Lary Bloom
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Saturday, October 29, 2005
This Is Not Watergate
Where were you when Scooter Libby was indicted? It's a question that won't be asked forty years from now. It surely doesn't rank with, Where were you when John Erlichmann and H.R. Haldeman were banished from Nixon's White House in 1973?I was in Louisville, Ky., at the River Club, drinking bourbon with other Sunday magazine editors. With the help of the local beverage of choice, we toasted Nixon's toasting. The president, of course, still employed the phrase "third-rate burglary," referring to the five Watergate thieves who broke into the Democratic National Headquarters in search of campaign secrets.
Indeed, it was a third-rate burglary (followed by a massive coverup). Nixon, for once, was accurate. And that's what makes Watergate, as celebrated a case as it was, different from what we now face: a first-rate example of hardball politics with deadly consequence.
Today's Hartford Courant front page devoted a great deal of space to the news about Libby, but nowhere on it was the word Iraq. And yet the motive for Libby's action was to keep momentum going for the war effort, and to silence critics.
The results of these actions, and others like them, at the highest level proved lethal -- which makes it unlike the third-rate burglarly. True, Nixon had sent hundreds of thousands to war in Southeast Asia, and was at the helm when thousands of our soldiers and airmen were killed. But that war wasn't of his making (even if his "secret" plan to end it was mere campaign rhetoric.)
In the present case, the war was manufactured by the Bush Administration, and Scooter Libby was one of those who made it possible.
Posted by:Lary Bloom at 5:28 AM
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