Sunday, June 05, 2005
If Watergate Happened Now
Jonathan Alter's piece "If Watergate Happened Now" in the June 13th issue of Newsweek is a must read.
The gist of the article is that Nixon would have gotten away with the Watergate burglary and cover-up if he had been president in 2005 because a Republican controlled Congress would refuse to hold hearings into the matter, the Conservative media would spin the Watergate investigation as a partisan lynching of Nixon, the Justice Department would have subpoened Woodward and Bernstein the way they have subpoened Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper in the Valerie Plame case, effectively shutting down the Washinton Post's Watergate coverage, and the Supreme Court would have split 5-4 along partisan lines in U.S. v. Nixon, allowing Nixon to burn the tapes rather than hand them over to investigators.
That is why it is so important that America return a Democratic majority to either the Senate or the House. Otherwise Bush, Cheney, Rummy, et al. are going to get away with everything - the lies in the lead-up to war, the partisan use of the terror alert system, the prison torture and abuse, the missing millions from the Iraq Reconstruction fund, the hiring of journalists and the planting of paid administration propaganda into the media. They'll get away with it all because no one will hold them accountable and the right-wing propaganda machine will be there to make excuses for the administration and attack anyone who does try to hold them accountable.
So please, America. Forget about the spin for just a few moments and remember what this nation used to be like before the thugs in the Bush Administration got a hold of it. When America was attacked on September 11th, 2001, the rest of the world wept with us as the victims of a terrible act of evil. The world was ready to help us in our war against the terrorists and help us to bring the perpatrators of that evil to justice. But we squandered that good will. We went to war in Iraq under false pretenses. We tortured, abused, and murdered innocent Muslim men and women at Guantanamo Bay, and in Iraq, and Afghanistan. We screwed up the post-war phase of the Iraq War with our incomeptence and arrogance and have created a chaotic conflict that has killed over 12,000 Iraqi civilians and 1,670 American military personnel and just seems to get worse and worse every day.
This didn't have to be. But an arrogant, spoiled, little rich boy who happens to be a dry drunk had to get his way on everything and now the country sits in a mess of its own making.
Please, America. Let's put a stop to this. Let's get these bastards. Let's frog-march Bush out of the White House and into his own prison cell for these high crimes and misdemeanors which are surely worse than anything done by Nixon.
Please.
The gist of the article is that Nixon would have gotten away with the Watergate burglary and cover-up if he had been president in 2005 because a Republican controlled Congress would refuse to hold hearings into the matter, the Conservative media would spin the Watergate investigation as a partisan lynching of Nixon, the Justice Department would have subpoened Woodward and Bernstein the way they have subpoened Judith Miller and Matthew Cooper in the Valerie Plame case, effectively shutting down the Washinton Post's Watergate coverage, and the Supreme Court would have split 5-4 along partisan lines in U.S. v. Nixon, allowing Nixon to burn the tapes rather than hand them over to investigators.
That is why it is so important that America return a Democratic majority to either the Senate or the House. Otherwise Bush, Cheney, Rummy, et al. are going to get away with everything - the lies in the lead-up to war, the partisan use of the terror alert system, the prison torture and abuse, the missing millions from the Iraq Reconstruction fund, the hiring of journalists and the planting of paid administration propaganda into the media. They'll get away with it all because no one will hold them accountable and the right-wing propaganda machine will be there to make excuses for the administration and attack anyone who does try to hold them accountable.
So please, America. Forget about the spin for just a few moments and remember what this nation used to be like before the thugs in the Bush Administration got a hold of it. When America was attacked on September 11th, 2001, the rest of the world wept with us as the victims of a terrible act of evil. The world was ready to help us in our war against the terrorists and help us to bring the perpatrators of that evil to justice. But we squandered that good will. We went to war in Iraq under false pretenses. We tortured, abused, and murdered innocent Muslim men and women at Guantanamo Bay, and in Iraq, and Afghanistan. We screwed up the post-war phase of the Iraq War with our incomeptence and arrogance and have created a chaotic conflict that has killed over 12,000 Iraqi civilians and 1,670 American military personnel and just seems to get worse and worse every day.
This didn't have to be. But an arrogant, spoiled, little rich boy who happens to be a dry drunk had to get his way on everything and now the country sits in a mess of its own making.
Please, America. Let's put a stop to this. Let's get these bastards. Let's frog-march Bush out of the White House and into his own prison cell for these high crimes and misdemeanors which are surely worse than anything done by Nixon.
Please.
