[BretLudwig]

View From Lodi, CA Pittsburgh, PA: As Bush Eyes His Legacy, He Should
Consider Nixon

By Joe Guzzardi

"Last weekend, I happened onto the 1976 movie, All the Presidents
Men, the story of Watergate, Richard Nixon and the downfall of his
administration.

About half way through, the €œDeep Throat€� character (played by Hal
Holbrook) tells Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) to
forget about €œthe myth thats built up about the White House.€�

€œDeep Throat€� warns: €œThe truth is theyre not very smart guys.
Things got out of hand.€�

The reference was to Nixons Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, Attorney
General John Mitchell, John Dean, all of who went to jail after the
Watergate cover-up exposed them.

Thirty years later, we can certainly say that Nixon let things get out of
hand.

Sadly, we can today apply the €œnot very smart€� tag to George W.
Bushs inside circle that also let conditions spin out of control.

How else can anyone assess Secretary of State Colin Powell, who bought
into and then promoted the €œweapons of mass destruction€� myth?

Powells successor Condoleezza Rice defended the war in Iraq that
evolved from WMD fairy tale. Donald Rumsfeld, Bushs first Secretary of
Defense, blindly followed along.

Six weeks ago, Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, sold the
administration a multi-trillion dollar bill of goods to save country from
financial disaster. The benefits have yet to be seen but the bill to
American taxpayers is on the horizon.

Everybody came with such seemingly impeccable credentials. What went
wrong?

* Powell: a €œstatesman,€� described as an Operation Desert Storm
hero, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a U.S. Army four star
general.

* Rice: Stanford provost, professor of political science, Ph.D., cum
laude, Phi Betta Kappa

* Rumsfeld: a four-term Congressman with forty years of impressive
public and private service who served under Nixon and Gerald Ford.

* Paulson: Dartmouth and Harvard, Goldman Sachs president and
Chief
Operating Officer. Prior to Wall Street, Paulson was an all-Ivy League
football star and held a series of White House staff jobs.

Despite their glowing qualifications, what Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld and a
list of others too long to detail here have in common is that when it
comes to making policy they are woefully€”perhaps even
criminally€”ineffective.

Whether these central figures mapped the strategies that Bush signed off
on or whether Bush charted the course and they followed wont be clear
for some years to come.

But Bush, in the last six weeks of his presidency, has turned his
attention to promoting what he amazingly refers to as his legacy. [Bush
Uses Final Fifty Days in Office to Tout Legacy, By Ben Feller, Associated
Press, December 2, 2008]

With the country falling apart on virtually every front, its
impossible
to imagine what the president is thinking. Perhaps Bush has completely
lost
touch with reality.

One Internet blogger with whom I agree calls Bushs legacy €œdeath,
debt and deceit.€� Whatever it may be, I know Im glad Im not
responsible for selling it to the American people.

Bush is promoting himself on two relatively non-controversial fronts, one
sort of valid but the other completely baseless.

First, Bush legitimately points to the $15 billion in worldwide
contributions hes distributed to combat AIDS. Worth noting is that his
largess is made possible by American taxpayers and not Bush himself.

But second, and completely off base given what we know about American
learners and the disaster that is No Child Left Behind, Bush is taking
bows for advances in education even though there have been none.

Conveniently omitted from Bushs personal retrospective is any mention
of Iraq, the deficit, the mortgage crisis and the Wall Street bailout.

Bush is correct to worry about his legacy. History treats poorly bad
presidents who betrayed America.

As proof, lets return to where we started: Nixon.

On December 5, more than thirty years after Nixon left office in
disgrace,
a new movie, Frost/Nixon, opened in select theaters across America.
Concurrently, a DVD release of the taped interviews is also available.
[Nixon Tapes Reveal His Reservations and Motivations, ABC News, December
3, 2008]

And finally, the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation released
taped Oval Office conversations wherein the former president had
unflattering things to say about blacks, Jews, Ivy League graduates,
Spiro
Agnew and George McGovern as well as others.[ Nixon Tapes Reveal
Anti-Semitic Remarks, ABC News, December 3, 2008]

All this new material serves as a reminder that presidential misdeeds
live
long after the perpetrators have departed from office and from earth.
Americans have long and bitter memories when their leaders lie to them.

Bush shouldnt expect to be remembered any more favorably than Nixon.
In
fact, hell be lucky to do as well."

http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/081205_vfl.htm

--
Message posted using http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/group/rec.audio.opinion/
More information at http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/faq.html