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Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Attorney firings bring echoes of "Saturday Night Massacre"

Most readers are likely somewhat familiar with the broad outlines of the "Saturday Night Massacre" in 1973, when Richard Nixon fired a Watergate special prosecutor, leading to the resignations of the two top officials at the Justice Department. In many ways that episode has informed American politics for the last thirty-four years. It led to the creation of independent counsels, which later became a tool of the right (I'm looking at you, Kenneth Starr,) and it was a salient moment in the Watergate era that fostered conservative hatred of the media.

The big lie that "the truth is liberal," as Stephen Colbert might put it, in many ways owes its existence to the Watergate scandal. In the conservative movement, any person or institution that tries to challenge their power is to be destroyed, facts be damned. Starting with Archibald Cox and continuing down through the years, we've witnessed the flagrant disregard for Congress and the law (Iran-Contra,) the "politics of personal destruction," (Whitewater and the Blue Dress Affair,) and the career-wrecking personal attacks on patriotic military and diplomatic professionals (Shinseki, Clarke and Plame, to name a few.)

Some things never change, it seems. The politically motivated firings of the US attorneys by the Bush administration may have superficial differences from what happened during the Nixon years, but at its core the sickness is the same.

And now that the Prosecutor Purge is at full tilt, we can take an interesting look at some of the original reporting about the "Saturday Night Massacre," thanks to the Internet and The Washington Post, which has this Carroll Kilpatrick story from Oct. 21, 1973, amongst its on-line Watergate collection:
In the most traumatic government upheaval of the Watergate crisis, President Nixon yesterday discharged Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and accepted the resignations of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus.

The President also abolished the office of the special prosecutor and turned over to the Justice Department the entire responsibility for further investigation and prosecution of suspects and defendants in Watergate and related cases.

Shortly after the White House announcement, FBI agents sealed off the offices of Richardson and Ruckelshaus in the Justice Department and at Cox's headquarters in an office building on K Street NW.

An FBI spokesman said the agents moved in "at the request of the White House."
Obviously, Nixon was trying to protect himself from damaging revelations that were an immediate threat to his political survival. So there is that superficial difference from Prosecutor Purge.

But the difference isn't all that profound. Why have the Bush administration and state Republican parties been so adamant that they simply must find evidence of "Democratic vote fraud?" As always, it's part of the "see, all politicians are crooks" argument. If the GOP can convince the media and the citizenry that Democrats are just as crooked as them, the advantage goes to the GOP, which actually did engage in the systematic exlusion of African American voters in Florida in the year 2000. The vote in Ohio in 2004 actually did feature outrageous abuses of power by a Republican secretary of state. Here in Washington, GOP leaders really did try to short-circuit elections law and procedures and bully their way into the governor's mansion.

In short, it's all about politics. For all the years that Karl Rove was touted as a "political genius," it turns out that he is and always has been nothing more than a glorified thug. It's far past time for Rove to be invited to appear before full US Senate committees, live on all networks, and do some explaining. If Rove should decline the invitation, he should be compelled to appear. The American people deserve answers about why their government, which belongs to everyone after all, was yet again turned into an extension of the Republican Party.

And the hearings should be held during prime time. On a Saturday night.

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