I Love Me Some New Nixon Tapes

Another batch was released yesterday, and I wish I could fast-forward 40 years in time so I could drive down to Yorba Linda and spend the day listening to them all. Actually, I could telecommute, as the tapes, from 1973, can be heard right here.

One thing I love about the Nixon White House is the impression that they did almost nothing. Somebody would wander into the Oval Office, and Nixon and that figure, either Colson, Haldeman, Kissinger or Ehrlichman, would just shoot the bill with the President for about 45 minutes or so. It sounds less like the White House and more like The Office. I mean, this, from the Nixon Library, sums it up:

Other notable individuals on these tapes included Republican National Committee Chairman (and future President) George H. W. Bush, House Minority Leader (and future President) Gerald R. Ford, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, journalist Barbara Walters, film director John Ford, professional golfer Arnold Palmer, conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra Eugene Ormandy, “Truck driver of the year” Curtis C. Stapp, and Washington Redskins football coach George Allen and his family.

Obviously the big news hook has been Nixon's comments on abortion:

The tapes also caught his reaction to Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. In a Jan. 22 conversation with aide Chuck Colson, Nixon can be heard saying: "There are times when abortions are necessary -- I know that. . . . Suppose you have a black and a white, or a rape."

Nixon and Colson agreed that legalized abortion encouraged permissiveness.

"It breaks the family," Nixon says.

Please note that Loving v. Virginia was the law of the land for Nixon's entire Presidency.

But more interesting is this:

Nixon had promised "peace with honor" and pledged to withdraw American forces only when South Vietnam could defend itself. But if Nixon couldn't persuade Thieu to agree to his peace agreement, Hughes said, the American president would have had difficulty justifying his continuation of the war during his first four-year term, during which 20,000 American troops died.

"For domestic political reasons, Nixon needed to conceal the failure of his strategy of Vietnamization and negotiation," Hughes said. "If people realized that he had added 20,000 additional American casualties to the war, and the communists were going to win anyway, then it would have proved his critics right that he should have ended the war at the start of his (first) term."

And this, which is just classic Nixon:

On Feb. 23, 1973, he placed a call to future President George H.W. Bush, then the Republican National Committee chairman.

The call was "nothing of great importance," Nixon says, but he wanted to inform Bush of what he witnessed during his recent visit to the South Carolina state Legislature.

"I noticed a couple of very attractive women, both of them Republicans, in the Legislature," Nixon tells Bush. "I want you to be sure to emphasize to our people, God, let's look for some. . . . Understand, I don't do it because I'm for women, but I'm doing it because I think maybe a woman might win someplace where a man might not. . . . So have you got that in mind?"

"I'll certainly keep it in mind," Bush replies.

"Boy, they were good lookin' and bright," Nixon continues. And he had been informed, further, that "they're two of the best members of the House."

"Well, that's terrific," Bush says.

In addition to releasing tapes, the Nixon Library released a cache of documents, one of them showing that Mississippi Democrat John Stennis secretly approved of the bombing of Cambodia before Nixon carried it out in 1970.

In an April 24, 1970, telephone conversation with Sen. John C. Stennis (D-Miss.), who was then chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Nixon said the administration was going to provide arms to the Cambodian government to prevent its overthrow by a pro-communist element, and continue secret B-52 bombing raids, "which only you and Senator Russell know about." Richard Russell (D-Ga.) was the former committee chairman.

"We are not going to get involved in a war in Cambodia," Nixon reassured Stennis. "We are going to do what is necessary to help save our men in South Vietnam. They can't have those sanctuaries there" that North Vietnam maintained.

Stennis replied, "I will be with you. . . . I commend you for what you are doing."

ConservaDems, then as now...

Nixon is just a fascinating character sketch, and I wish I could marinate in all this material for a long while.

Newsmakers 1972

Fox News Sunday opened today with the question "Are we saving the economy or heading toward socialism," (By the way, we're not.) featuring such pearls as Richard Shelby blaming the Obama Administration for legislation passed in the fall of 2008, during, um, the Bush Administration. But I was more interested in one member of the panel, Fred Malek, listed as the head of "Thayer Capital Partners." I knew I'd heard that name before, and David Corn jogged my memory.

It's one of the more gothic stories about Nixon related in Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's The Final Days. As they tell it, late in 1971--the same year, coincidentally, that the Washington Senators moved to Texas and changed their name to the Rangers--Nixon summoned the White House personnel chief, Fred Malek, to his office to discuss a "Jewish cabal" in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The "cabal," Nixon said, was tilting economic figures to make his Administration look bad. How many Jews were there in the bureau? he wanted to know. Malek reported back on the number, and told the President that the bureau's methods of weighing statistics were normal procedure that had been in use for years.

In 1988, when George Bush pere installed Malek as deputy chairman for the Republican National Committee, Woodward dusted off his notes and, with the Washington Post's Walter Pincus, further revealed that two months after Malek filed a memo on the matter--he'd counted 13 Jews, though his methodology was shaky--a couple of them were demoted. (Malek denied any role and said Nixon's notions of a "Jewish cabal" were "ridiculous" and "nonsense.") The 1988 story raised a predictable ruckus, and Malek beat a hasty retreat from the RNC. As exiles go, Malek's was pretty painless. He still got to run the 1988 Republican Convention (and in 1992 he would be Bush pere's campaign manager). He joined George W. Bush's syndicate to purchase the Rangers, he went on the board of the American-Israel Friendship Society, he took over Northwest Airlines, and he started an investment firm, Thayer Capital Partners.

"Nixon's Jew counter" for some reason never came up on Malek's chyron today.

Malek's just one of those upwards-falling Republicans in Washington. Actually I found the Corn piece because he was discussing Malek's hiring as finance co-chair for the McCain campaign. The DC establishment finds keeping one of these guys going through the revolving doors of power perfectly normal.

Condi Invokes The Nixon Defense

Condoleezza Rice, who's being investigated and may go to prison if she ever sets foot in Spain, had a conversation at the Hoover Institute where she follows in the footsteps of another California politician:

Q: Is waterboarding torture?

RICE: The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations under the Convention Against Torture. So that's -- And by the way, I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department's clearance. That's what I did.

Q: Okay. Is waterboarding torture in your opinion?

