Could a “Deep Throat” Mark Felts; exist today in the Bush era? It is doubtful that it would be possible given the unchallenged power this administration wields. If you thought Nixon was the worst president to form an imperial presidency and force all supposed independent government agencies like the CIA/ FBI to bow to the executive branch of government think twice. What Nixon couldn’t do “w” has done. Bureaucratic independence and integrity has never been at this low level in the modern history of our republic. Nixon’s grand plan was to concentrate executive power in an imperial presidency, politicize the bureaucracy and crush its independence, and invoke national security to wage partisan warfare. According to William Saffire, Nixon wanted to reshape the Republican Party by forging a purge in the government and press. Nixon himself declared in his own memoir that to achieve his ends the “institutions of government had to be “reformed, replaced, or circumvented. The end justifies the means. I think we all know what he meant by circumvent. He established his own secret police which broke into and spied on his political enemies. Only because some brave government employees leaked this plot to the press did his lies and plans come to public knowledge. The rest was history and our republic survived and was stronger as a result of the proper balance of power between all branches of government and the press. All that has changed since Bush has been in office.
One month before the Watergate break-in J. Edger Hoover died and Nixon feared no one in the Federal government. It was his for the taking and he tried. Now George Bush is building anything beyond what Nixon imagined. Today Bush has declared himself by executive order above international law, the CIA is being purged, the Justice Department is breaking down the wall of separation of Church and State, the EPA suppresses scientific studies, and the Pentagon destroyed intelligence and diplomacy, leaving the U.S. with only blunt military force as its chief foreign policy. The three main architects of Bush’s imperial presidency came from the Nixon white house. Donald Rumsfield and his deputy, Dick Cheney, served as chief of staff to Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford. Cheney remarked in 1976, “Principle is OK up to a point. It doesn’t help if you lose.” During the Iran Contra treason of Reagan’s years, Cheney said any Congressional oversight of the presidency was an encroachment on executive authority. Does that sound familiar today? Remember secret intelligence on exactly the location of Iraqi WMD, the connection of Saddam with 911 and energy meetings with oil executives to mention but a few. Carl Rove was another player that cut his teeth during the Nixon era. He was an agent of Nixon dirty trickster Donald Segretti. Today the Republican Congress has essentially abdicated its responsibilities of presidential oversight. I wonder why they didn’t take that position when Clinton was president.
Nixon learned the necessity of muzzling the press. Today the white house has neatly neutralized the press corps and used some gay prostitute conservative partisan journalists for their own assets. All the lies concerning weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s so called involvement in 911 was funneled into the press from the main stream press of NBC, CBS and ABC to FOX news on the right. What we have in the press today is much like Russia’s press, a propaganda machine controlled by the administration in power. We’ve come a long way baby, since Nixon, and the scary thing is the public doesn’t really care. When these abuses of power are ignored and the balance of power shifts to this extreme can the demise of our democratic republic be far behind?