Deep Gloat

Bush faces his own Nixon moment

by Alan Bisbort

Source: Hartford Advocate, June 9, 2005.

To George W. Bush's increasing dismay, there are only so many Michael Jacksons and runaway brides to go around. As Our Fearless Leader pedals his Pee Wee Herman bike more maniacally than usual these days, he's in desperate need of another monumentally weird news story to distract the nation "bigtime," as Dick Cheney would say. His approval ratings are in the low 40s (in the 30s on Social Security); Iraq refuses to behave the way he fantasized it; Congress has defied him on stem cells and lunatic-fringe judges; John Bolton and his moustache are on ice; prisoners have been tortured on his watch; dead bodies are piled in mounds everywhere he looks.

Poor boy. It's a wonder he doesn't just hide out on his ranch with his pillow over his head blissfully ignoring reality the way he ignored classes at Yale, his military commitment, his failed businesses, even his baseball team. If things get any worse, he may have to rename his ranch NeverNeverLand and invite young boys in for sleepovers.

Barely having dipped his toe into the pond of his second term, GWB is already a lame duck. He'll be even lamer when the Democrats retake the Congress in 2006, at which point there's a remote possibility that, well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Which is why he doesn't need any monumentally weird news stories about Watergate hogging headlines in his lapdog press.

George W. Bush is facing his Nixon Moment. Indeed, the revelation of the identity of Deep Throat this past week was a national wake-up call. It was a reminder of just how far "investigative journalism" has fallen in this nation, where the best of that formerly celebrated breed are working at cartoon magazines (Sy Hersh at the New Yorker), as an exile in England (Greg Palast), as a satirist (Jon Stewart and The Daily Show) or wielding a camera (Michael Moore).

If a Deep Throat with close White House ties were today to funnel the truth to the press corps, half of the reporters would soil their britches in fright and the other half would run and rat him out to Massuh Rove. We got a glimpse of that dynamic when longtime White House insider — a Republican, no less — Richard Clarke spilled the beans on Bush's bungling the war on terror. Rather than address the issues of national importance Clarke raised in his book, the media focused on Clarke's "motives."

The dynamic was the same before the war began. Only a fool or blindly partisan hack thought attacking Iraq was justified. As Daily Kos notes, "The only thing surprising about the Iraq occupation is that it has so persistently mirrored what war critics predicted; a rapid military 'win,' followed by a Vietnam-like insurgency that bogs down U.S. forces and destabilizes any nascent attempts at self-government. That's not horn-tooting; anyone not fully under the spell of yay! war could see it coming ten miles off."

Yet, the media turned it into a he said/she said proposition. They presented, as "he said," the White House's insistence that Saddam had WMDs and posed an immediate threat to U.S. security, as well as the unchallenged innuendo that he had a connection to the terrorists that carried out the 9/11 attacks. On the "she said" side, you had Hans Blix, Scott Ritter, the United Nations, all of our traditional sissie allies and most of the rest of the world begging, cajoling, screaming NO.

Though one side was clearly lying — the very definition of high crimes and misdemeanors — their version was always given (more than) equal weight. In fact, the New York Times colluded with the lying side, via Judith Miller's criminally misleading reportage of Saddam's WMD cache, and Bob Novak was an outright accomplice to treason by revealing the name, at the White House's bidding, of an undercover CIA agent, compromising national security. Worst of all, Bob Woodward, one of the titans of Watergate, became George W. Bush's biggest wartime cheerleader.

So much for our press.

George W. Bush needs another runaway bride, not this collective gloating over Deep Throat. That's because Watergate equals impeachment. We don't want to be thinking impeachment right now. Why? Because no president in American history is more impeachable than George W. Bush. There has not been such high crimes and misdemeanors, such chicanery, manipulation, murder and looting since, well, ever. Nixon's crime was the cover up, not the initial act. Bush's crimes are so numerous that any cover up, including ones willingly aided by a national press obsessed with Michael Jackson's sexual psychosis and hillbilly brides, will ultimately fail.

It has been said that the six-year witch hunt of Bill Clinton was payback for Watergate. But, if indeed there is a predictable trajectory to our national Greek tragedy, the payback for Clinton will be an even bigger bitch.

Let the impeachment begin.

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reprinted from The Hartford Advocate