June 2008: Grim Reaping

Newsboys hawking tabloid sheets
Posada's Popular Mexican Prints,Roberto Berdecio/Stanley Appelbaum

The canonization of Tim Russert begins June 13. Over the top, yes, but 100% predictable is the newstainment industry's wallow in the story–Russert was a big star, he was only in his 50s, his death was sudden.

But the public buys the late multi-millionaire's self-promotion as a regular guy. Just as they swallow the idea that Russert was the finest of journalists.

driftglass' assessment gets it right–

I have no standing to say a word about Tim Russert’s personal life, so I’m perfectly happy to assume that it was exemplary. Good husband, son, father, uncle and husband. Loyal friend. Picked up after his dog.

...But his professional life was another thing entirely, and no fire hose of laudatory prose from his peers -- however heartfelt -- with alter the fact that Russert was no pioneering journalist. Instead, he kept ferocious watch over the Beltway's Velvet Rope Line; keeping the Serious People Secure and In and the dirty fucking hippies Marginal and Out.

Week after week after week, Russert held his meaty thumb on the scale, insuring that only the Royalty of Bourgeois Centrism made it into the clubhouse.

driftglass covers the record on the "centrist" guests, and how the heaviest trend leans very much to the right. And his analysis of Russert's inteview technique finds that, "Russert did not practice journalism so much as he perfected a new infotainment magic trick to take the place of journalism."

Which leads driftglass to pose some questions—

So...how many important national stories were ever rooted out and broken on Meet the Press? (And no, "being forced to testify about your own ignominious role in a major national security scandal" does not qualify as "breaking" a story. Neither does "acting as a launch pad for Administration Trial Balloons")

How many traitorous douchebags were ever brought to book by a Russert journalistic crusade?

In a country where Russert is held out as the ne plus ultra of his profession, has the Mainstream Media been doing a consistently better or worse job of ferreting out the Truth over these last twenty years?

Take a wild guess: Have Americans grown more or less ignorant?

And after more of a look at Russert's record—

So, Washington insider...
Boy from Buffalo...
Network Vice President...

In the end, perhaps we can agree that Tim Russert was a Man of Many Names.

But "journalist" really wasn’t one of them.

Then a true reporter on America departed the scene, when George Carlin died on the 22nd.

Someone who couldn't have been more unlike a corporate spokesman, speaking out as he did against corporate media and the interests they represent. And, someone who said, "The owners of this country know the truth: It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

A line that was much quoted in the better obituaries, like John Nichols'piece, George Carlin: American Radical. There's a lot on video, but a good segment is The Owners of America.

And in metaphorical deaths this month,

House Approves Unconstitutional Surveillance Legislation

driftglass on this–No Country for Old Rights–

...our most fundamental rights to privacy are traded away for votes like baseball cards and, under a sinister bargain struck between the leaders of the Party of Darkness and the Party of Weakness, absolution will be granted to the Peeping Telcoms before a single trial has even been held, or a single word of testimony has been taken under oath.

A crime has been committed here.

A crime against our Constitution.

A crime whose seriousness and scale dwarfs the offenses that drove Nixon to resign, and yet a crime that fades into the crowd when considered alongside all of those other acts of barbarism and betrayal that have been the hallmark of Conservative rule in America.

A crime for which no one will be held responsible, just as before. As the Iran-Contra investigation was thwarted by the alliance between political power and the media, and

...as we watched the Conservative traitors drive away in limousines, laughing at our quaint belief in the Rule of Law, we swore – we swore! – we would never let it happen again.

June 2007: Makeover

The Office of the Chairman returns to its original space, after a three month redo.

It's been an even longer saga. Before work could begin, there were several months of meetings between Dr. G. Zuss and interior decorators. They brought sample after sample, in a procession much like one of hapless subjects bringing offerings to placate a jaded king. As Dr. G. Zuss is so keen on "our corporate branding," no detail of wall treatment or furniture selection was too small for his scrutiny and thumbs down or up.

Now we're surrounded by the results: dark red walls and blonde furniture. People from around the Department make sure they are seen stopping by to ooh and ahh over how bright and shiny. The luckiest do it when The Decorator-in-Chief is around, so as to note they've paid tribute. Even so, a couple of dissidents have whispered to me, "it kind of clashes, doesn't it?"

