McClellan admission evokes memories of Nixon era

By DeWayne Wickham

This trail is starting to look familiar. When an excerpt from the soon-to-be-released book by former presidential press secretary Scott McClellan revealed that President Bush and Vice President Cheney instructed him to tell journalists that top White House aides played no role in the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson, I had an eerie feeling that the nation had been down this path before.

In discussing a 2003 press briefing during which he told reporters that Karl Rove, the president's political adviser, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, had nothing to do with the leak, McClellan says he was misled.

"There was one problem," he wrote of what he told journalists that day. "It was not true. I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff (Andrew Card) and the president himself," McClellan writes.

This blurb from What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and What's Wrong with Washington, is posted on the website of its publisher, Public Affairs Books.

We now know that Plame Wilson's identity as a CIA undercover operative was leaked to reporters by at least two Bush administration officials,...

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The seedy path taken by Bush's aides looks a lot like one taken by another White House.

In 1971, a group of advisers close to Richard Nixon decided to go after people they considered opponents of that Republican president. The people whose names made it onto that "opponents' list" were targeted for retribution in much the same way that the Bush administration went after Wilson. As Nixon White House counsel John Dean said at the time, "We can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." And, in fact, Nixon's henchmen tried to use the Internal Revenue Service to do just that.

Bush's minions took a similar road. They used information secretly gained from the CIA to strike at one of Bush's "enemies" — and to publicly use the president's press secretary to deny any role in this act of retribution.

When the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon in 1974 (he resigned before the full House could vote on the resolution), it accused him of, among other things, trying to misuse the IRS to attack his enemies — and using his subordinates to make "false or misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States" about the White House involvement...[Open in new window]

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Let's make it simple, shall we? THE SCUM SUCKING WEIRDOS IN THE BOOOSH ADMINISTRATION ARE WORSE THAN NIXON.

In some cases they're the same scum sucking weirdos.

Hopefully we're about to enter an era where 'Bush supporter' will be synonymous with 'stupid' in pop cultural parlance. That's pretty mild. 'Stupid' plus 'degenerate' is more to my liking. And more truthful.

It just blows my mind how stupid people are. My entire life has been haunted by these morons. I hate them...