RICE: I just said, the United States was told, we were told, nothing that violates our obligations under the Convention Against Torture. And so by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture.

Score one for pop culture, because thanks to the trailer to Frost/Nixon, most of the country understands the insanity of a statement like this.

Cenk Uygur notes that Rice was also questioned about her verbal authorization for waterboarding and other torture techniques to the CIA, and gave a classic answer:

"I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency, that they had policy authorization, subject to the Justice Department's clearance. That's what I did."

Can we ask why she teaches at Stanford at this point, similar to asking why John Yoo remains at Berkeley and Jay Bybee on the federal bench?

Condi Rice's entire career in the White House was marked by a denial of responsibility. "Nobody could have anticipated" should be the epitaph on her gravestone. But I don't know what legal world exists where a conveyance of authorization does not equal an authorization. Uygur concludes:

This is why I say these people don't understand the whole concept behind America. In our system of government, the president is not supposed to be above the law. He is not a king; his word is not the law. The president can violate the law and when he does, he is supposed to be held accountable. That is supposed to be one of the pillars of our democracy.

Look at what she said: "[B]y definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Convention Against Torture." Does that mean the president can authorize any kind of torture under the Convention Against Torture?

If someone doesn't do something about this dangerous idea it will do more damage than the torture itself. Yes, the torture damaged our reputation across the world, helped terrorists recruit fighters against us, endangered our soldiers and sullied the name of America. But if this precedent - that the president can authorize anything and make it legal "by definition" - is allowed to stand, then our whole form of government is in jeopardy.

This was not the consensus view of everyone in the government at that time. Not everyone was swept up in 9/11 fever. Military experts warned against using these techniques for a variety of reasons, because it put our soldiers at risk and yielded bad information, setting aside the legal, ethical and moral implications of torture. So the use of these techniques, and the legal theories underpinning them, can only be seen as deliberate and thought-out by the perpetrators. They conspired to break the law for their own reasons, be it their warped beliefs about the Arab Mind, or their desire to expand executive power, or producing the false confessions necessary to assert an Iraq/Al Qaeda link, or whatever. These were sane people who made the decision to torture. And we have courts available to deal with the consequences.

...Spencer Ackerman thinks Condi made news:

But Rice is now portraying herself as merely being a conduit for approving the CIA's interrogation regime: "I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency." Well, there are only two more-senior officials than Rice in this context, and that's Bush and then-VP Dick Cheney. If she hadn't made a decision on the part of the administration for the Abu Zubaydah interrogation plan, only one of these two men would have had the authority to do so. And all of this would have happened before the Justice Department determined the interrogation techniques to be legal.

My impression of the SASC report was that Condi told the CIA they could do ahead and waterboard pending OLC approval. But it'd be nice to haul Rice before a panel and ask her to clarify this.

Legacy Of Ashes

The Bush Legacy Project is off to a rough start. Despite a fresh set of talking points and a round of gauzy interviews, the public doesn't want a damn thing to do with this guy anymore. What has been done cannot be undone.

While the public is giving Obama a nice honeymoon, it’s finalizing its divorce from President Bush. A whopping 79% in the poll say they’re not going to miss him when he leaves office. That’s compared with 55% who said the same of Clinton in December of 2000. Moreover, almost half (48%) think that Bush will go down as one of the worst presidents in our history. Just 18% said that of Clinton and only 6% said that of Bush 41. But Bush 43 isn’t the only Republican who has taken a hit in the new NBC/WSJ poll. Dick Cheney leaves office with sporting an all-time low in his personal rating. And the Republican Party’s fav/unfav is 27%-52%, which is its lowest rating ever in the poll (by comparison, the Democratic Party’s is nearly reversed, 49%-28%).

The hubris of these people, thinking they can throw around a bunch of shady facts and figures and bamboozle the public into loving George Bush again. That ship has sailed. People may not know every single outrageous assault on the dignity of this nation perpetrated over the past eight years, but they certainly have a sense of the broad strokes - the failed wars, the economic collapse, the destruction of at least one American city (and Detroit is on the brink). Not to mention that there's no contrition or even connection to current world events in these Bush "exit interviews." They are as devoid of humanity as they are of substance. Ezra Klein had a good piece on this in the LA Times.

Asked to reveal what would surprise us most about his presidency, Bush replied that "every day has been pretty joyous." That is indeed surprising. Asked if Barack Obama's victory wasn't a repudiation of Bush's presidency, Bush allowed that some people may have voted for Obama in reaction to his presidency, but overall, "most people voted for Barack Obama because they decided they wanted him to be in their living room for the next four years explaining policy."

The most galling answer, however, came when Gibson asked if Bush had any regrets. "The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq," he said, entirely in the passive voice. "A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn't just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq. ... I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess." In other words, Bush did not let the American people down. The intelligence community let Bush -- and, let's not forget, lots of others -- down.

Nixon decided to give the country closure. That meant sacrificing the comfort of hiding behind partisanship, and it meant admitting the failures of his presidency. To date, Bush shows no such inclination. And on this, he retains agency. Conflicting evaluations of his presidency will simply collide in the postmodern thunderdome of contemporary partisanship. "I don't spend a lot of time really worrying about short-term history," he said to Gibson. "I guess I don't worry about long-term history, either, since I'm not going to be around to read it." Then he laughed, even though it wasn't very funny.

See, Nixon, in his Shakesperian way, admitted his crimes. Bush gave a medal to Chuck Colson.

Actually, to me the Condi Rice interview on NPR was even more galling, considering that she had the nerve to offer a defense of the Administration on torture:

Q: And Guantanamo wasn’t sort of the only issue that tarnished the U.S. image. There is also the treatment of terror suspects, waterboarding, other methods of torture or –

RICE: Well, you know that I’m going to have to object, because the United States has always kept to its international obligations, which include international obligations on the Convention on Torture. The United States, the President, was determined after September 11th to do everything that was legal and within those obligations, international and domestic laws, to make sure that we prevented a follow-on attack.

They keep insisting that the ends justify the means, that the only focus in the minds of the top officials in the Administration was to "keep the country safe," and thus they had to commit the war crimes. At the same time, they try to pin the abuse on a "few bad apples," saying their actions are inconsistent with the comportment of the United States in meeting its international obligations.

