Getting the Government

“...that they pretty much deserve” – Mark Twain

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
6/21/08

It wasn’t until years after, when he was already dead and unlikely to make another political comeback, that we learned that Richard Nixon knew of the Watergate break-in at the time that it occurred, and perhaps prior.

It didn’t matter, not only because Nixon was dead, but because he had already been forced from office. He got the boot, not for complicity in the break-in, but for covering up and lying about it afterward.

At the start, it really wasn’t all that serious a crime. Nobody got killed, nothing of great value was destroyed, and in the end, the perpetrators didn’t even steal anything of political value.

But Nixon covered it up, and lied about it. This was a time of a stronger, more resolute America, a time when Republicans weren’t just complete third rate fucking whores, and so it wound up driving him from office.

Scott McClellan gave his testimony, and despite the third rate fucking whore Republicans on the committee who sneered that he was a Judas for putting his country ahead of his party (for a good time, call the Honorable Texas Rep. Lamar Smith), and the third rate fucking whores in the mainstream media such as Time Magazine, which tried to dismiss the testimony as “summer theater,” it was damning.

Putsch, McClellan believes, didn’t know about the Valerie Plame leak at the time. He learned about it quickly enough, and moved quickly to protect the guilty, including, McClellan believes, Vice President Dick Cheney (R-Complete Fucking Whores).

It’s too early to tell if there’s much of anything of the type of America that still existed in the 1970s left or not. The problem, of course, is that Republicans don’t have a monopoly on being compete fucking whores, as witness the shameful Democratic sellout on the FISA vote in the House this week. For those whose “news” consists of updates on the status of Tiger Woods’ knee and Tim Russert (this just in: he’s still dead), Congress decided to let the corporations such as AT&T and Verizon off the hook for illegally spying on Americans on behalf of the Republicans, in return for a promise from the GOP that they would obey the laws that they have, so far, been ignoring. Complete Fucking Whore Nancy Pelosi (D-Republican) is expected to show up with an umbrella and bowler hat at any time and announce that she believes it will be peace in our time.

So. The Republicans are complete fucking whores who put party ahead of country. The Democrats, with some exceptions, are compete fucking whores who are bought out cowards, or simply cowards who are hoping to be bought out. And the media was bought out so long ago that most people today don’t realize that “Network” wasn’t a documentary when it was shot, and when they aren’t praising one another beyond farce, they assure us all that they are REAL journalists in that they would never do or say anything that might make the Republican party look bad.

The right wing responded on cue (hard to believe that they once preached that we should all be wary of secretive government, isn’t it?). They pounced on one remark by McClellan, who said, “Well, it was a marketing campaign or a propaganda campaign, however you want to refer to it. But I do not think there was a group sitting around trying to conspire to say let's mislead the American people. Instead, it was how do we make the strongest possible case?” This, they crowed, was proof that there was no deception, no attempt to hide the truth. The administration just sort of lied by accident, so to speak. Nobody seemed to remember John Dean’s answer when asked who suggested that there be a coverup in Watergate: “Nobody suggested there shouldn’t be a coverup.”

And yet a coverup happened. It was a coverup of a third rate burglary, and it was a stupid, unnecessary coverup. Perhaps if the reflexive paranoia of the Nixon administration hadn’t kicked in, and instead, Nixon had come out the day the story broke and said, “Yes, some senior administration advisors authorized this illegal act. They have been fired, and I apologize to the McGovern campaign and the Democratic Party,” that would have been the end of it. Nixon would have stayed President until 1977, perhaps longer, and the US would be Canada’s “Province 11" today.

But they lied, and that pissed off the Democrats, and it pissed off 65% of the American people. And the press wasn’t afraid to cover the story, no matter how much Spiro Agnew prattled about them being “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

But that was then. The media didn’t consist of corporation whores trying to pass off criminal findings as “summer theater,” and Americans weren’t as dispirited or as unsure that they deserved to be free and in control of their own government.

Back then, America had that famous “can-do” attitude. In fact, one of the most effective strategies the GOP took was to claim – sometimes quite accurately – that liberals were the ones who suffered from malaise, who no longer believed there were solutions to all problems and that the country would keep moving forward.

Now, it’s the GOP singing that sad song. “We can’t address global warming because that will destroy our poor, weak, fragile little economy. Terrorists are a greater threat than Hitler or the slavers of the south, and Americans should be grateful they have Dick Cheney’s pants leg to cling to for safety. We can’t trust people to phone their relatives without the government listening in, because there’s a one-in-a-million chance one of those phone calls might be hostile to America. Muh gawd, is it any WONDER we have to resort to nazi tactics?”

The message from the far right is that Americans are weak, and should be fearful of many vague dangers, but the far right is there to protect them. And the best way to do that is to let government and corporations work together to forge that protection. Halliburton and the GOP have only your best interests at heart.

Maybe that’s why, on the same day that the whores at Time Magazine were trying to pretend McClellan’s testimony didn’t matter, the Democrats in the House caved and let Putsch have his way with FISA, including immunity for corporations spying on us for the government. Can you say fascism?

Fascism has always failed. It is vile, it is corrupt, it is petty, greedy little men, vicious and vacuous, making a buck off public fears. It is the GOP. And it is far too many Democrats.

What Americans have to do now is decide if that is not for them, or just something they deserve because they’re no better than they ought to have been.