Then there's the day the boss compliments Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant on the red dress she's wearing—for coordinating with his decor!

Actually, what she wore clashed badly with the wall. Perhaps he suffers from color-blindness; it would explain his paint choice.

Jesus' BAA—need I say?—was as close to Rapture™ as could be. After all, the boss may not be Jesus, but he is her worldly master, so his praise is next best. Despite that excitement, J's BAA thought fast! "Dr. Schmoe's Assistant and I have been saying: we need a clothing budget, so we can be appropriate for the improvements!"

Quick thinking pays off, and the great man laughs.

Having made a funny, Jesus' BAA repeats it to any and all admin assistant types who enter the room. After quoting herself, she pauses to say, "I'm joking." And just to prove it: she pauses again, to rev up to just-a-notch-below-hysteria level of laughter. And once she gets that started, she takes it for a lengthy spin...

I have to hear this process repeated the rest of the goddamn day. And no doubt, for however long I will work in this room...

A big feature of the remodel is that Cruella has maneuvered an early move to an office of her own, where she begins "my new role"—no longer supervising lowlife secretaries, but instead serving as HR officer for faculty.

She summonsed me to her new space, to say, "You will be returning—temporarily" to the throne room. Then I will be moved somewhere else, or perhaps be sacked, she doesn't know which. In any case, someone else (she doesn't know who) needs to take over my current job.

Cruella presents final decisions as to be made by a new Department Administrator; another part of the redo is that Ghengis will "retire" (meaning only that he won't be here full-time).

Plans to kick me out the door are of course Cruella's doing. She detects an insufficient degree of servility and fawning, and before she left the immediate premises, she wanted to curry favor with Dr.G. Zuss by lining things up to replace me with someone better at servility and fawning. As always, she came up with a lame cover story no one can seriously be expected to believe.

But not having to inhabit the same space as Cruella is already a big improvement. Now, if we pass in the hall she doesn't acknowledge my existence. Nice that there seems to be no further interaction ever required.

Ghengis, however, is still very much with us. The day of the move, he called together the remaining servant class—Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant and me. First thing he has to say: "We'll have to be very careful about what we place on furniture surfaces."

Meaning: the master's surroundings are not to be sullied by our return to that space, so we'd better get ourselves there without any visible signs of a move (e.g., cartons). By teleportation, then? Technology would not seem to be keeping up with what would best please Dr. G. Zuss.

Ghengis also means that, although we're expected to order and receive purchases for the whole Department, packages must be invisible until someone bothers picking them up. This is a new extreme of the usual expectation that the womenfolk work non-stop at doing the bidding of all, while also letting no piece of paper mar the pristine orderliness of their desks.

Next, Ghengis informs us to prepare for an immanent Big Announcement on permissible décor for staff. It seems soon Our Leader will promulgate a new policy: that personal photos and decorations are not to be displayed.

Cynical as I am, even I find this surprising. I've lived with micromanaging of the executive suite for nearly three years, as is only to be expected in such a pompous hierarchy. But suddenly, they intend telling several hundred people to spend their lives at the office, without being allowed so much as a picture of the kids on their desks! Isn't that a big thing keeping the workforce under control—that they display the family photos to keep reminding themselves of why they have to be there? And they post official Office Humor, of the "Dilbert" ilk. Those are small enough safety valves, and meant so employees don't do anything rash, like try to unionize, or show up with an AK-47...

Personally, I would never dream of displaying pictures or anything the least bit personal—not the way I spend 40 hours a week trying to divorce myself emotionally from this environment. Still, it's rather astounding that even a control freak on the level of Dr. G. Zuss would go against something so sacred.

Not to mention—if you dare gaze upon his office, what's the first thing you will see? A display of his family photos!

Well, word starts to get around, and it seems the mutterings are bad enough to cause Dr. G. Zuss to back off. So far, no staff have been separated from the grand-kids' photos and desktop teddy bears.

While The Leader of our Department appears to give up one of his schemes for combined interior design and behavior modification, the Homeland's Leader faces no interference in his Extreme Makeover project.

