Last winter, I wrote two journals about the current administration's crimes. The first was a very straightforward piece, based upon an essay which Chomsky wrote in 1973. Briefly, he suggested that Watergate became a national scandal, because Nixon violated the unspoken rule that presidents were allowed to persecute minorities, the poor, political extremists and other marginalized people who threaten the business establishment. But once the dirty tricksters created an Enemies Lists that included the names of wealthy newspaper publishers, actors, movie producers, Nixon and his cronies became outlaws---since these are the people who really run things in this country.
Chomsky predicted that Nixon would never be held accountable for the much greater crimes of the illegal incursions into Cambodia (which lead to the Killing Fields) or Laos or the many other war crimes over which he Kissinger presided. He discussed the fact that Kissinger would emerge from the Watergate scandal unscathed.
Why the Dems Won’t Impeach Bush: Noam Chomsky Predicted 2008 Back in 1973http://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/132 Liberal political commentators sigh with relief that Kissinger has barely been tainted -- a bit of questionable wire-tapping, but no close involvement in the Watergate shenanigans. Yet by any objective standards, the man is one of the great mass murderers of the modern period. He presided over the expansion of the war to Cambodia, with consequences that are now well known, and the vicious escalation of the bombing of rural Laos, not to speak of the atrocities committed in Vietnam, as he sought to achieve a victory of some sort for imperial power in Indochina. But he wasn't implicated in the burglary at the Watergate or in the undermining of Muskie, so his hands are clean.
There is a link to the entire Chomsky piece in the journal. Please read it.
In the second journal, I expanded upon that essay written by Chomsky, using as my starting point a quote from Hunter S. Thompson:
Nuremberg, USA or Impeach Now So That It Will Happen Never Againhttp://journals.democraticunderground.com/McCamy%20Taylor/150 “The trail of Richard Nixon, if it happens, will amount to a de facto trial of the American Dream. The importance of Nixon now is not merely to get rid of him; that’s strictly political consideration…The real question is why we are forced to impeach a president elected by the largest margin in the history of presidential elections…The necessity of actually bringing Nixon to trial, in order to understand our reality in the same way the Nuremberg trials forced Germany to confront itself…” Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Washington: The Boys in the Bag 1974 The Great Shark Hunt
Of course, there was no impeachment of Nixon, for precisely the reasons why Thompson demanded one. The power brokers did not want America to understand the reality of this country, which was that the rich and powerful had much more power than all of the voters combined. Jeffersonian democracy had taken a wrong turn somewhere and had ended up back at the place where Tom Paine had warned us about, the world of hereditary privilege and wars for profit. Ever since the Great Depression, a cabal of the nation's elite had been scheming to take over the country. They tried to throw FDR out with a military coup. They allied with Hitler. They battled the Soviet Union by persecuting Blacks and Unions. When Nixon almost gave away the game, they had to make a strategic retreat. They allowed the nation to elect a
Leader for a Change candidate, Jimmy Carter, an engineer who was big on ethics and short on policy experience. Mr. Oil himself, David Rockfeller supported the Jimmy Carter candidacy. And four years later, David Rockefeller had a change of heart and played the role of bag man for the Iranian-Reagan/Bush campaign hostages for votes deal. Jimmy Carter hardly made a blip in the coup. Bill Clinton has been more problematic, because he taught the American people that their lives are better under a Democratic president.
But that sneaky right wing coup knows how to plan for the long run. They spent eight years searching for
something they could impeach Bill Clinton for, knowing that the impeachment would fail. They did not have enough votes to drive him out of office, and they did not really want to do it----St. Gore was much worse for them than Big Dog. They wanted to taint the legitimate Congressional power of impeachment, because they knew that it was time to step things up a notch, but
the president can not break laws right and left, if Congress is standing over him with the power to punish.What kind of laws did they plan to break? They spelled it out for us, in a document called
Project for the New American Century. People like Nader who said that Gore was the same as Bush must not have been paying attention, or maybe they though that it was a prank, that no one would reveal such a twisted scheme in advance. But the NeoCons had been talking about invading the various countries which had nationalized their oil----to them I guess the phrase would be
stole Standard Oil’s petroleum ---ever since they were Dems working for Scoop Jackson. Later, James Baker III advised the new Bush administration that Iraq’s oil was the key to U.S. energy independence, if only an excuse could be found to invade that country. For those who like graphics, here is a crude rendering of Baker’s plan at my cartoon site
Grand Theft Election Ohio :
http://www.grandtheftelectionohio.com/050906.htmWhile you are there, just for fun, check out the 17 part (for now) graphic series
The Nixonians about the parallels between the current Bush administration and the Nixon administration.
