Nixon's Empire Strikes Back

Nixon's Empire Strikes Back
>
> Excerpt: With perfect Nixonian pitch, Cheney
> remarked in 1976:
> "Principle is OK up to a certain point, but
> principle doesn't do any
> good if you lose." During the Iran-contrascandal
> Cheney, a Republican
> leader in the House of Representatives, argued that
> the congressional
> report denouncing "secrecy, deception and disdain
> for the law" was an
> encroachment on executive authority.
>
> One of the chief lessons learned from Nixon's demise
> was the necessity
> of muzzling the press. The Bush White House has
> neutralised the press
> corps and even turned some reporters into its own
> assets. The
> disinformation WMD in the rush to war in Iraq,
> funnelled into the news
> pages of the New York Times, is the most dramatic
> case in point. By
> manipulation and intimidation, encouraging
> atmosphere of
> self-censorship, the Bush White House has distanced
> the press from
> dissenting professionals inside the government.
>
> (I think almost the whole of the Bush
> administration's philosophy is
> contained in Cheney's telling quote above. They
> certainly don't want to
> be hampered by anything as unnecessary as principle.
> (!)
>
> And then, of course, we have the rest of their
> philosophy as revealed in
> an article
>
<http://cscs.umich.edu/%7Ecrshalizi/sloth/2004-10-16b.html>
>
> by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind
> that appeared in the
> October 17, 2004 New York Times Magazine and that
> deserves to be better
> known because of the light it sheds on the extent to
> which the current
> administration is ideologically driven. His article
> has this chilling
> anecdote:
>
> "In the summer of 2002, after I had written an
> article in Esquire
> that the White House didn't like about Bush's
> former communications
> director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a
> senior adviser to
> Bush. He expressed the White House's
> displeasure, and then he told
> me something that at the time I didn't fully
> comprehend - but which
> I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush
> presidency.
>
> "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what
> we call the
> reality-based community,' which he defined as
> people who 'believe
> that solutions emerge from your judicious study
> of discernible
> reality.' I nodded and murmured something about
> enlightenment
> principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
> 'That's not the way the
> world really works anymore,' he continued.
> 'We're an empire now, and
> when we act, we create our own reality. And
> while you're studying
> that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll
> act again, creating
> other new realities, which you can study too,
> and that's how things
> will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and
> you, all of you,
> will be left to just study what we do.'"
>
> What you have here is a world-view so arrogant that
> it believes that it
> has the power to create its own realities--and we,
> the people are "left
> to just study it." Goodbye, Constitution and Bill
> of Rights. Goodbye
> government of the people, by the people, for the
> people. We'll certainly
> miss you!)
>
> Nixon's empire strikes back
>
> Bush's imperial project has succeeded by learning
> the chief lesson of
> Watergate - muzzle the press.
>
> Sidney Blumenthal
> Thursday June 9, 2005
> The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk>
>
> The unveiling of the identity of Deep Throat - Mark
> Felt, the former
> deputy director of the FBI - seemed affirm the story
> of Watergate as the
> triumph of the lone journalist supported from the
> shadows by a magically
> appearing secret source. Shazam! The outlines of the
> fuller story we now
> know, thanks not only to Felt's selfunmasking but to
> disclosures the
> Albany Times Union of upstate New York, unreported
> so far by any major
> outlet. Felt was not working as "a disgruntled
> maverick ... but rather
> as the leader of a clandestine group" of three other
> high-level agents
> to control the story by collecting intelligence and
> leaking it. For more
> than 30 years the secrecy around Deep Throat
> diverted attention to who
> Deep Throat was rather than what Deep Throat was - a
> covertFBI operation
> in which Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward was
> almost certainly an
> unwitting asset.
>
> When FBI director J Edgar Hoover died on May 2 1972,
> Felt, who believed
> he should be his replacement, was passed over. The
> Watergate break-in
> took place a month later. As President Nixon sought
> to coerce the CIA
> and FBI to participate in his increasingly frantic
> efforts to obstruct
> justice, Felt, who had access to raw intelligence
> files, organised a
> band of his most trusted lieutenants and began
> strategic leaking. The
> Felt op, in fact, was part of a widespread revolt of
> professionals
> throughout the federal government against Nixon's
> threats to their
> bureaucratic integrity.
>
> Nixon's grand plan was to concentrate executive
> power in an imperial
> presidency, politicise the bureaucracyand crush its
> independence, and
> invoke national security to wage partisan warfare.
> He intended to
> "reconstitute the Republican party", staging a
> "purge" to foster "a new
> majority", as his aide William Safire wrote in his
> memoir. Nixon himself
> declared in his own memoir that to achieve his ends
> the "institutions"
> of government had to be "reformed, replaced or
> circumvented. In my
> second term I was prepared to adopt whichever of
> these three methods -
> or whichever combination of them - was necessary."
>
> But now George Bush is building a leviathan beyond
> Nixon's imagining.
> 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.
>
> The three main architects of Bush's imperial
> presidency gained their
> formative experience amid Nixon's downfall. Donald
> Rumsfeld, Nixon's
> counsellor, and his deputy, Dick Cheney, one after
> the other, served as
> chief of staff to Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford,
> both opposing
> congressional efforts for more transparency in the
> executive.
>
> With perfect Nixonian pitch, Cheney remarked in
> 1976: "Principle is OK
> up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any
> good if you lose."
> During the Iran-contrascandal Cheney, a republican
> leader in the House
> of Representatives, argued that the congressional
> report denouncing
> "secrecy, deception and disdain for the law" was an
> encroachment on
> executive authority.
>
> The other architect, Karl Rove, Bush's senior
> political aide, began his
> career as an agent of Nixon's dirty trickster Donald
> Segretti -
> "ratfuckers" as Segretti called his boys. At the
> height of the Watergate
> scandal, Rove operated through a phoney front group
> to denounce the
> lynch-mob atmosphere created in this city by the
> Washington Post and
> other parts of the Nixon-hating media".
>
> Under Bush, the Republican Congress has abdicated
> its responsibilities
> of executive oversight and investigation. When
> Republican senator John
> Warner, chairman of the armed services committee,
> held hearings on
> Bush's torture policy in the aftermath of the Abu
> Ghraib revelations,
> the White House set rabid House Republicans to
> attack him. There have
> been no more such hearings. Meanwhile, Bush insists
> that the Senate
> votes to confirm John Bolton as US ambassador to the
> UN while refusing
> to release essential information requested by the
> Senate foreign
> relations committee.
>
> One of the chief lessons learned from Nixon's demise
> was the necessity
> of muzzling the press. The Bush WhiteHouse has
> neutralised the press
> corps and even turned some reporters into its own
> assets. The
> disinformation WMD in the rush to war in Iraq,
> funnelled into the news
> pages of the New York Times, is the most dramatic
> case in point. By
> manipulation and intimidation, encouraging
> atmosphere of
> self-censorship, the Bush White House has distanced
> the press from
> dissenting professionals inside the government.
>
> Mark Felt's sudden emergence from behind the curtain
> of history evoked
> the glory days of the press corps and its modern
> creation myth. It was a
> warm bath of nostalgia and cold comfort.
>
> · Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to
> President Clinton and
> author of The Clinton Wars
>
>

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