About the ongoing remake of our most basic principles, Hilzoy notes that this month—

...six human rights groups released a report (pdf) on 39 people who they think the US government might be holding in undisclosed locations, and whose location is presently unknown. (Thus, they are not counting anyone known to be at Guantanamo or Bagram; just people who are missing.) That we have disappeared anyone is shocking, and a violation of treaties we have signed and ratified.

This report has gotten a fair amount of play, but in all the coverage I've read, only the Philadelphia Inquirer has mentioned what is, to me, the most awful allegation: that we disappeared young children...

In a noble effort by some American kids, Presidential Scholars Tell the President 'No' on Torture, presenting him with a letter to say—

"As members of the Presidential Scholars class of 2007, we have been told that we represent the best and brightest of our nation. Therefore, we believe we have a responsibility to voice our convictions. We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants."

In response, whitehouse.org reports: President Graciously Responds to Retarded Anti-Torture Ramblings of Insolent Teenaged Nerds.

June 2006 (II): 666

That is, calendar date 06-06-06. pennypostcards.com

Which soon was followed by an anti-climactic 06-07-06.

Perhaps some fundies were quietly raptured away, or at least went into hiding on the 6th. As far as I can tell, though, it was just another day in another month and year, here in the world Cheneybush hath wrought.

Responding to the suicides of three Guantanamo detainees, camp commander Rear Admiral Harry Harris

...said he did not believe the men had killed themselves out of despair.

"They are smart. They are creative, they are committed," he said.

"They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

A Tiny Revolution notes Other Ways They Are Waging Asymmetrical Warfare Against Us. Including such clever subterfuges as, Not Being A Terrorist, and, Being [a civilian] 4 Years Old.

The Homeland's Leader has been plagued by asymetrical terroristic disrespect from people like the wheelchair-bound man who did not rise in Dear Leader's presence.

This month, it's terroristic wearing of sunglasses, by a blind reporter.

Digby last month, after the wheelchair incident—

There's an interesting simple psychology involved in such things. If someone can coerce those in a group to help him attack a single member they become his accomplices. For instance, getting everybody in the press corps to laugh at a reporter's baldness makes those reporters part of the president's gang. And, of course, it intimidates them. If they stray, they too will be subject to that kind of public humiliation. It's the evil fratboy theory of social relations, very primitive stuff. That Bush may be reduced to plying this unconsciously with senior citizens in wheelchairs is not surprising, given his poll numbers.

Back on 666 day, Dave Neiwert pointed to "The targets of the psy war"—the targets being the American public. The media serving to "catapult" the administration's propaganda.

Neiwert quotes Craig Unger—

For more than two years it has been widely reported that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of intelligence failures. But in fact it is far more likely that the Iraq war started because of an extraordinary intelligence success—specifically, an astoundingly effective campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, which led the White House, the Pentagon, Britain’s M.I.6 intelligence service, and thousands of outlets in the American media to promote the falsehood that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear-weapons program posed a grave risk to the United States.

Unger interviewed former intelligence and military analysts who had worked in a variety of agencies, and "at least nine of these officials believe that the Niger documents were part of a covert operation to deliberately mislead the American public."

Unger's sources, says Neiwert, confirm "from the inside [what] some of us observed from the outside fairly early on," that—

...The entire meaning of the Iraq war -- and by extension, the "war on terrorism" -- is inextricably bound up in the psychological manipulation of the voting public through a relentless barrage of propaganda.

This is why the both the runup to the war and its subsequent mishandling have been so replete with highly symbolic media events -- many of them played repeatedly on nightly newscasts -- that have proven so hollow at their core, from the declarations of imminent threat from Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, to phony images of Saddam's statue being torn down, to flyboy antics aboard airline carriers, to meaningless "handovers" of power. It also explains why certain important and humanizing symbols of wartime -- civilian casualties, the returning flag-draped coffins -- have been so notably absent from our views of the war.

The role of the media in this manipulation cannot be understated. The abdication of the media's role as an independent watchdog and its whole subsumation as a propaganda organ bodes ill for any democracy, because a well-informed public is vital to its functioning.

Hell being co-workers, no special date is needed. For that matter, the fundies at work don't talk specifically about the EndTimes™ stuff, although they no doubt fall for it. Instead, what I generally have to hear is inane conversation about whatever comes up in the course of the work day.

Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant phoned the faculty secretaries to ask what each of their bosses wants to drink with a lunch she's planning. When one of the faculty happened to walk in, she asked him directly. The answer: "A sweet German white would be good!"

Jesus' BAA waits for him to leave, takes a deep breath, then asks Cruella: "What's a sweet German white?"

Cruella—unhesitating expert on all subjects—shoots back, "A coffee drink!" A fraction of a second later: "No! It's a beer!"

It must be painful for Jesus' BAA to be Cruella's subordinate, rather than being the ordained authority herself. And Cruella is never more sure of herself than when she's inventing a snap answer to something she knows nothing about. Jesus' BAA has her peculiar mentality of aspiring to reach the top of the Administrative Assistant heap,while also being so unacquainted with ungodly, worldly things that she cannot understand a mild joke from a faculty guy. Yet, she does so want to Improve Herself into understanding what faculty are talking about. On the other hand, who knows if she wants to understand such talk mainly to learn what forces in need of conversion she is up against.

Getting started on this topic leads to another notable date this month: 6/16, when a non-faculty staffer stopped by on some business or other.

His usual topic of discussion with Cruella and Jesus' BAA is American Idol, but that's over for the season. Now, this guy is so completely deadpan that I can't know for certain about what follows. Though it's possible he's genuinely reaching for a topic, he sure seems to be baiting the most unlikely of persons. Either way, he asks Jesus' BAA if she realizes that today is Bloomsday? And—cherry on top!—has she ever read Ulysses?

That line cannot be topped for this month. Anyway, in another week Jesus' BAA is at away at Camp Su-Mo-Fo. In her absence, there's a surrogate provider of daily annoyance.

Red State Girl is forever trying to browbeat secretaries into crowning her Social Director. This time around, it's this e-mail—

Thursday June 29th GIRLS NIGHT OUT!!! Please let me know if you are going so I can make reservations at Olive Garden right after work or 5:00 pm. For anyone interested I still have not seen The Breakup with Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston so perhaps a movie after.

Hope to see you all!

Clever sister responds:

Yuummmm!
Olive Garden!!!!!!
Eyetalyan food!!!!
Can we go ?

Sure—to CS it might be a bit of amusing tourism, but I'm stuck spending my days with these people. Anyhow, GIRLS NIGHT OUT soon is cancelled, due to lack of interest.

Later the same day...(the demands never end). From the subject line, I thought Red State Girl was going into competition with Jesus' BAA and her camp crafts—

Date: 6/22/2006 1:33 PM
Subject: Egg Cartons

My nephews are raising Rhode Island Red and another variety of laying hens, 20 in all and will be selling brown eggs for 4H. They will need lots of egg cartons because these hens can lay 2 or more eggs a day each...

So I have been asked if I could collect egg cartons...Just drop them on my desk if I am not there.

Thank you in advance!

Clever Sister:

it will cost her if she wants any damm egg cartons from me!

June 2006 (I): Wedding Bells

The pealing of the bells is preceded by the trawling for gifts. The e-mail from from Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant to the Department's womenfolk—

You are invited to a bridal shower on behalf of my future daughter in law, Elly May Xxxxx, on July 8, 2006 at 2:00 pm. Please see the flyer attached for further information.

Elly May will be registered at WalMart, Sears, and Jethro's * in the next few days.

[*Not the real name of this boondocks store, but it gets the feel. No doubt it'll be ideal for Elly May to get her some purty thangs, and pick up pig slopping supplies, in one easy trip.]

Your RSVP is appreciated to assist in planning for the shower.

I wanted to invite you as my friends, but understand if you are unable to participate.

I hope to see you there!

I'm forced to dignify this with a reply, as she seems not to have noticed in almost two years that I don't speak to her unless it is absolutely unavoidable.Does she think I am her "friend," because I'm forced into proximity five days a week? Or is she just dazzled by visions of Walmart bounty?

Clever Sister says

The registrations are open -- just go to the web page & look up the name. So we could have some fun.

Or, should I want to ingratiate myself, CS suggests giving the bride her very own Seen-On-TV non-stick JesusPan.