http://www.grandtheftelectionohio.com/main.htmThis is one of the series. I call it
Nixonians XIII: The World Poison 
Henry Kissinger tried to keep his involvement in the Iraq War a secret. At first, this was probably so people would not compare it to the
quagmire in Vietnam. Later, when it became apparent that the war was a great big fiasco, Henry the War Criminal would have wanted to keep his reputation clean. Bob Woodward got back at the White House for using him to cover its ass on Valerie Plame by outing Dr. K. It was the best journalism Woodward has done since Watergate.
So, the title of this piece is true in a very literal sense. Had this nation prosecuted Henry Kissinger and Dick Nixon as Noam Chomsky wanted for the war crimes they committed, and had we made a real effort to correct the loopholes which allow the execute branch to wield near unlimited domestic power in time of war, the so called “Article II” exceptions to the rule of law would not have been in place when the Supreme Court made their illegal decision in Bush v. Gore. Plus, the public would have no stomach for an all powerful executive branch. Reagan would not have been allowed to fund the murderers of children and nuns in Central America by protecting crack cocaine dealers in the U.S. and selling arms to our enemies in the Middle East. Someone would have thought to ask Bush Sr. why his ambassadors encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait---forcing us to go in and rescue that country. Heads would have rolled when Iran's exiled president revealed the hostages for votes deal in the early 1980s.
By some horrible freak accident, if Bush and Cheney had still managed to steal the election in 2000, they could not have started their domestic wiretap program or come up with their misnamed Patriot Act or started a torture program or incarcerated Padilla without filing charges or allowed their friends to feed at the trough of the federal tax payers like a bunch of pampered pigs with no accountability, because
everything that has to do with the executive branch is now a state secret . They could not have done any of that if there had been an impeachment of Richard Nixon, in which all of his crimes were made public and legislation was passed which made it impossible for future presidents to ever do the same again.
That is why it is so important that the most criminal administration in all of United States history be held accountable, the way that the most criminal regime in all of German history was held accountable at Nuremberg.
If we do not turn over every stone
now while Bush and Cheney are still in office and it matters, if we do not have public hearings and charges filed, and if we do not force Congressional Republicans to go on record as either supporting corruption or denouncing it, then the Right Wing Coup (I think it deserves to be capitalized) will have won again. It can bide its time and wait for a new manufactured crisis. It will package a new candidate, declare him something that he is not and sell him to enough of the public that election fraud will take care of the rest.
This Friday, thanks to the efforts of Rep. Dennis Kucinich and others, there will finally be open discussion of the abuses of executive branch power that lead this nation to a war of choice based upon lies. The war was planned so that the offspring of Standard Oil could regain the crude they lost when Iraq nationalized its oil. Had this adventure in colonial militarism succeeded, Iran would have been next, then Venezuela, then Saudi Arabia. Over 3000 U.S. troops have paid with their lives so that U.S. oil companies can make more money, at a time when oil company profits are already obscene. Many more soldiers will be scarred for life, physically and emotionally. As of 2006,
over half a million Iraqis had died in this war for oil. More have been displaced. Henry Kissinger's hands are dripping blood again.
And what have we gotten for our war? Less freedom, more oppression, more
fear . When the U.S. had the ability to shut down Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Bush administration deliberately backed off. Instead, it created a training ground for more Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq where it left strategic parts of that country close to Saudi Arabia unprotected so that Al Qaeda could strengthen its base. The U.S. also treats Pakistan, a functional ally of Al Qaeda, as an friend. Saudi Arabia, which funds Al Qaeda, is also an ally. This bears investigation, since if you follow the maxim “You will know them by their acts”, it appear that the Bush-Cheney administration actively sought to increase the capacity of Al Qaeda to commit acts of terrorism around the world, leading to the 2006 Iraq NIE which judged that the Iraq War has made us all more vulnerable to terrorism rather than less. The presence of Al Qaeda serves to recreate a Cold War mentality, which gives the current administration its Article II excuse for its abuses of power.
If we do not impeach now, this will never end, and with each erosion of our Constitutional liberties, the public will grow a little bit more accustomed to being oppressed by the federal government, until our only hope will have to come from outside, as it did for the people of Germany---or from the chaos brought by a Second Great Depression. But the latter will come at a terrible price.
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