how you doin out there. Great, glad you could make it. Hey, listen...How's the missus? Great, wonderful, listen, um...
Hey, did you hear a pulitzer prize winning journalist just said he has two mid to high level CIA sources on tape saying that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a backdated document purporting to establish a link between Saddam and Mohammed Atta?
So, like, if all this stands up, all these people are going to jail. For serious. Because you know how with all those other scandals, there was some grey area? Tapped phone lines without FISA court approval? Constitutional prerogative of the executive. Pressured CIA over pre-war WMD intelligence? Thought you were right, wanted them to be right also. Exposed a CIA agent as retribution for unfavorable press coverage? Just trying to correct the misinformation that spin doctor Joe Wilson.
Told the CIA to forge a document purporting to establish a link between Atta and Saddam, years after the invasion? Not defensible. No grey area. No conceivable purpose except to deceive. No possible larger motive except crass political gain. No possible audience except American and world opinion.
This, not any of its predecessors, is the Bush Administration's Watergate. The Nixon Presidency was completely suffused with illegality, much of it obvious, and almost all of it had more serious consequences than the dirty tricks campaign. Watergate brought down Nixon because nobody can imagine a functioning democracy in which the executive can burglarize the headqaurters of his opposition. Because there is no grey area in burglary, because the only conceivable defense is denial. Because if there is any truth to it at all, someone has to go to jail. With forgery and burglary, res ipsa loquitor. This one is different, different legally and different politically, even if, as is likely, it cannot purge a sitting executive before the conclusion of his term. Different because, if proven, it will send extremely high ranking officials to jail, purge every artifact of the previous regime from all positions of influence, remind future leaders of the limits of their power, and bring the natural distrust of government to bear on the initiation of warfare. If this is true, the history of 2001-2005 will become alarmingly clear -- America was, in that brief period, despite all the trappings of a constitutional democracy, despite Chris Matthews speaking earnestly about the daily course of American politics, despite nifty electoral maps, despite a limited and cowering opposition, despite press briefings and war resolution debates, a different form of government.
If only it weren't August 2008... But the timing is a very good reason to think it might just be true.