The two statements are incompatible.

The physical and mental abuse of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was the direct result of Bush administration detention policies and should not be dismissed as the work of bad guards or interrogators, according to a bipartisan Senate report released Thursday.

The Senate Armed Services Committee report concludes that harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA and the U.S. military were directly adapted from the training techniques used to prepare special forces personnel to resist interrogation by enemies that torture and abuse prisoners. The techniques included forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, and until 2003, waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning [...]

Administration officials publicly blamed the abuses on low-level soldiers-- the work ''of a few bad apples.'' Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., called that ''both unconscionable and false.''

''The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees,'' Levin said.

Arizona Republican and former prisoner of war Sen. John McCain, called the link between the survival training and U.S. interrogations of detainees inexcusable.

''These policies are wrong and must never be repeated,'' he said in a statement.

(That's right, man of honor and integrity John McCain popped up on this one. He has no right to say a word about it.)

And I should add, if the epitaph for the Bush Administration, so we are told, is "he kept us safe" (I guess every President has a 9-month mulligan on that), how can this be reconciled?

The military ignored steps before the invasion of Iraq that could have prevented the staggering number of casualties from roadside bombs, the Pentagon's acting inspector general charged Tuesday.

The IG's report says that the military knew years before the war that mines and homemade bombs, which the military calls "improvised explosive devices," would be a "threat . . . in low-intensity conflicts" and that "mine-resistant vehicles" were available.

"Yet the military did not develop requirements for, fund or acquire" safer vehicles, the report says. The military invaded Iraq in 2003 "without having taken available steps to acquire technology to mitigate the known mine and IED risk to soldiers and Marines."

Even after the war was under way, as the devices began taking a deadly toll and field commanders pressed for vehicles that were better protected from roadside bombs, the Pentagon was slow to act, the report says.

People may not know all the details, but they're very clear on their feelings. The Bush Legacy Project mirrors the Bush Presidency Project: a failure. That's not accountability, of course, and unless we start sending some people to jail these criminals will return like zombies to feast upon the body politic. The Bush reign isn't even over and some of his favorite Democrats are calling to retain all of his intelligence officials, which is disturbing beyond the point of reason.

I think we need our own "Legacy Project" to fill in the details and make sure this never happens again. The public is on our side and willing to listen.

Beware of Republicans Bearing Gifts

Good for Karen Tumulty to smack down the latest instance of a Republican mole trying to suck up to Barack Obama. Tumulty deconstructs the moment during the campaign where Obama correctly reiterated that Henry Kissinger had called for high-level talks between the new Administration and Iran. Faced with this from an ally, the McCain campaign put Kissinger up to claiming that Obama was mistaken when that was completely not the case. Now that the election is over, Kissinger has the gall to praise Obama for his foreign policy stances.

Of course, we all know that Kissinger, and in fact everyone in Nixon's orbit, was a worm. After all, there was nobody more responsible for blocking peace with Vietnam for at least 7 years in order to win an election, causing the needless deaths of tens of thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, than Kissinger.

In the last months of his administration, President Lyndon B. Johnson suggested that associates of Richard M. Nixon were trying to persuade the South Vietnamese government not to join the peace talks until after the 1968 election, recordings of telephone conversations released Thursday show.

Accusations of Nixon’s influence in the peace conference have been reported before, but the tapes provide a look at how Johnson handled the issue, said Bruce Buchanan, a government professor and an expert on the presidency at the University of Texas, Austin.

During a conversation with Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, Johnson, referring to people close to Nixon, and said, “This is treason.” Dirksen was the Republican leader in the Senate.

In a conversation in November 1968, Nixon assured Johnson that he supported the president’s efforts to arrange a peace conference in Paris. Johnson had cited news articles and private information he had been given that he said made him think Nixon’s associates were working against his efforts.

This is chronicled in Nixonland. Nixon's national security team had back-channel communications with the South Vietnamese that persuaded the then-President that they could get a better deal under the new leadership.

Privately, however, Nixon was acting more assertively on the Vietnam issue. Over the course of the campaign, Nixon grew increasingly concerned about President Johnson's negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Word was "out" that LBJ would be proposing a bombing halt of North Vietnam provided the South Vietnamese were permitted to participate in the ongoing peace talks in Paris. To blunt the possibility of a late campaign "Peace Offensive" by the Democrats, Nixon developed a "back channel" to persuade President Thieu of South Vietnam not to cooperate with President Johnson. The line of communication went from Nixon to John Mitchell (who would be named Attorney General) to Anna Chenault, a strong Nixon support who was close to a number of South Vietnamese officials, including President Thieu. Nixon's message was subtly delivered but unambiguous. Thieu should refuse to join the peace talks in 1968 because the South Vietnamese would be treated better by a Nixon rather than a Humphrey Administration. Thieu ultimately followed Nixon's suggestion and did not participate in the peace talks during the fall of 1968 (see, Steven Ambrose, Nixon: Triumph of a Politician, pp. 206-218).

This is a classic Kissingerian move and was repeated dozens of times in his tenure. He never believes in transparent negotiation, only secret meetings with political designs in mind, not conceptions of peace. He's an execrable man. I would stay FAR away from him if I were the President-elect.

Nixon's Id On Display

Coming out of reading Nixonland, I'm fascinated by his Presidency, and the fact that he used the Oval Office the way that a speaker would use Hyde Park, spouting off about whatever popped into his head. And he KNEW he was taping it! Yesterday the Nixon Library released 200 more hours of Nixon tapes, and I wish I was not working so that I could go down to Yorba Linda and listen to every one of them. Here's just one example:

-- On Dec. 9, 1972, Nixon talks to Colson about the appointment of building trades union leader Peter Brennan as secretary of labor:

NIXON: "The idea, they finally think the appointment of a working man makes them think we're for the working man.”

COLSON: “That's precisely it.”

NIXON: “They talk about all the tokenism. We appoint blacks, and they don't think we're for blacks. Mexicans. They don't think we're for Mexicans. But a working man, by golly, that is really something."

It takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance to complain about charges of tokenism while admitting that he's hiring a trade unionist for reasons of tokenism.

