Bush copies Nixon model of an Imperial Presidency
December 7, 2002
By Bob Connors

The Bush Administration has been warned by the noble John Dean, who started the march toward truth in Watergate, that they are too closely following the Nixon model of an Imperial Presidency. The only other administration that tried to pretend they had no duties to comply with the Freedom of Information Act was Nixon�s who championed executive privilege defense that George W. Bush�s group is currently emulating. It is impossible to understand how his chief advisors, mostly failed old-dogs from bygone GOP Administrations, are still trying these subtle variations of the same time-tested, cynical ploys. The sheer magnitude of this is mind boggling. Nixon had eighteen minutes of a blank tape, but Cheney has 7,500 pages of documents related to the task force that he is trying to keep hidden. The transparent lie the White House is using is that if they submit to the wishes of the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, then confidential conversations with experts will become impossible. It flies in the face of the fact that just in the most previous administration, the Clinton Health reform task force, after a minimum of prodding, revealed everything that was required. This Cheney task force accepted the barest minimum of consultation with environmental concerns, while the big oil companies wrote the country�s energy policy.

Dean was underestimating this current group. From the Cheney mess, to the Harvey Pitts saga, to appointing that Reagan era king of perfidy, Poindexter, and the Nixon thug, Kissinger, who most of the world considers a war criminal, this current GOP group plays to win. Their goal is to get every last cent for their top 1% supporters, while they can, by whatever means necessary. They know that before too long the voters will gradually see that this group of thugs is imitating their mentors and fallen cohorts from the Nixon, Reagan, and Senior Bush Administrations. These mutts, realized they would have to learn some new tricks and they have some new interesting half truths as the rational for their mendacity.

Nixon tried to use executive privilege, and might have gotten away with his scams, until the tape with the missing 18 minutes and Dean surfaced. Reagan simply lied and said he wasn�t in the Iran-Contra loop. He knew that 41 would pardon all of them and he got Weinberger, Poindexter, everyone except North off. They had to have someone fall on the sword and North, as with Liddy in the Watergate mess, have been rewarded ten fold for their taking the temporary fall. When I see North on Fox TV with a show �Heroes of War� I wonder how can this be allowed to happen? How can these vicious villains pass off North as a wonderful war hero? Then I realize that the masses, the rural, uneducated, low-income white males, who make up the core of the red states that Bush Bush won, identify with their incurious, soul-mate Bush Junior. This fool, who proudly proclaimed that the �leader of the free world� doesn�t have to �do nuances� when ruinously fumbling the Mideast crisis, is someone that all of the uninterested voters in the red states can identify with. He is one of them and his advisor, Rove, knows how to get their votes. That is all that matters and with the recent revelations of how politics has driven policy as exposed in the John DiIulio letter to Esquire�s Ron Suskind should make us all fear that the worst is yet to come. If John DiIulio remembers and is justifiably terrified, about what happened to Mrs. Mitchell, among others who turned on Nixon, he had better take up residence in a concealed fortified bunker.

Anyone who took Psych 101 would recognize the Rove ploy. Maslow talked about the hierarchy of needs. First, and the need that had to be always addressed, is survival. Bush, in his cold-hearted 2002 campaign for Congress attacked Democrats as being in league with the terrorists. The most shocking example was how he attacked the war-hero Max Cleland as the evil GOP had pictures of Cleland being linked to bin laden. They had completed their research because earlier they had the same ad attacking Daschle. Junior Bush lied about Democrats because he knew that most of the people who he could sway would not do the research that shows that the Homeland Security bill that recently passed was originally proposed right after 9-11 by the Democrats. The GOP plan has always been to appeal to base desires of drooling fools in the electorate, not a reasoned presentation of their platforms. They draw in bigoted, gun-toting, old-fashioned, God fearing, lower-middle class voters with their policies to keep a segment of society in an even worse financial situation, by reducing the streams of money for domestic programs and increasing the budget exponentially for military campaigns. The model started with Reagan and the Bush puppet-master Rove has never let anyone in the GOP admit that many of the Reagan tax cuts were rescinded and that Reagan threw away giant sums of money for a failed �Star Wars�. Ironically, Bush is resurrecting that failure, even though recently the Naval Department abandoned as useless their missile-based defense system and proclaiming it as necessary in the war against terrorism. A few meek souls have spoken out and said that a missile-defense system would have done nothing to combat the terrorist of 9-11, but Bush control the media and the entire Government.