As to the sudden wedding preparations for Sonny, Jr. and intended, she had moved in with the family. Jesus' BAA had been home schooling Elly May for a high school equivalency—or, as Jesus' BAA put it—for her degree. Then the scholar became with child...

In the photo I've been shown, Elly May looked pretty lumpy even before the pregnancy. Certainly, nothing like the idealized little brides of Jesus' BAA's flyer. And that multiple bride clip art seems a bit kinky—perhaps even Mormon?

Ghengis' copy of Newsweek arrives. Only 20 years late—

Susan Faludi in Backlash (1991) cited the Newsweek story, both as spurious information used to manipulate women, and as example of how phony data is spread by multiple sources once it's been foisted on the public. On page 100—

...Maybe Newsweek was only trying to be metaphorical, but the terrorist line got repeated with somber literalness in many women's magazines, talk shows, and advice books...A former Newsweek bureau intern who was involved in the story's preparation later explains how the terrorist analogy wound up in the magazine: "What happened is, one of the bureau reporters was saying it as a joke—like, 'Yeah, a woman's ore likely to get bumped off by a terrorist'—and next thing we knew, one of the writers in New York took it seriously and it ended up in print."

Recalling this story over the last five years, I've been stuck by how in 1986 Newsweek used "killed by a terrorist" as shorthand for a statistically unlikely event. The magazine was selling fear, to be sure, but it was a very different fear from what's sold now.

After September 11, 2001, "killed by a terrorist" was made into code signaling the opposite of rarity—now, of course, we're meant to expect that a terrorist can lurk under any bed, and that the entire populace are potential victims.

And in a shotgun ceremony, the entire populace was joined together a union of fear with the political agenda of a radical regime.

Newsweek and the rest gave their blessings to that marriage. And continue to show make no show of saying, "we were wrong." Unless it will be a mild statement too many decades later to matter.

June 2005: Impeachable Offenses, Old And New

(Image: salon.com)
Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant is away for a week this month, overseeing the craft-making and Christian Discipline of her deaf/developmentally disabled campers.

Cruella comes up with daily reasons for leaving early: she has to play golf; there's roadwork on her route; she's having guests for dinner. She slaps down any notion of taking time off that I might have, but at least most days this summer I get rid of her by 3:30.

Early in the month, the media are full of "The Real Deep Throat" stories, after the May 31st confirmation that Mark Felt, the era's Deputy FBI Director, was the Woodward-Bernstein source. And most of the stories are predictably full of self-congratulatory visions of heroic Journalism rooting out The Truth.

This storyline is countered by the usual independents. In a succinct piece, Sidney Blumenthal ties together the major threads of the Nixon project of creating an imperial presidency and Republican majority—a project interrupted by Watergate, then resumed a quarter-century later:

...The Bush presidency is the highest stage of Nixonism. The commander-in-chief has declared himself by executive order above international law, the CIA is being purged, the justice department deploying its resources to break down thewall of separation between church and state, the Environmental Protection Agency being ordered to suppress scientific studies and the Pentagon subsuming intelligence and diplomacy, leaving the US with blunt military force as its chief foreign policy.

Blumenthal points to the Nixonian origins of Bush's presidency. Two of the chief architects being former Nixon lieutenants—Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney—who learned during Watergate "the necessity of muzzling the press." And the other is Karl Rove, who got his start in politics working for Nixon's chief of political dirty tricks, Donald Segretti.

Joe Conason covers similar ground, as well as touching on the media landscape then and now:

By the time Nixon was forced to resign or face impeachment in 1974, the great majority of citizens understood that this president and his mafia had perverted the electoral process, the law enforcement system and government itself in a manner the nation had not seen before.

Conason notes how the post-Watergate right-wing media machine enables endless attempts to rewrite the Nixon history. But Rove doesn't have to expend his own energy on this project—"He is too busy wreaking Nixon's revenge on the rest of us."

Robert Parry outlines The Real Lessons of Watergate:

As the Washington Post again basks in the faded glory of its Watergate coverage, many of the scandal’s crucial lessons remain obscure...

Indeed, it could be said that today’s U.S. political imbalance...derived from the simple fact that conservatives learned the real lessons of Watergate while the liberals didn’t.

Most importantly, the bitter experience of Watergate taught the conservatives the need to control the flow of information at the national level.

