From Salon regarding the enemies list

[nadinbrzezinski]

and the imperial presidency (and I guess Salon is also fishwrap for they were floatng this oh two years ago) The fact is the Bushies have had enemies lists for decades, and the staff right now in the WH were around with Nixon. Under Secretary of Defense Rumsefeld, our current SecDef, comes to mind among others....

Restoring the imperial presidency
The Bush administration rivals the Nixon White House when it comes to secrecy and unchecked power, with John Ashcroft as our modern-day John Mitchell.

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By Bruce Shapiro

printe-mail

June 17, 2002 | They are not exactly young, these two men in the photograph, but they are trying for rakish in a '70s way -- modified Elvis sideburns, hair falling below the ear -- pushing outward the boundaries of hipness in a Republican White House.

Recently I found myself contemplating this photo, taken shortly after the Watergate scandal forced President Nixon from office. The two would-be hipsters -- Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney -- were aides to the new president, Gerald Ford. At that time Rumsfeld and Cheney were persuading Ford to veto one of the most important Watergate-inspired reforms, an enhanced Freedom of Information Act, designed to guarantee public and media scrutiny of the FBI and other agencies. FOIA, the two aides warned, would take too much power from the executive branch. Ford indeed vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode the veto and the FOIA became the law of the land -- at least until last October, when Attorney General John Ashcroft fulfilled Cheney and Rumsfeld's three-decade-old wish by pledging to fight any FOIA request that comes over the transom.

With the political aftershocks of Sept. 11 only now beginning to be felt in Washington, it's especially important to recall the real lessons of Watergate. Thirty years on, it is easy to forget that "Watergate" was really misleading shorthand: It was shorthand not only for the 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters and Nixon's subsequent coverup of campaign shenanigans, but also for a vast array of domestic spying and other executive-branch abuses, which the Nixon crew perfected but did not invent.

http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/06/17/bush_watergate/print.html