The AP has some more:

"Never forget," Nixon tells national security adviser Henry Kissinger in a taped Oval Office conversation revealed Tuesday. "The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.

"Professors are the enemy," he repeated. "Write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it."

The conversation was on Dec. 14, 1972, four days before the U.S. unleashed a massive bombing campaign on Hanoi and Haiphong aimed at getting North Vietnam to negotiate more seriously in peace talks.

"We're going to bomb them," Nixon told Kissinger and adviser Alexander Haig, green lighting one of the most controversial acts of the war. "We'll take the heat right over the Christmas period, then on January 3, it's Christmas withdrawal."

As early as 1966, Nixon was quoted as saying that Vietnam could not be won. He was bombing them into the Stone Age to get a better deal at the bargaining table, to get "peace with honor." This didn't work since he was inaugurated, but here in Christmas 1972, he's continuing with it.

The most obvious thing here is that all of the elements of the modern Republican Party are on display in Nixon's brain dump. The resentment, the anti-intellectualism, the demonization of academia and the press, the digging up of dirt (the big revelation is that Nixon's people knew about Tom Eagleton's shock treatments before it was made public), the siege mentality, the persecution complex, the bullying, the need to look tough, etc.

Of course, we had a chance to punish Nixon for his crimes, but we passed it up in the spirit of comity. Good move:

It's a good thing we decided for the good of the country not to play the blame game and to let bygones be bygones because it resulted in the Republicans completely changing their ways.

Dick Cheney, for instance, learned from Nixon's mistakes and completely repudiated Richard Nixon's imperial presidency and profane disrespect and operated with bipartisan good faith and total transparency as a result of the generosity with which Richard Nixon (and later Ronald Reagan) were dealt. It's a heartwarming story of the power of positive reinforcement, forgiveness and redemption.

The New Nixon

There's quite a lot to say about Sarah Palin. There's actually quite more to say about Barack Obama's magnificent speech, but John McCain kicked the soccer ball and the media herd is chasing it. So we'll go with Palin for now and come back to Obama's speech on the weekend.

What's striking to me is what has happened in Alaska since Palin was swept into office as a reformer. In 2006, sitting governor Frank Murkowski finished third out of four in the primary due to corruption scandals. A good chunk of the Republicans in the state legislature are either under indictment or under suspicion. Ted Stevens will go to court in September. Palin offered a new direction from that culture of corruption.

And then she came into office and did the same thing as every other Republican in Alaska. The most prominent scandal, for which she is currently under an ethics review, concerns her trying to get her sister's ex-husband fired as a state trooper.

Gov. Sarah Palin, a rising young GOP star mentioned as a possible running mate for John McCain, could see her clean-hands reputation damaged by a growing furor over whether she tried to get her former brother-in-law fired as a state trooper.

A legislative panel has launched a $100,000 investigation to determine if Palin dismissed Alaska's public safety commissioner because he would not fire the trooper, Mike Wooten. Wooten went through a messy divorce from Palin's sister.

Palin has denied the commissioner's dismissal had anything to do with her former brother-in-law. And she denied orchestrating the dozens of telephone calls made by her husband and members of her administration to Wooten's bosses.

There's actually tape of a Palin aide pressuring the Public Safety Department to fire Wooten. And when the Public Safety Commissioner wouldn't, she fired him and replaced him with someone who would. Someone who had a history of sexual harrassment and is now the PUBLIC SAFETY commissioner.

That's shades of Archibald Cox and Elliot Richardson and William Ruckleshaus. I understand that the state trooper and her sister had a messy divorce, and he's been alleged to have done all sorts of terrible things to the sister and the kids, but firing people who refuse to carry out your wishes - well, that's good for Woodward and Bernstein's career, but not for the country.

And there's more.

Siun reports that Palin broke the law to ensure that Alaskan water would stay dirty:

It is against the law for the governor to officially advocate for or against a ballot measure; however, Palin took what she calls "personal privilege" to discuss one of this year's most contentious initiatives, which voters will decide Tuesday.

Along with taking a position on the big mine's side, Palin's administration apparently used state Department of Natural Resources resources to lobby for defeat of the Clean Water Initiative under the pretense of creating a state run website to "educate" citizens. The citizen group Alaskans for Clean Water responded by filing “a complaint against DNR for a recently-launched state website meant to clarify the issue for voters. “

The complaint alleges that the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) improperly attempted to influence the outcome of an election by publishing information against the initiative on its website. It also alleges that DNR failed to report to APOC the expenditures, including employee time, related to creation of the information.

“It has become clear to us that the Department of Natural Resources is working hand-in-hand with the industry, and that the state is inappropriately making efforts to influence voters on this ballot initiative,” said Art Hackney, a co-sponsor of Ballot Measure #4.

Now, this reflects Nixon as much as it reflects our current White House resident. When the laws constrain you, use a "personal privilege" or make a signing statement. The point of similarity is contempt for the rule of law and a belief in the expansion of executive power.

There are a lot of ways to talk about Palin. She is a creationist-loving anti-choice, environment-despoiling gift to the fundie right who's resume is so thin that she doesn't really know what the Vice President does. It's clear that McCain, who has only met Palin a few times, sees the election as an uphill climb and tried to use the pick to command the news cycle with a surprise. Maybe that works for a day, but over time this could backfire heavily. Like Eagleton heavy.

Not to mention that she is completely in line with Fourthbranch Cheney and Spiro Agnew and the rest of the Corruptocrats on the issue of abuse of power. The Anchorage Daily News put it best:

She can look you in eye and tell you black is white.

Especially when there's oil involved.

Peace With Honor

It took me a little while to figure out what this new John McCain ad reminded me of.

"Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war," McCain tells the camera. "I was shot down over Vietnam and spent five years as a POW. Some of the friends I served with never came home. I hate war. And I know how terrible its costs are."

Never mind that McCain routinely romanticizes war, such as in his books like Faith of My Fathers or Worth The Fighting For (yes, for some reason there's a "the" in there). But let's try and determine what's really going on here. In the midst of a war he's cheerleaded for five years, he comes out and tells us how much he hates war, leaving unsaid any desiresor strategies to end the current one.

