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.