Friday, August 26, 2005
Summertime Blues
I remember watching the Watergate Hearings in the summer of '73 with a sense of awe toward our institutions' self-correcting capacity. (I was only twenty years old.) By the time these same structures got around to Iran-Contra twelve years later, though, I'd managed to acquire a healthier skepticism.
But the scale of the ReaganBush corruption seems almost amateurish by the CheneyBush standards. Perhaps they were merely testing the water to see how far criminality might be extended without serious consequence. As it turned out in the summer of '85, the answer was pretty far.
And now that Bush II--like Nixon and Reagan, also in the first summer of his second term at the time of imminent reports by special prosecutors investigating high crimes in the Oval Office--begins to feel the winds of felonious failure, I am curious just how The FUBAR Presidency will respond.
But the scale of the ReaganBush corruption seems almost amateurish by the CheneyBush standards. Perhaps they were merely testing the water to see how far criminality might be extended without serious consequence. As it turned out in the summer of '85, the answer was pretty far.
And now that Bush II--like Nixon and Reagan, also in the first summer of his second term at the time of imminent reports by special prosecutors investigating high crimes in the Oval Office--begins to feel the winds of felonious failure, I am curious just how The FUBAR Presidency will respond.