It reminded me an awful lot of this Richard Nixon ad from 1968:



Nixon talked in slightly more explicit terms about new leadership and an honorable end to Vietnam. But there was no substance behind the talk. While the visual styles are different, each suited to its time period, these are basically the same ads. Rick Perlstein writes about the Nixon ads in his book Nixonland on page 333:

Nixon's commercials would run without narration as well. The sound would only be music and snippets from stump speeches. The images, rapid-fire collages of still photographs, told the story just as effectively with the sound off, a visual semaphore. TV specialist Harry Treleaven was so proud of their aesthetic force that he screened them for curators at the Museum of Modern Art, hoping they might be added to the collection. The aesthetes were unimpressed: "The good guys are either soldiers, children, or over fifty years old." It was a telling moment: that's why Treleaven believed they belonged in the museum. He responded, "Nixon has not only developed the use of the platitude, he's raised it to an art form" - a mirror of Americans' "delightful misconceptions of themselves and their country." (He meant it as a compliment.) (Gene, the combat photographer who created the spots) Jones's assistant imagined staging the State of the Union the same way - intercut with heart-tugging stills.

While McCain's spots have that personal touch of narration, they really are meant to evoke the same "delightful misconceptions" - meant to make the viewer feel good instead of informed about any agenda or plan for the future. If you felt good about Nixon pursuing an honorable end to the war in Vietnam, you were comfortable with his escalation into Cambodia and carper-bombing of the North. If you feel satisfied with McCain's explanation about his hatred of war, you won't mind so much when he declares it approximately once every 28.4 seconds upon reaching the Oval Office.

This is a blurring strategy, making war into an abstraction that is excruciating but necessary, and avoiding the unnecessary invasion that has saddled us with the occupation of Iraq. The idea that nobody likes war but sometimes there is no choice is a powerful mainstream opinion in America. It has absolutely nothing to do with the current war in Iraq or proposed wars with Iran or Syria or whatever other tiny adversary we have, which is why McCain feels on more solid ground going with the abstraction.

Watch out for this. It's bound to be effective.

Nixonland

Let me echo Bradrocket and Atrios. I'm about 100 or so pages into Nixonland and it's amazingly good. Rick Perlstein has a knack of finding the best contemporaneous sources, the ones which have completely fallen through the cracks of history, and resurrecting them to contruct a credible view of the political times as they were lived, in this case the era from 1965-1972. This book is the antidote to mawkish 60s love letters like Tom Brokaw's 1968. It gives the whole picture, from the silent majority and the hippie backlash on up, and it informs our politics, particularly on the right, up to this very day. It's also just a great read.

You should really order it.

I'll put a full review up when I'm done.

Blast From The Health Care Past

Really interesting article about Nixon's plan for universal health care, which shares similarities with the major Democratic plans today. He called for it in 1974, and at that point he called have called for free lollipops for children and he wouldn't have gotten it through. This could clearly be seen as a job-saver, as well as an attempt to write the wrong of creating the HMO system and making the insurance industry even more powerful. But his universal system would have preserved the employer-based insurance plans, but this part is interesting:

Nixon first proposed national health insurance as a conservative California congressman in 1947. He grew up poor and lost two brothers to tuberculosis, which marked him for life. He frequently pointed to the cure for tuberculosis as a medical marvel that underscored the need for a public-private partnership on health care.

"It was something personal for him," Price said of Nixon's health-care push.

Despite the heated politics of Watergate, national health-care legislation was proceeding in Congress thanks to a compromise brokered by a young Democratic senator from Massachusetts, Edward Kennedy, a Nixon nemesis.

But then, according to a 1974 political almanac published by Congressional Quarterly, the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers lobbied successfully to kill the plan. Unions hoped to get a better deal after the next elections.

Wow. Shows you the folly of continually waiting until the next elections.

We are closer to the moment where everyone agrees that health care is a right and not a privilege and the government needs to play a role to revive the current broken system. Everyone has a different way of doing it, but I really like what I'm hearingabout the Edwards mandate:

Later today, John Edwards will announce the specifics of how his mandate works. And they're quite good. Whenever you come into contact with the health care system, or whenever you pay your taxes, you will be asked to provide proof of insurance, presumably a policy number or some similar identifier. If you cannot, you will automatically be enrolled in either a public plan that you qualify for (like Medicaid or S-CHIP) or the cheapest plan offered by his Health Insurance Market. Bills will then get sent out, and if they're not paid, will be collected just like the government collects on student loan debts, or taxes, or anything else, using tools up to and including collection agencies and wage garnishment. (It's notable, here, that Edwards doesn't shy away from saying what his stick will be.)

In this way, Edwards' plan is much less an individual mandate and much closer to a government mandate. The burden is less on the individual to seek new insurance and more on the government to simply enroll them in it. From there, they can opt in to a different insurer if they so choose, or simply stay with their default plan. It's a smart and efficient way to move towards universality, and, for now, it puts Edwards ahead of both Obama and Clinton on the substance of the policy, and the speed with which he presented it to the public.

This is the smartest way to quickly and efficiently get everyone in the country covered. And it will take the sting out of those who avoid the hospital for fear of not being able to pay; presumably, those who are indigent will be put on a public plan. In the end this will bring DOWN emergency room costs for constantly dealing with the uninsured. Not sure whether or not Nixon would approve.

Bada Bing Indicted

Bernie Kerik, this is your life:

— Allegedly traded $165,000 worth of renovations on his house from a contractor who wanted a license from the city.

– Used the apartment donated for weary Ground Zero rescue workers into his own personal love nest to use with his mistress.

– Was named in a civil suit in 1999 as “the architect of a system to force prison guards to work for Republicans in their off-hours.”

– Had mob ties that include the best man in his wedding, Lawrence Ray, who was indicted in 2000 along with other organized crime figures in a scheme to manipulate the stock market.

And today, that ended in an indictment on multiple counts of corruption and tax evasion.

Apparently, Rudy has come out and admitted a mistake for not vetting Kerik more vigorously when he was hired as police commissioner.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani said he "made a mistake" by not vetting his former police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, indicted today in a public corruption case. Giuliani also said he wouldn't contribute to Kerik's legal defense fund because it "wouldn't be appropriate."

But Giuliani also said the experience would make him a better president, defended the job Kerik did as police commissioner and compared his former protégé to the late President Richard Nixon -- a man with both flaws and accomplishments.