Parry points to how the right-wing media juggernaut was created over more than three decades. And how it's been used to intimidate journalists, who've become accomplices in covering up government wrongdoing.

All of which leads to our current sad state. Geov Parrish:

I have a three-word response to the media frenzy that followed Tuesday's revelation of the long-secret identity of Deep Throat.

Downing Street Memo.

... It's hard not to contrast the frenzy that greeted the revelation of a 30-year-old secret with the thudding indifference US media has given the Downing Street Memo. The memo has scarcely been mentioned in the country's leading newspapers, and has been completely ignored by evening network news.

Parrish goes on to describe our current pathetic situation, where outlets won't invest time in money in investigative journalism, and especially want to avoid stories that could brand them as "liberal."

We now know the identity of Deep Throat. Fine. But take a moment to mourn the fact that the courage and integrity displayed by Deep Throat would not be possible today, because there is nobody, in our country's major media, willing to hear such secrets. Without that, we've lost an essential tool for accountability of our country's highest powers.

The career rewards of laboring to prove lack of "liberal bias" is demonstrated a couple weeks later by Dana Milbank. The Washington Post—so happy to congratulate itself for its Watergate coverage of long ago—ran the piece mocking House Democrats as "taking a trip to the land of make-believe"—

They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.

Rep. John Conyers Jr....banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman."

Milbank's piece, which purports to describe "a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war," has to be read to fully appreciate its smarminess. And the June 16th event that prompted Milbank's sneering? It came about because our Supreme Soviet of a Republican Congress prevents Democrats from holding hearings .

Just as on June 17th—the day Milbank's mocking column ran—Judiciary Commissar James Sensenbrenner shut down a meeting

...where Republicans and Democrats were supposed to be debating the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act and [Sensenbrenner]walked out in response to Democratic members raising issues regarding human rights violations at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay and the ongoing Iraq war. He ordered the court reporter to halt transcriptions of the proceedings, C-SPAN cameras covering the meeting be shut off, and that discussion on the issue be halted. Sensenbrenner defended his actions by claiming that the Democrats and witnesses had repeatedly violated House rules in discussing issues he believed to be unrelated to the subject of the meeting. His abrupt walkout was contrary to House parliamentary procedure, which is to adjourn either on motion or without objection.

[Account above is part of the Wikipedia entry on Sensenbrenner, under the heading, "Legislative record and stance on issues"]

Greg Mitchell responds to Milbank's version of Conyers' hearing attempt—

[Milbank] seems less interested in the far more serious "make-believe" that inspired the basement session: the administration's fake case for WMDs in Iraq that has already led to the deaths of over 1,700 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis. No, Milbank used the valuable real estate of the Post -- its only coverage of the event -- to mock Rep. John Conyers, who arranged the meeting, and his "hearty band of playmates."

This fun-loving "band" included a mother who had lost her son in Iraq.

Mitchell goes on to connect Milbank's piece with another bit of "humor" greatly enjoyed by the DC media: Bush's "WMD joke," made at the March 2004 Radio and TV Correspondents dinner.

Meanwhile, the story behind the rush to war continues to be covered in Britain. From Michael Smith, who broke the Downing Street memo [DSM] story, we have Ministers were told of need for Gulf war 'excuse'—

Ministers were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair’s inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was "necessary to create the conditions" which would make it legal.

This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.

The briefing paper was distributed to Blair's inner circle at the July 2002 meeting, the DSM itself being meeting minutes written up afterwards.

Thom Hartmann, goes farther back—to 1999, when Bush told his biographer that if he became president, he would invade Iraq for "political capital...to get everything passed that I want to get passed..."

And while justification was being manufactured in 2002, US and British planes were being used to violate Iraqi airspace—beginning the invasion, even before the regime had made a show of going before Congress or the UN.

And with Bushco's wars being fought to the profit of well-connected private contractors, the enormity of opportunities for rewarding cronies is now beyond anything Nixon could ever have imagined.

All of the above being stories the major media mostly choose to ignore. Parts of the media may congratulate themselves on an old self-image of having stood up to Nixon, but their current state only means that Nixon really has won his revenge—thanks to the members of his administration who have gone on to run the country, through the offspring of that old protege, George Herbert Walker Bush.