Monday, May 10, 2004

Worse than Watergate

Oh, much, much worse, Mr. Dean.

John Dean was a central figure in the fall of US president Richard Nixon. Now Dean believes the Bush presidency is even more flawed.

..."All Bush does is campaign and raise funds while Cheney runs the country. Cheney is so able and so shrewd that he lets George Bush wake up each morning thinking he is the President . . ."

...Thirty years later, he is the clarion with first-hand experience of a conservative Republican White House that systematically lied, who sees Nixonian parallels in the current White House: a belief that the national interest justifies deceit, suppressing information, subverting Congressional oversight and manipulating the media. Except that Dean regards the Bush White House as more dangerous and George Bush as the most insular, destructive and secretive American President in modern history.

...But [Dean's new book,] Worse Than Watergate is not an expose about a scandal like Watergate. It is not a book about one thing, the Iraq war. It is about the influence of money, a culture of secrecy, and the cover-up of the reasons for war.

...Worse Than Watergate, begins: "George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney have created the most secretive presidency of my lifetime. Their secrecy is far worse than during Watergate and it bodes even more serious consequences. Their secrecy is extreme — not merely unjustified and excessive but obsessive . . . It has given us a presidency that operates on hidden agendas. To protect their secrets, Bush and Cheney dissemble as a matter of policy. In fact, the Bush-Cheney presidency is strikingly Nixonian, only with regard to secrecy far worse . . . This administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous."

...He believes that the Bush Administration has so ruthlessly exploited the September 11 tragedy that, in the event of another deadly terrorist attack on American soil, "Bush and Cheney will simply push aside the Constitution they have sworn to uphold, inflame public passions with tough talk . . . and take this country to a place it has only been once. For 11 weeks during the onset of the Civil War, president Lincoln became what scholars have euphemistically called 'a constitutional dictator'."

Constitutional dictatorship. This is a grave claim...
  The Age article

But not an unrealistic one.

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