(snip)
While history never repeats itself in quite the same way, the possibility that Bush could wind up disgraced looms larger today than it did for Nixon in the winter of 1972. Back then, the Watergate burglars were still being depicted as a "rogue" operation, and no one believed Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Washington Post reporters who doggedly uncovered the crimes that eventually brought down a president. Similar scandals are simmering on the back burner at the Bush White House: at least three, at last count. Any one of them could lead to big trouble for this administration, which had better start battening down the hatches just as soon as the last of the champagne is poured.
While the issue has largely been lost sight of on account of special prosecutor Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald's bulldoggish tactics – threatening to jail reporters for refusing to divulge their sources – his probe into the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame by Washington neocons eager to discredit her husband, diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, is likely to reach into the vice president's office – and, from there, insinuate its way into the White House. It's the cover-up, not the crime, that gets them every time…
A related investigation into the basis of the infamous "16 words" of the president's 2002 State of the Union address is also percolating, and this should be even more interesting – and potentially damaging to the administration. Because this probes into the question of how so much blatantly false information made its way into the White House and onto the president's desk – including an outright forgery that was so crude it took the IAEA's scientists a matter of minutes with Google to debunk it.
Yet another looming legal case is the upcoming trial of neocon ideologue Larry Franklin, a specialist on Iran working in Douglas Feith's Pentagon policy shop, who was caught red-handed turning over highly sensitive top secret documents to two Israeli government officials and two top employees of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. In a fascinating piece on the sociology of the neoconservative movement, social anthropologist Janine R. Wedel characterizes them as an "informal" faction:
(more)
<
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/>