Why little Gonzogate might be Bush's Watergate (not why you think)

At first I thought it was really odd that this Gonzales business was what Congress and the press latched onto to unravel Bush. But if you think about the parallels with Nixon, it makes sense. Was Watergate the worst thing Nixon did in office? Probably not by a country mile. The illegal bombing of Cambodia, overthrowing the elected president of Chile, and Operation Condor in general did far more damage and led to the deaths of tens of thousands.

But if you started to pull on those threads, they'd lead back to some big corporate players, like ITT, United Fruit, and whoever the hell it was that thought a decade of war in Southeast Asia was a good idea. Those people would not want their business discussed when everyone was watching. Instead, they pulled on a thread that was impeachable, but only led to a handful of political operatives, a dead end.

In the same way, if you pulled on the bigger threads with Bush, Enron, New Orleans, Iraq, 9/11, not only does it lead to willful indifference to human suffering and even the gleeful exploitation of it for profit, but it leads to the administration doing it as the agents of the largest corporations in the world. Once you start to go down that road in public hearings, people might forget about abortion, gays, Anna Nicole Smith and whether Harry Potter is dangerous long enough to demand a break up of some of these corporations into a thousand pieces as was done a hundred years ago with Standard Oil.

Better to take care of the problem exactly the way Bush did the first couple of years: make someone in the administration the scapegoat, get all public hatred and scorn focused on him, them remove him from sight so people think the problem is solved. This peek-a-boo game has gone through one or two cycles with Karl Rove, and it worked once or twice with Rummy before they finally really gave him the boot.

Now the same thing will be done to the whole administration. They be will taken down by a scandal that has roots no deeper than Bush's equivalent on Tattoo on Fantasy Island, Alberto Gonzales.

The media will tsk and cluck about those crazy, out of control ideologue neocons, and foreign policy establishment types like Zbigniew Brzezinski will write op-ed about how wrong-headed the very foundations of Bush's policies are even though he himself built the molds Bush poured the concrete in. Neither Brzezinski nor the Bushies are ideologues. They are businessmen, who sell the same product. Brzezinski with gravitas and Bush with a lynch mob and Jesus. To the elite, Bush's sin is that he is a bad salesman. He gave us a hat full of shit, and couldn't convince us it was a chocolate cake for long enough.

The Lyndie Englands of this era will go to prison, Bush and Cheney may go into involuntary early retirement, but those profited and stood to profit by Bush's actions, who told their papers and networks to salute so their oil and defense stocks would be shoot through the roof, they will escape unscathed.

If we were a people of laws, with equal laws for all, the soldiers tried for atrocities and torture would not serve one day more in prison than the heartless bastards in their mahogony lined country clubs. In fact, before a single soldier is convicted of any wrong-doing, the masters of war should be tried as mass murderers of hundreds of thousands. The foot soldiers should at worst get Pinochets fate of wondering if they will ever see prison even in last days of their life, and the masters of war should wonder if they will ever get some privacy while they are taking a shit on a steel toilet bolted to the wall of their cell.


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