Somehow, I don't see comparing Kerik to Nixon - you know, in a good way - is going to resonate with the public.

Do We Need Another One Of These?

I really don't think America is going to be willing to again choose a President who can be credibly described as dumb as hell.

Fred Thompson gained an image as a tough-minded investigative counsel for the Senate Watergate committee. Yet President Nixon and his top aides viewed the fellow Republican as a willing, if not too bright, ally, according to White House tapes [...]

Thompson, then 30, was appointed counsel by his political mentor, Tennessee Sen. Howard Baker, the top Republican on the Senate investigative committee. Thompson had been an assistant U.S. attorney in Nashville, Tenn., and had managed Baker's re-election campaign. Thompson later was a senator himself.

Nixon was disappointed with the selection of Thompson, whom he called "dumb as hell." The president did not think Thompson was skilled enough to interrogate unfriendly witnesses and would be outsmarted by the committee's Democratic counsel.

This assessment comes from audio tapes of White House conversations recently reviewed by The Associated Press at the National Archives in College Park, Md., and transcripts of those discussions that are published in "Abuse of Power: The New Watergate Tapes," by historian Stanley Kutler.

"Oh s---, that kid," Nixon said when told by his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, of Thompson's appointment on Feb. 22, 1973.

"Well, we're stuck with him," Haldeman said.

This story is a kind of follow-up to this week's revelation that Thompson was a mole inside the Senate Judiciary Committee, leaking to the White House what the committee knew about Nixon's wrongdoing. Nixon's lawyer, J. Fred Buzhardt was helping Thompson interrogate and discredit witnesses. So he was a spy but an exceedingly stupid one. Maybe that's why he was unsuccessful in saving Nixon's butt.

"We've got a pretty good rapport with Fred Thompson," Buzhardt told Nixon in an Oval Office meeting on June 6, 1973. The meeting included a discussion of former White House counsel John Dean's upcoming testimony before the committee.

Dean, the committee's star witness, had agreed to tell what he knew about the break-in and cover-up if he was granted immunity against anything incriminating he might say.

Nixon expressed concern that Thompson was not "very smart."

"Not extremely so," Buzhardt agreed.

"But he's friendly," Nixon said.

Seeing the lengths to which Thompson was willing to carry water for Tricky Dick, maybe paid Nixon apologist Hugh Hewitt will dump Multiple Choice Mitt Romney and stroll over to Frederick's of Hollywood.

The portrait in this article is of Thompson, at 30, as a partisan hack of the highest order, with no mind of his own whatsoever. And that tracks with this account of Thompson's appearance at a Young Republicans conference this weekend. Would anyone with half a brain, who's been paying any kind of attention over the past 6 years, ever say anything like this?

In his speech, Thompson fired up the crowded when he said he was the top target of The New York Times and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. He said the United States was the greatest country, and that set the audience off, too.

"I'm getting tired of having to apologize for the United States of America around the world," Thompson said. "I'm tired of other people's perceptions that we need to apologize."

You know, I'm tried of apologizing for the United States myself, but considering we haven't done so once in the past six years, despite secret prisons, botched invasions, warrantless wiretapping, torture, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, denial of habeas corpus, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, alienating allies by calling them "Old Europe," lying America into war, lying to the world at the UN, 50 years of illegal covert actions on behalf of American empire, etc., maybe we should practice a little humility for a change.

But that wouldn't mean anything to Thompson because he's too dumb as hell to look beyond his narrow partisan worldview. Like Ezra Klein said earlier this week, it'd be like electing Limbaugh. And the last thing we need in the White House is another dim partisan.

(P.S. I've been slamming Thompson this week because the information is starting to leak out, no doubt by other Republican candidates. You got a problem with it, blame them)

Like Electing Limbaugh

Ezra Klein did the perfect call-out of Fred Thompson yesterday.

It's important to note that Fred Thompson isn't going to be just any Republican. He's going to be a hack Republican. This is not a guy like Romney or Giuliani who's had a period of substantial executive experience, and so, whatever their panders, actually possess some independent idea of how policy works. Thompson is a movement conservative with no particular policy specialties and a deep involvement in the oh-so-substantial world of conservative talk radio. It'll be like electing Limbaugh.

I think this is perfectly sound. Thompson has swallowed whole the conservative noise machine rhetoric of the past decade; indeed, he's PART of the conservative noise machine, with his ABC Radio commentaries (which he is STILL doing while essentially running for President as well, something that sounds perfectly reasonable and fair). That rhetoric bears absolutely no resemblance to the truth, nor to the rigors of public policy, which isn't seen as capable of producing anything positive anyway. He's not even really concerned with writing or understanding legislation, so he'll outsource it to industry, or some unitary vice-executive that worms his way into the inner circle. There would be little or no difference in electing Thompson than there would be in electing Bush.

I mean, you remember this style vs. substance argument from 2000, right?

red Thompson's easygoing, no-nonsense style is clearly his strength and undoubtedly has helped him soar in presidential polls. It may only get him so far.

Sooner or later, the all-but-declared candidate will have to answer the question: What else do you offer? [...]

Top candidates Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and John McCain mix it up daily, taking questions from voters and fleshing out their presidential agendas.

Not Thompson.

His stump speech consists of broad conservative themes, talk of bipartisanship and commentary on issues of the day, but it largely lacks any vision for the future of the country. He deflects questions on what a Thompson presidency would look like and demurs when pressed for specific proposals for how to fix the nation's ills. He opines on hot topics, from taxes to terrorism, in online columns and on his Web site, usually without being challenged. His campaign-trail time is minimal, largely limited to giving speeches at state GOP events.

There's little difference between any of this and the kind of themes in Bush's pre-campaign hackography A Charge To Keep. Bush didn't write that one, it's likely, and I don't think Thompson has any handle on what he's saying either. And on one of the few times we know of where he did exercise independent judgment, it was to spy for Nixon during Watergate, which he admits:

The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.

The article is a doozy. Thompson says that he was so brainwashed and blinded by party that he was convinced of Nixon's innocence, but just in case, he spilled information to the White House every step of the way without authority from the Judiciary Committee. He was a friggin' MOLE for Richard Nixon. And he's running for President 30 years later.

With that kind of judgment, and considering that no public figure has taken a more high-profile or public stand in defending convicted felon Scooter Libby, do you really want 4 or 8 more years of party over justice and country in the White House?

...one thing I forgot to add to this is that I do think the American public is ready to reject style in favor of substance, for once, and that competence will win out (although perhaps not over change, and if someone like Obama can exude competence AND change, he'll be tough to beat). This is essentially what liberals are ALWAYS hoping, but the disaster of the past 6 years does suggest that all hat and no cattle will be shown the door.

SiCKO To My Stomach-O

I spent a good portion of the day at a screening of Michael Moore's SiCKO (finally, this blogging thing gets me a perk!). It's definitely going to get this country talking. One thing I always say about the health care debate is that you cannot easily fool the country into thinking it's going well. Unlike Iraq, which only is happening in news reports and doesn't impact the lives of anyone without a family member or friend over there, everyone in this country has participated in the giant ball of crap that is our health care system. And so the horror stories Moore collects will be quite familiar.

The film's genesis is from a segment on Moore's old show The Awful Truth, when he held a mock funeral out in front of an HMO for a man who was denied an organ transplant. Actually there are almost no confrontations like that in this film. Yet Moore is ever-present, more visible than in Fahrenheit 9/11, despite the fact that many of these stories tell themselves. Yet there is a raw power in hearing from regular people run down by a for-profit health care system that values the bottom line over human life. A lot of the tales are familiar - Blue Cross of California retroactively cancelling anyone who dares to use their insurance coverage for treatment; LA-area hospitals dumping homeless people who couldn't afford to pay their bills at Skid Row in front of social services centers; 9/11 rescue workers contracting respiratory illnesses and having trouble collecting any benefits from the city. There's not much about the drug companies, surprisingly, and little about the value of preventative care. But the fact that we have a broken health care system does shine through. In fact, Moore plays this amazing clip from the Nixon tapes about the origins of the HMO system that almost reads like a parody:

John D. Ehrlichman: “On the … on the health business …”

President Nixon: “Yeah.”

Ehrlichman: “… we have now narrowed down the vice president’s problems on this thing to one issue and that is whether we should include these health maintenance organizations like Edgar Kaiser’s Permanente thing. The vice president just cannot see it. We tried 15 ways from Friday to explain it to him and then help him to understand it. He finally says, ‘Well, I don’t think they’ll work, but if the President thinks it’s a good idea, I’ll support him a hundred percent.’”

President Nixon: “Well, what’s … what’s the judgment?”

Ehrlichman: “Well, everybody else’s judgment very strongly is that we go with it.”

President Nixon: “All right.”

Ehrlichman: “And, uh, uh, he’s the one holdout that we have in the whole office.”

President Nixon: “Say that I … I … I’d tell him I have doubts about it, but I think that it’s, uh, now let me ask you, now you give me your judgment. You know I’m not to keen on any of these damn medical programs.”

Ehrlichman: “This, uh, let me, let me tell you how I am …”

President Nixon: [Unclear.]

Ehrlichman: “This … this is a …”

President Nixon: “I don’t [unclear] …”

Ehrlichman: “… private enterprise one.”

President Nixon: “Well, that appeals to me.”

Ehrlichman: “Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. And the reason that he can … the reason he can do it … I had Edgar Kaiser come in … talk to me about this and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because …”

President Nixon: [Unclear.]

Ehrlichman: “… the less care they give them, the more money they make.”

President Nixon: “Fine.” [Unclear.]

Ehrlichman: [Unclear] “… and the incentives run the right way.”

President Nixon: “Not bad.”

Stunning.

When Moore visits other countries (Canada, England, France, Cuba) to look at their not-for-profit systems, the film is on slightly shakier footing. It was a little odd to see a few minutes of the likes of Bill Frist and Duncan Hunter extolling the great medical care at Guantanamo for detainees (I guess they need it after a full day's torturin'). I understand why he did it, to play on their field and say "Why do we have this great care for Al Qaeda but not for these 9/11 heroes," but it didn't ring true. It also was strange to end the film with this portrait of the great Cuban health care system, when in a graphic earlier in the film of the top countries at delivering health care (the US is 37th), Cuba is BELOW the United States. The stuff with the expats in France, who seemed to be trying to one-up each other ("We get free laundry! We get 10 weeks off! No, 13!") looked odd as well. But there was a great truth in there, where a woman says "In France, the government is afraid of the people, but in America the people are afraid of the government."

This is very true. And the final message of the film, that we are all in this together, that we must think in terms of "We not me" and care for our fellow man, is in the spirit of the common good that underlies most of the progressive movement. Moore tells his tales with a blunt instrument, and yes, he blurs the edges a bit. But not everyone is going to sit and read the 300-page report that underscores the failed health care system in America and the need to adopt a better plan similar to those abroad. We do need to see health care as a basic human right, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as something that is inalienable, and work to provide it to all of our citizens no matter what. And I think this film will inspire discussion along those lines.

The Blueprint

Take a look at this Nixon ad from his 1968 campaign.



Unlike Brink Lindsay, I think this is the blueprint for how the REPUBLICANS will end up talking about Iraq in 2008. There will be two antiwar candidates, at least rhetorically. What the Republican nominee will do is say that he has the best chance to get out of Iraq honorably and in a way that avoids chaos. It will be a lie, but it will attempt to blur the lines on Iraq and make the choice about who has the best plan to get out safely, rather than staying versus leaving. In this way, the Republicans on Iraq will be exactly like Hillary Clinton was on Iraq tonight in the debate.

Team Thompson

So Tim Griffin, the Karl Rove protege and caging expert, is officially resigning as the US Attorney for Arkansas, announcing this on the same day that Fred Thompson announces his exploratory committee. Thompson has been rumored to be in touch with Griffin over hiring him as a campaign manager. We already know that his campaign-manager-in-waiting is a former tobacco industry executive. Now from Rick Perlstein comes news about another Thompson staffer:

I've been reading up on the latest Republican presidential candidate, and in an article in the new Weekly Standard when the following line caught my eye:

The conference call began around 2:00 pm. Ken Rietz, a top executive with Burson Marsteller and a close adviser to Thompson, welcomed the participants."

Kenneth Rietz. I knew I'd heard of that name before.

I used my MacIntosh's function that lets you search for any string of characters that's on your hard drive. I found what I was looking for in my "Watergate" file. The following is a quote from my favorite book about the Nixon presidency, Jonathan Schell's The Time of Illusion (page 221):

In Washington, a taxi-driver was hired by the Nixon reelection committee to join the Muskie campaign. He was taken on as a volunteer, and was eventually assigned the task of carrying the Senator's's mail between his Senate office and his campaign headquarters. On the way he would give the Senator's's campaign documents, including internal memoranda and drafts of speeches and position papers, to a Republican operative whose code name was Fat Jack and who held a post in the Office of Economic Oportunity. Fat Jack would photograph the papers in a downtown office rented for that purpose, and would pass the film along; for the first few months...to Kenneth Rietz, director of the youth division...and then, after Rietz withdrew...to E. Howard Hunt on a Washington Street corner.

A current Republican presidential contender has a Watergate spy as a "close advisor": surely interesting, and perhaps even relevant to the character of the candidate.

I'm telling you, the moment that anybody finds anything out about Thompson, the 20-year lobbyist, whose last two high-profile political jobs were running Scooter Libby's Legal Defense Fund and shepherding John Roberts and Sam Alito through their Supreme Court confirmations, they're going to see that he's the same old Republican, with ties to every low-down dirty trickster in the business.

How Prescient

The I word, which I had put in a drawer and filed away, starting coming back up today solely by virtue of the President's obstinate refusal to accede to imminent subpoenas and turn over documents. That's prescisely the crime, as Atrios notes, on which one of Nixon's impeachment articles hung:

Article 3

In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, contrary to his oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas issued by the Committee on the Judiciary of the House of Representatives on April 11, 1974, May 15, 1974, May 30, 1974, and June 24, 1974, and willfully disobeyed such subpoenas. The subpoenaed papers and things were deemed necessary by the Committee in order to resolve by direct evidence fundamental, factual questions relating to Presidential direction, knowledge or approval of actions demonstrated by other evidence to be substantial grounds for impeachment of the President. In refusing to produce these papers and things Richard M. Nixon, substituting his judgment as to what materials were necessary for the inquiry, interposed the powers of the Presidency against the the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, thereby assuming to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the sole power of impeachment vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives.

And, much like the Nixon years, there is a gap in reporting the documents to Congress, from between mid-November and early December, which is right when the prosecutors were fired.

Gonzales looks to be gone, and if he doesn't step down he could be impeached and even Republicans would back it. But this is a whole other problem now. The President is asserting executive privilege and steeling for a fight for no other reason than his own pigheadedness:

This mini-press conference was the most Nixonian performance of Bush's presidency, and his robotic repetition of the word "reasonable" to characterize his proposal to let Karl Rove, Harriet Miers, and others be interviewed in a shady lagoon (not under oath, no transcripts made) could only remind Watergate buffs of the phrase "modified limited hangout". That's what's so strange about this percolatiing scandal. Instead of defusing it, dousing it, sedating it, Bush & co. have amped it up to a mini-Watergate decibel level of confrontation and document spew, complete with a former Watergate cast member. When Dick Cheney famously told Pat Leahy to go fuck himself, he and the rest of the administration clearly never anticipated the day when Leahy would return to powerful chairmanship; I think they internalized Karl Rove's visionary scheme of a permanent Republican majority and thought the future was in the bag. Now they're holding the bag and it's leaking all over their laps.

What's really at stake here is the whole theory underpinning the Bush, and really the Cheney, theory of government. It's true that this is a major lose-lose for the White House:

1. Karl Rove under oath: a dream come true. Enough said about that.

2. Karl Rove testifies in private, not under oath: public assumes that Rove can't possibly testify under oath without lying and/or incriminating himself. Implication: Rove and Bush have done something wrong.

3. Resist subpoena, claim executive privilege (i.e., no testimony of any kind): public assumes Bush and Rove have something to hide. Leahy's brings resolution citing Rove for contempt of congress. Resolution passes. Congress asks U.S. Attorney (ironic, yes) to bring charges.

--U.S. Attorney does not bring charges: public is reminded that U.S. Attorney was appointed by Bush. We know eight have been fired for not going after Democrats. Is this one of the ones who survived, i.e., a Bush guy? Did he/she not indict for political reasons?

--U.S. Attorney brings charges: litigate. Bush morphs into Nixon. Bush tries to run out the clock until January 2009. While he does, he gets nothing.

But that's not the point. This is about asserting the extreme, royalistic view of unitary executive power that has characterized this Administration from Day One. If Bush gives this up, he gives up every power he's ever asserted. He's painted himself into a corner and has nowhere else to go.

And this time, it's the President who is pushing the country toward impeachment, nobody else.

UPDATE: Kagro X has more, making a similar point that Bush has bet the ranch on this, but also explaining how they can wiggle out of a contempt of Congress...

In its investigative capacity, Congress has adopted for itself the use of a subpoena power that's roughly analogous to that more commonly seen in the judicial and law enforcement system, in which government prosecutors (employees of the executive branch) leverage the power of the judicial branch (in the form of its ability to sentence those brought before it for contempt, should they defy the subpoenas) to ensure compliance with the demands made.

But Congress is not the executive branch. Nor is it the judicial. Its independent enforcement powers are limited to only the most obscure and archaic procedure -- "inherent contempt" -- which hasn't been exercised since 1935, and with good reason: this procedure itself requires a trial before Congress. Not a particularly helpful substitute when you're trying to avoid a trial before Congress [read: impeachment] in the first place.

Instead, Congress depends for its enforcement powers on the executive branch. If you defy a Congressional subpoena, you face the possibility of charges of contempt of Congress, pursuant to the adoption of articles by whichever house is charging you. But those charges are not self-executing. In other words, they're a request that charges be brought. In order to be effective, those charges still have to be prosecuted in court, and that's up to the discretion of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. He's an employee of the "unitary executive," of course, and reports to the Attorney General [...]

That's some game, eh? Enforcement of the contempt power falls to the U.S. Attorneys -- the political strong-arming and contamination of which brought us to this crisis in the first place. Heck, you'd almost think they... planned it.