultuous 1960s and ’70s, the great Joan Didion wrote: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live ... We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.” In American politics, the most workable choice is Watergate, and it’s been that way ever since Richard Nixon waved from the helicopter steps in 1974.

I’ve not seen one cable-TV guest from Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal during the current crisis, even though what happened then—a half-generation after Watergate, as America’s great political divide was starting to harden like wet sidewalk cement—probably better explains the looming national crack-up over Trump.

Forty-five years later, as the world of punditry struggles to put the sprawling amorality of Donald Trump into a tidy box, TV producers raised in the dark shadows of Deep Throat continually invite the stars of Watergate — John Dean, Woodward and Bernstein, Jill Wine-Banks — into your living room to impose reason and order. And why not? The system worked, right? There were checks and balances, just like the Founding Fathers drew it up. The journalists, the judges, and Congress did their jobs and masses overwhelmingly approved.

I’ve not seen one cable-TV guest from Reagan’s Iran-Contra scandal during the current crisis, even though what happened then — a half-generation after Watergate, as America’s great political divide was starting to harden like wet sidewalk cement — probably better explains the looming national crack-up over Trump. It was a post-Watergate restoration of situational ethics over the rule of law, and a new understanding that impeachment was a political act in a time when raw partisanship was just beginning to trump (pun intended) principle.