Headline: Bush far worse than Nixon.
Not that we needed a veteran and famous ex-news reporter who broke his bones on Watergate to tell us this, but it’s always nice to see someone, anyone, from a former era of Presidential criminality and abuse of power speaking out against the current Liar-in-Chief (via Editor & Publisher):
Q. Finally, I just want to get your reflections on the [famously contentious] relationship of Richard Nixon and the press. … How does that compare to George W. Bush and the press?
BERNSTEIN: First, Nixon’s relationship to the press was consistent with his relationship to many institutions and people. He saw himself as a victim. We now understand the psyche of Richard Nixon, that his was a self-destructive act and presidency.
I think what we’re talking about with the Bush administration is a far different matter in which disinformation, misinformation and unwillingness to tell the truth — a willingness to lie both in the Oval Office, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in the office of the vice president, the vice president himself — is something that I have never witnessed before on this scale.
The lying in the Nixon White House had most often to do with covering up Watergate, with the Nixon administration’s illegal activities. Here, in this presidency, there is an unwillingness to be truthful, both contextually and in terms of basic facts that ought to be of great concern to people of all ideologies. …
This president has a record of dishonesty and obfuscation that is Nixonian in character in its willingness to manipulate the press, to manipulate the truth. We have gone to war on the basis of misinformation, disinformation and knowing lies from top to bottom.
That is an astonishing fact. That’s what this story is about: the willingness of the president and the vice president and the people around them to try to undermine people who have effectively opposed them by telling the truth. It happened with [Sen.] John McCain in South Carolina. It happened with [Sen.] John Kerry. It’s happened with [Sen.] Max Cleland in Georgia. It’s happened with many other people. That’s the real story, and that’s the story that [the press] should have been writing. …
The story the press should have been writing. Too bad, most of them valued their access to this corrupt administration and Republican politicians far more than they valued reporting the truth. Otherwise we might not have gotten this:
September 8, 2002
New York Times
U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts
By Michael R. Gordon and Judith MillerWASHINGTON, Sept. 7 – More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped.
Total fiction, of course. Made good copy, though. I wonder if Judy’s sold the movie rights yet?
