Hullabaloo

Thursday, July 03, 2008

 
Nixon vs Bush

by digby

Swopa, writing over at FDL, has some thoughts on this discussion among bloggers today about why Bush didn't get run out of town on a rail for doing many of the things that Nixon did.

Swopa points out that Kevin Drum's explanation, that Nixon did what he did for petty political reasons while Bush did it out of ideology (the prerogatives of the executive branch during wartime), is incorrect, explaining that Nixon had the same ideological underpinnings.

The whole "unitary executive" claptrap and all the other pseudo-ideological manure put out by the Bushites is simply a flimsy fig leaf over the kind of naked power grab Nixon thought was his right (indeed, Kevin seems to have forgotten that Tricky Dick tried to use "national security" as an excuse, too).

The difference now is that the petty political vendettas pursued by Nixon have been raised to the level of ideology by the modern GOP. Unrestrained use of power for its own sake is their sine qua non, their raison d'etre (and probably a bunch of other foreign phrases, too).

The other day I actually excerpted the passage of the interview where Nixon asserted "if the president does it, it's not illegal" and he uses nearly the exact language the Bush administration has used. Swopa is quite correct that the petty political vendettas pursued by Nixon are now ideology, but we have quite a few examples of petty political vendettas pursued for just plain old poltical gain.

Nixon didn't have the Democratic national Committee offices bugged out of personal pique. He wanted to spy on his opponents during an election campaign to gain an advantage. I don't think there's any substantial difference between that and trying to force US Attorneys to indict political opponents on bogus charges of voter fraud or ginning up phony scandals to derail the political careers of Democrats. It's all ratfucking. And Karl Rove, the student of Nixon and Atwater, was at the heart of most of it.

Do you remember this?

Bush administration targets sources, reporters under espionage laws

By Dan Eggen
March 4, 2006

The Bush administration, seeking to limit leaks of classified information, has launched initiatives targeting journalists and their possible government sources. The efforts include several FBI probes, a polygraph investigation inside the CIA and a warning from the Justice Department that reporters could be prosecuted under espionage laws.

In recent weeks, dozens of employees at the CIA, the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies have been interviewed by agents from the FBI’s Washington field office, who are investigating possible leaks that led to reports about secret CIA prisons and the NSA’s warrantless domestic surveillance program, according to law enforcement and intelligence officials familiar with the two cases.

Numerous employees at the CIA, FBI, Justice Department and other agencies also have received letters from Justice prohibiting them from discussing even unclassified issues related to the NSA program, according to sources familiar with the notices. Some GOP lawmakers are also considering whether to approve tougher penalties for leaking.

Here's a little something you might not remember:

THE BUSH administration’s warrantless wiretapping program may have shocked and surprised many Americans when it was revealed in December, but to me, it provoked a case of deja vu.

The Nixon administration bugged my home phone – without a warrant – beginning in 1973, when I was on the staff of the National Security Council, and kept the wiretap on for 21 months. Why? My boss, national security advisor Henry Kissinger, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover believed that I might have leaked some information to the New York Times. When I left the government a few months later and went to work on Edmund Muskie’s presidential campaign (and began actively working to end the war in Vietnam), the FBI continued to listen in and made periodic reports on everything it heard to President Nixon and his closest associates in the White House.

Recent reports that the Bush administration is monitoring political opponents who belong to antiwar groups also sounded familiar to me. I was, after all, No. 8 on Nixon’s “enemies list” – a curious compilation of 20 people about whom the White House was unhappy because they had disagreed in some way with the administration.

The list, compiled by presidential aide Charles Colson, included union leaders, journalists, Democratic fundraisers and me, among others, and was part of a plan to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies,” as presidential counsel John Dean explained it in a 1971 memo. I always suspected that I made the list because of my active opposition to the war, though no one ever said for sure (and I never understood what led Colson to write next to my name the provocative words, “a scandal would be helpful here”).

As I watch the Bush administration these days, it’s hard not to notice the clear similarities between then and now. Both the Nixon and Bush presidencies rely heavily on the use of national security as a pretext for the usurpation of unprecedented executive power. Now, just as in Nixon’s day, a president mired in an increasingly unpopular war is taking extreme steps, including warrantless surveillance, that many people believe threaten American civil liberties and violate the Constitution. Both administrations shroud their actions in secrecy and attack the media for publishing what they learn about those activities.

This is why FISA matters. We just don't know what happened and because of their history, we have every reason to suspect that these powers were used for political purposes under the guise of national security. And with Telcom Immunity, we will have foreclosed the most likely avenue for finding out.(Clearly, the politicians don't have the political will...)

And frankly, the more these politicians insist, for dubious and unpersuasive reasons, that this program must be swept under the rug, the more imperative it seems to me to find out what's being swept under with it.


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digby 7/03/2008 04:30:00 PM |