Bush Puts a 'Cancer on the Presidency'

[Manix]

LA Times
by Robert Scheer


<snip>


"Worse Than Watergate," the title of a new book by John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House counsel, is a depressingly accurate measure of the chicanery of the Bush/Cheney cabal. According to Dean, who began his political life at the age of 29 as the Republican counsel on the House Judiciary Committee before being recruited by Nixon, "This administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous." And when it comes to lies and cover-up, the Bush crowd makes the Nixon administration look like amateurs. As Dean writes, they "have created the most secretive presidency of my lifetime … far worse than during Watergate."


<snip>


This is an administration that has been dominated by the neoconservative ideologues who condemned the logical restraint of the first Bush administration on foreign policy as a betrayal of the national interest.

These neocons have made a horrible mess of things, but that gives them no pause. They went to war with a nation that had no weapons of mass destruction and few connections to terrorism — but have coddled Pakistan, which sponsored the Taliban and Al Qaeda and which recently was revealed as the source of nuclear weapons technology for North Korea, Iran and Libya.

The president's team is wrong to believe its outrageous lies can continue to lull a gullible public. Nixon's lies won him a second election, but then he lost the country.

Bush smiles better than Nixon, but when the lies are exposed, the smile turns into a character-revealing smirk. That happened last week when the White House released photos of a skit, performed for the amusement of jaded media heavyweights, in which the president pretended to look under his desk for the missing weapons of mass destruction. This may have amused his cynical audience, but to the general public, the carefully lip-synced policy pronouncements of the man who cried wolf has morphed into a sick joke.




Full Text

[izzie]

1. It is going to be very hard to get to those right wing nuts.

Bush keeps giving them a chicken wing here and their so it looks like they will stay with him. They just do not think a church run state will hurt them but even the church people get hurt when it is run like that. Then it becomes which church. So far most of those people do not see that or do not know their history. Even the 'city on the hill' people would only let you pray in a set way. Just think people had to move to RI to get away from it. And these were all Christians. Even the Mayflower people were getting away from other Christians for their own ways.

[ashling]

2. You've got to give the Bush crowd credit for one thing.

They really do make those watergate thugs look good!

Did I say "thugs?"

Come to think of it, they were boy scouts.

I never would have thought that Nixon wasn't so bad after all.

:puke:

[pretzel4gore]

3. the price of the disconnect....

the media hasn't been all that truthful, in terms of insightful, in packaging/selling history as they want us to see it......fact is nixon was legitimately elected, even if lotsa dirty tricks ie donald segretti they still were democratically elected regime. the 'neocons' who today praise reagan/bush/*bush were the mob who turned on nixon (cia man woodward was part of the 'deep throat' gang)
nixon was in his day the epitome of nasty gop/rnc....at least reading all the info then led one to believe it...but nixon wasn't 'on inside looking out' cuz, for example, supreme court voted 8-0 against him, and they impeached him (after clinically aborting vice president agnew with convenient highway industry bribes of about 2000 dollars) and so on......the media was anti nixon suddenly and inplacably, sometime along the way. why? maybe nixon was too honest, too devoted to the country, too willing to look out for public good versus the multinat corporate world good. either way, the mass media has been an interested player in US politics for generation, and we're a dead society if we cannot control their constant interference with the system.....they do not know what's best for themselves, much less the rest of us....
911 is a symptom of a unhealthy society....the media ownership/ operation are vital important...news is a public interest and the airwaves are public property. the disconnect we see is the result of letting kids get away with murder (bushinc murdering JFK)
the media gets enraged at idea it is a monolithic agency constantly on the prowl for SOMETHING it can't or won't define.....but if you look at how they finessed the JFK murder, Watergate, Iran/Contra affair (basically illegal war against hapless lil nicaruaga) the reagan shooting, kal007, the clinton 'wars' see limbaugh's 15 year long campaign of inimidation etc etc etc, you get the idea

[Disturbed]

4. What?

If Bush &/or Cheney shot somebody in front of witnesses the Right Wing ones would say it didn't happen and the Liberals would say they didn't see or hear anything.

[H2O Man]

5. That's a curious statement.

I think that it is important to focus the blame where it belongs. I'm not sure that your comment on liberals is accurate or helpful. Perhaps it has to do with potential differences in our definitions of "liberals." I suspect that in building coalitions -- which is the only avenue that can save our nation -- it might be wise to hold back on the insults.

[Cassandra]

6. Nixon resigned...

before he could be impeached, unfortunately.

[ashling]

7. apparently somebody missed my

veiled attempt a humor.

"If you've forgotten what it looks like when the wheels come off an administration, you're seeing it happen before your eyes"
- The Christian Science Monitor, 3-29-04

[indepat]

8. The difference between a third-rate burglary and a monstrous theft

of the nation, its institutions, its honor and good name, its Constitution, and liberty and freedom itself?

[ashling]

9. Nixon directed not only

a third rate burglary, but a concerted effort to avoid the Constitution. He was only tripped up by a bungled third rate burglary.

As John Henry Faulk put it at the time, "here he's raped, pillaged, and burned his way across America and he get's caught for running a red light." At the time, all thinking Americans saw it as a Constitutional crisis of the highest order -- and we were right.

Its significance should not be underappreciated.

It only pales in its comparison to the undermining of the Constitutional safegaurds and the outright contempt for democracy that is shown daily by the facist crew in power today who learned their craft at the feet of Richard I. The students have far surpassed their mentor's mastery of the dark arts.
:dem: