Is this the Rovian move? No massacre .. but a boss who can order how Fitz does his job ?
Note 3rd paragraph !!!


Prosecutor Nominated As Justice No. 2
Saturday October 22, 2005 12:46 AM


By MARK SHERMAN

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Paul McNulty, a federal prosecutor in Virginia, was chosen Friday by President Bush to serve as the No. 2 Justice Department official, following the withdrawal of a nominee who faced questions about his business ties.

As the U. S. Attorney in Alexandria, Va., since 2001, McNulty has prosecuted several high-profile terrorism cases. Earlier this year, McNulty's office obtained a guilty plea from Zacarias Moussaoui, who admitted to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers and now could face the death penalty.

His nomination as deputy Attorney General must be confirmed by the Senate, but the White House announcement said he would serve in an acting capacity until then. The post has been vacant since James Comey resigned in August.

Bush's previous nominee for deputy Attorney General, Timothy E. Flanigan, withdrew his nomination in early October, citing uncertainty over when he would be confirmed. Senators complained that Flanigan lacked prosecutorial experience and also questioned his dealings with indicted Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

McNulty, 47, is well-known on Capitol Hill. He served as spokesman for House Judiciary Committee Republicans during the impeachment of President Clinton. He later directed the Bush transition team for the Justice Department and worked in the deputy's office until Bush appointed him to the prosecutor's job in Virginia.

In the administration of President George H.W. Bush, McNulty served as the department's director of policy and communication.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/stor...5361404,00.html

I think it's too late to derail this train.

Oh Lord! do I hope you are right!

But if he assumes his duties immediately in an acting capacity he could order Fitz to issue NO indictments and to close the investigation . Would Fitz disobey a direct order ?

It is exactly the type of thing this administration would do and believe they could get away with.

They even issued new talking points TODAY attacking Wilson.

It's okay, for the matter at hand, Fitzgerald IS the attorney general.

Comey has also stated that Fitzgerald cannot be removed from the case, and in any event, it would be political suicide and an admission of guilt to remove him one week prior to the end of the investigation.


The Honorable Patrick J. Fitzgerald
United States Attorney
219 S. Dearborn Street
Chicago, IL 60604

Dear Patrick,
By the authority vested in the Attorney General by law, including 28 U. S .C. §§ 509, 510, and 515, and in my capacity as Acting Attorney General pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 508, I hereby delegate to you all the authority of the Attorney General with respect to the Department's investigation into the alleged unauthorized disclosure of a CIA employee's identity, and I direct you to exercise that authority as Special Counsel independent of the supervision or control of any officer of the Department.
/s/ James B. Comey James B. Comey Acting Attorney General

But does Comey's authority hold true ? He has been gone since August hasn't he ?

This administration doesn't care about the law and believes they can mold public opinion to suit themselves. Their arrogance is all encompassing.

I am praying you are right.

The day this would be derailed, is the day before Bush would be impeached.

The day Nixon fired Cox was the beginning of the end- although it took 10 months til it happened.

If this should go on another 10 months, right before election 2006, it would benefit us nicely.

This is a no-issue.

As said, I don't believe Alberto Gonzales would sabatoge his life if asked
anymore either.

Same as I said months ago- once people are going down, they cannot easily get people to do dirty work for them

I accept that I am probably panicking for nothing . I found this in a British newspaper. Has anyone seen it in a US paper ? I remember Watergate too well and this mess is getting too close to Bush.

And the GOP didn't own Congress during Watergate.

I believe this guy is Fitzgerald's boss in his role as U.S. Attorney for the Chicago area. But I don't that applies to his role as Special Counsel in this investigation. So this guy could technically fire Fitzgerald from his 'day job', but not from this investigation.

On the other hand, I'm not so sure about Alberto Gonzales...

Not good. Not good. This guy is obviously far more "political" than Fitzgerald. Perhaps that is why Fitzgerald has not announced his findings yet?

If he seeks to put the breaks on this prosecution maybe the Republicans in the Senate will show some guts and immediately schedule confirmation hearings to deny his nomination. One can only hope. Maybe this is an indication of why Fitzgerald started the website. Maybe he pushed back and said you do it and I will make you pay.

Wow, did Comey expect something like this to happen? Was this his way to try to head it off? Remember the Bush Administration tried to get someone in there earlier but their person had to withdraw because of the Abramoff connection. Were they hoping to shut this down long before this new appointment? If, the Whitehouse is trying to shut this down then this case is obviously bigger than Plamegate.

What worries me is not that he fires Fitz... they aren't that stupid. But they could be trying to direct how he proceeds. Would Fitz knuckle under ? Or would he chuck his career on a matter of principle ?

Make no mistake .. this administration will do anything to hold on to power. ANYTHING. And if there is now talk that there may be proof Bush lied to Congress before the war that is an impeachable offense.

Is the Comey letter on the new Fitzgerald website?

Flanigan never took on the position in an acting capacity and he withdrew his nomination later because of ties to Abramoff. This guy is assuming his duties immediately. That's what rang the alarm bells with me.

Just based upon what I have read about Fitz. my opinion is that he would fight them tooth and nail. I don't think that if he found criminal behavior that he is going to look the other way for political purposes. He isn't stupid. He knows what happened in Watergate during the Saturday night massacre.

I'm so glad that it is Fitzgerald and not some politico like Star. Star would dump the prosecution.

If the administration could have derailed this, they have a long time ago. There was no reason to wait. It's that simple, so stop worrying.

I just checked. There are several Comey letters there. I didn't read all of them but all I did read pertain to Fitz's authority. They are Acrobat files and I couldn't copy them.

That site didn't go up by coincidence today!

He never took on the position in an acting capacity because the Whitehouse assumed he would be confirmed quickly and the investigation was not being speculated about in the press like it is today.

It's only in the past few days that there have been rumours that Fitz was investigating the prewar actions by the Administration. Maybe they didn't expect him to delve further. And unless I read Comey wrong he gave Fitz the authority to investigate any avenue he chose.

Fitz has not divulged even to the administration where he was going or what he knows. They may be only realizing how serious this really may be.

There is something you don't seem to know about US Attorneys or Special Prosecutors. They do not work under the direct supervison of the Attorney General. They are, in every sense of the word, their own boss. It's an unusual thing for any government office to work that way, but it is like that in DOJ that for a very good reason.

As for chucking his career, based on everything I have heard about Fitzgerald, he could get a job anywhere in the country at 10 times his current salary if he wanted to. He has nothing to worry about no matter what he does.

It's only in the past few days that those rumors became national news. The rumors themselves are over a year old. A year ago, Fitzgerald received permission from the judge to "expand his investigation." I am sure the administration noticed even if you didn't, and if they were going to stop him, the time was then, before he started, not now that he is finished and all of the evidence is already gathered and surely well secured.

You're right. I am not familiar with the procedures and rules. I'm not American remember. I haven't had occasion to educate myself about this before now. I perhaps just have a suspicious mind when it comes to the NEO CON and RR mindset, with which I AM all too familiar I have learned to never, ever underestimate their chicanery.

I hope that you are right.

I sure wish that I could be as sure as you are that there is nothing to worry about. The bottom line for me is that we don't know at this point what Fitzgerald and his staff have uncovered. He could have information on the President that he didn't have before. In addition, how do we know that they didn't try to derail this train but were prevented by people who would not do it.

Remember when they moved Gonzales to the AG role. He recused himself from this case. Obviously Gonzalez was not going to carry water for them. They found Flanigan and might have thought that they had their man but they ran up against some unexpected opposition. Flanigan bailed on them and they had to find someone else. Maybe the Harriet Miers nomination was so botched because they were spending all of their time trying to find someone that they could nominate that would be willing to step in and put the breaks on Fitzgerald.

Like I said, I hope you are right and our suspicions are unfounded. But until we see what happens with Fitzgerald I'm not going to rest easy. With this Whitehouse I'm just not willing to take things at face value anymore.

Most Americans don't know how DOJ works. I only know it because I have had contact with government attorneys through my work.

I am a little less worried since going back to Fitzgerald's site and seeing those letters there. If this is what they are trying to do , it looks to me as if he is not buckling under. Why did that site go up today ? How long has this investigation been going on ? And only today they found time to put up the web site?

I am hoping that is a sign he has drawn a line in the sand.

The letter does appear on Fitzgeralds website and is worded exactly as it is here. Does anyone know if giving Mr. Fitzgerald this power as acting AG is unusual?

The investigation has been going on for two years.

Part of my reasoning in this is the one thing we do know -- everyone who has seen this, including loyal Repub wingnuts like Ashcroft and Gonzales have either refused to touch it altogether, or have said that it involves both a serious crime and a serious breach of national security. That means a line of CIA officials up to George Tenet. A line of DOJ officials up to Ashcroft. A line of judges up to SCOTUS. All reacted with great concern or ran screaming from the room.

While we don't know what that breach is, to my thinking, it would have be big enough to scare away the likes of Ashcroft, who is pretty scary himself.

As I stated previously I don't think Fitzgerald will knuckle under but I don't discount the idea that this adminstration might try to make him close up shop, especially if he has a blockbuster charge.

Fitzgerald has a reputation for running a tight ship. He was not supposed to talk about his investigation and he didn't. So he didn't need a website. But once the indictments are handed up, he will be able to talk about it. So he will need a website to put out official information. He knows a million people will want to look at the indictments. So that's what the website is for.

I certainly agree that this is looking more and more like a case much bigger than Plame if we are to believe what we have read so far. There are just too many people stepping out and going after this administration.

My worry is that they do find a crony that is willing to try to stop this thing and we have a "situation" once again in Washington like we did with Watergate. Remember it was not clear after the Saturday night massacre if President Nixon would follow the rule of law. There was a point when people were very worried that he might fight instead of what he ended up doing. If it is something huge I just don't have the confidence that this president and some of the neocons would go quietly into the night.

Can Bush dismiss Fitzgerald?

No question, you make eminently good sense. I will only believe it when I see the indictments however . This administration has a way of twisting truth and ignoring the law that is as extreme as any banana republic dictatorship. And they have all their ducks in a row. The House , the Senate, and conceivably the Supreme Court. I know that sounds far fetched but look at their history.

I really believe that they will stop at nothing to hold on to power. And if Fitz has the dynamite which could blow up their ship of state they will do whatever it takes.

You have no idea how much I am hoping you can say I told you so and laugh at me next week. You can even call me a stupid fool and I'll agree publicly !

If he did that it would be as good as an admission of guilt. Even the Congress would desert him then to save their own skins. That would make every American who cares about truth stand up and take notice .. particularly when American troops are dying every day because of his decisions. That would be perceived as the reason he stopped the investigation now, because the press is now talking about the fact that Fitz may be going there.

Ditto. I would very much like to have my worries about this to be totally unfounded. But the plain simple truth is that I don't trust the Bush administration one bit and until this plays out I will not rule out any scenario.

I will disagree with you about calling yourself a stupid fool. You are not a stupid fool for considering all of the possiblities. You may end up wrong to have worried about it but neither of us is wrong to contemplate the possiblity if we believe that the possiblity exists.

It's a deal!!!

And do not forget the DC based Grand Juryers who hear all the evidence. You would have to kill all of them in a terrorist attack to really stop all of the knowledge from leaking out.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 22, 2005
Leak Prosecutor Is Called Exacting and Apolitical
By SCOTT SHANE and DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 19 - In 13 years prosecuting mobsters and terrorists in New York, Patrick J. Fitzgerald earned a public reputation for meticulous preparation, a flawless memory and an easy eloquence. Only his colleagues knew that these orderly achievements emerged from the near-total anarchy of his office, where the relentless Mr. Fitzgerald often slept during big cases.

"You'd open a drawer, looking for a pen or Post-it notes, and it would be full of dirty socks," recalled Karen Patton Seymour, a former assistant United States attorney who tried a major case with him. "He was a mess. Food here, clothes there, papers everywhere. But behind all that was a totally organized mind."

That mind, which has taken on Al Qaeda and the Gambino crime family, is now focused on the most politically volatile case of Mr. Fitzgerald's career. As the special prosecutor who has directed the C.I.A. leak investigation, he is expected to decide within days who, if anyone, will be charged with a crime.

To seek indictments against the White House officials caught up in the inquiry would deliver a devastating blow to the Bush administration. To simply walk away after two years of investigation, which included the jailing of a reporter for 85 days for refusing to testify, would invite cries of cover-up and waste.

Yet Mr. Fitzgerald's past courtroom allies and adversaries say that consideration of political consequences will play no role in his decision.

"I don't think the prospect of a firestorm would deter him," said J. Gilmore Childers, who worked with Mr. Fitzgerald on high-profile terrorism prosecutions in New York during the 1990s. "His only calculus is to do the right thing as he sees it."

Stanley L. Cohen, a New York lawyer who has defended those accused of terrorism in a half-dozen cases prosecuted by Mr. Fitzgerald, said he never detected the slightest political leanings, only a single-minded dedication to the law.

"There's no doubt in my mind that if he's found something, he won't be swayed one way or the other by the politics of it," Mr. Cohen said. "For Pat, there's no such thing as a little crime you can ignore."

Mr. Fitzgerald, 44, whose regular job is as the United States attorney in Chicago, is a hard man to pigeonhole. The son of Irish immigrants - his father, Patrick Sr., was a Manhattan doorman - he graduated from Amherst College and Harvard Law School. Though he is a workaholic who sends e-mail messages to subordinates at 2 a.m. and has never married, friends say the man they call Fitzie is a hilarious raconteur and great company for beer and baseball. Ruthless in his pursuit of criminals, he once went to considerable trouble to adopt a cat.

"He's a prankster and a practical joker," said Ms. Seymour, who now practices law in New York, recalling when Mr. Fitzgerald drafted a fake judge's opinion denying a key motion and had it delivered to a colleague. "But he's also brilliant. When he's trying a complicated case, there's no detail he can't recall."

Mr. Fitzgerald was appointed in December 2003 by James B. Comey, then the deputy attorney general and an old friend, to investigate the disclosure in a column by Robert Novak of the identity of an undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, Valerie Wilson, also referred to by her maiden name, Valerie Plame. Her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former diplomat who had traveled to Niger on behalf of the C.I.A. to check on reports that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was seeking uranium there, had publicly accused the White House of twisting the evidence to justify war against Iraq.

Lawyers involved in the case say Mr. Fitzgerald appears to be examining whether high-level officials who spoke to reporters about the Wilsons sought to mislead prosecutors about their discussions. Those under scrutiny include Karl Rove, the top political adviser to President Bush, and I. Lewis Libby Jr., the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

In grand jury sessions, Mr. Fitzgerald has struck witnesses as polite and exacting. Matthew Cooper, a Time magazine reporter who wrote about his two and half hours of testimony, said that the prosecutor's questions were asked "in microscopic, excruciating detail."

Before he testified, Mr. Cooper recalled that Mr. Fitzgerald counseled him to say what he remembered and no more. "If I show you a picture of your kindergarten teacher and it really refreshes your memory say so," Mr. Cooper wrote, quoting Mr. Fitzgerald. "If it doesn't, don't say yes just because I show you a photo of you and her sitting together."

Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who wrote about her two grand jury appearances, said that Mr. Fitzgerald asked questions that reflected a deep knowledge of the leak case as he led her through her dealings with Mr. Libby.

Mr. Fitzgerald has drawn criticism from press advocates for his aggressive pursuit of journalists he believes may have been told about the secret C.I.A. employment of Ms. Wilson. Ms. Miller served nearly three months in jail this summer before agreeing to testify. In pursuing leads that have made him a threat to the White House, Mr. Fitzgerald is following a pattern set by previous special prosecutors. Some allies of the White House complain privately that he has taken on some of the worst traits of his predecessors. Republicans criticized Lawrence E. Walsh for his handling of the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan administration, while Democrats attacked Kenneth W. Starr's performance in the Whitewater probe and Monica Lewinsky sex scandal under President Clinton. The two prosecutors operated under the independent counsel law, which both parties let die in 1999.

Katy J. Harriger, a political scientist at Wake Forest University who has studied special prosecutors, said that Mr. Fitzgerald had some advantages over his predecessors. He has essentially all the powers of the attorney general to chase evidence, question witnesses and seek charges. Unlike Mr. Walsh and Mr. Starr, both former judges, Mr. Fitzgerald is a career prosecutor. And as a Bush administration appointee, he is less vulnerable to attack from the White House.

"It will be much harder than it was with Starr to say this is a partisan prosecution," Ms. Harriger said.

Some attorneys who admire Mr. Fitzgerald detect a hint of zealotry or inflexibility in his approach and wonder whether what works with terrorism translates to an inside-the-Beltway case involving White House officials and their multilayered relationships with journalists.

In Mr. Fitzgerald's world, a former colleague recalled, it was pretty clear who had black hats and who had white hats, there was not a lot of gray.

But Mr. Cohen, whose defense work on behalf of Hamas and other groups has provoked controversy, says he has always found Mr. Fitzgerald willing to listen, and to distinguish between militant rhetoric and genuine terrorist plotting. "If I need a straight answer from a federal prosecutor, I call Pat," Mr. Cohen said.

Mr. Fitzgerald's moral grounding began at Our Lady Help of Christians school in his native Brooklyn. He attended Regis High School, a Jesuit institution in Manhattan for gifted students, all of whom attend on scholarship. At Amherst, where he majored in math and economics, he was an unassuming kid with a New York accent who was a stellar student, one others frequently turned to for help, recalled Walter Nicholson, an economics professor.

At Amherst, he worked part time as a custodian; in the summers during college and law school, his father helped him find work as a doorman.

After three years in private practice, he joined the United States attorney's office for the southern district of New York and quickly distinguished himself.

"I've tried a lot of cases, and he's probably the toughest adversary I've ever seen," said Roger L. Stavis, a New York defense lawyer who faced Mr. Fitzgerald during the 1995 terrorism trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Mr. Stavis prided himself on knowing the web of Muslim extremists but was surprised when Mr. Fitzgerald asked a witness about Osama bin Laden, then an obscure figure.

"I thought, 'I don't know who Osama bin Laden is, but he's in Pat Fitzgerald's crosshairs,' " Mr. Stavis said. In 2001, Mr. Fitzgerald led the team that convicted four men in the 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa.

During his time in New York, Mr. Fitzgerald's hapless bachelor ways became legendary. For months he did not bother to have the gas connected to the stove in his Brooklyn apartment. Once, in a fit of domesticity, he baked two pans of lasagna, recalled Amy E. Millard, a New York colleague. Distracted by work, he left them uneaten in the oven for three months before he discovered them, Ms. Millard said. When he tried to adopt a cat, she remembered, he was turned down because of his work habits and only later acquired a pet when a friend in Florida had to give up her cat and had it flown to him to New York.

Some of the cases Mr. Fitzgerald handled after moving to Chicago in 2001 have expanded his experience into the sensitive and murky arena of political corruption. He indicted a former governor of Illinois, George Ryan, in a scandal involving the Illinois secretary of state's office, as well as two aides to Mayor Richard Daley on mail-fraud charges.

But those cases bear little resemblance to the C.I.A. leak investigation, with its potential implications for national politics. Samuel W. Seymour, another former New York prosecutor and Karen's husband, said it is easy to politically "triangulate" most government lawyers, noting which were mentored by Democrats or promoted by Republicans. But not Mr. Fitzgerald.

"Some people may feel he's independent to a fault, because his independence makes him unpredictable," Mr. Seymour said. "I think it makes him the perfect person for this job."

I don't want to go too far afield into speculating about what they might or might not do because I don't know and I don't want to sound like some nutcase who is convinced that they know exactly what will happen.

I just know that when the Saturday night massacre happened in Watergate none of us knew if the President would follow the rule of law and it was a very tense situation. As it turned out Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford was sworn in and our democracy survived.

Now we have another potential situation where we have a prosecutor that is investigating the WH. If it should turn out that he has uncovered something within our government that would topple the people in power (I don't know if he has) all I am saying is that we can not automatically assume that they will just accept that they got caught and leave like Nixon did. We really don't know what they are capable of doing. If we don't know I submit that we can not really rule anything in or out. We can't automatically assume that we are dealing with rationale people that respect the rule of law. THey may, but they may not. In light of this wouldn't it be prudent to consider all possibilites?

In order to reassure us that nothing will happen you mention that they would have to kill the grand jury members in order to keep the knowledge from coming out . I would say that that is not necessarily true. They would not necessarily have to kill the grand jury members. All they would have to do is to discredit the process. They can fully admit that whatever evidence was presented was actually presented. If they wanted to they could make up some bogus story about how the investigation is not legimate. Hell, if they wanted to they could play their terrorist card. They could say that they uncovered a terrorist plot to infiltrate our government but let it play out so that they could catch all the players. They could then go out and "round up" all of the traitors. Far fetched? Probably, but then again who knows. THey were pretty darned good at convincing the American people that Kerry didn't deserve his medals and that Bush could protect us better. They have proven that they are very good at making the American people believe that day is night and night is day.

My point is that because we don't know what is happening in the grand jury room or what is happening at the WH that we need to keep an open mind. Anything is possible. It could end up that Fitzgerald doesn't indict anyone because he didn't find enough evidence that they violated the law.

In my mind there is a huge difference between being a conspiracy nut and considering all of the possibilities. Remember conspiracy nuts are usually certain about what they think they know. We freely admit that we just don't know and that is why we can not automatically accept that the rational version that one would expect to happen will in fact happen.

If any of what you describe were to occur, there will be hell to pay big time in this country. I lived through the Saturday Night Massacre etc. There is a system of checks and balances in this country - and if this unfolds next week to trigger your concerns, at least it has happened before Bush has had the opportunity to pack the Supreme Court. Congress will not confirm a new Supreme Court Justice, at least not Harriot Miers, within a short period of time.

On the otherhand, there is this view:
http://www.antiwar.com/solomon/?articleid=7729


Media at a Huge Crossroads, 25 Years After Reagan's Triumph

by Norman Solomon
By a twist of political fate, the Oct. 28 deadline for special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to take action on the Plamegate matter is exactly 25 years after the only debate of the presidential race between Ronald Reagan and incumbent Jimmy Carter. How the major media outlets choose to handle the current explosive scandal in the months ahead will have enormous impacts on the trajectory of American politics.

A quarter of a century ago, conservative Republicans captured the White House. Today, a more extreme incarnation of the GOP's right wing has a firm grip on the executive branch. None of it would have been possible without a largely deferential press corps.

Among other things, Reagan's victory over Carter was a media triumph of style in the service of far-right agendas. When their only debate occurred on Oct. 28, 1980, a week before the election, Carter looked rigid and defensive while Reagan seemed at ease, making impact with zingers like "There you go again." More than ever, one-liners dazzled the press corps.

For the next eight years, a "Teflon presidency" had the news media making excuses for the nation's chief executive, who often got his facts wrong while substituting folksy exclamations for documented assertions. The Democratic Party's majorities on Capitol Hill rarely challenged Reagan, and the Washington press corps used the passivity of the Democrats to justify its own. As Walter Karp wrote in Harper's magazine a few months after Reagan left office, "the private story behind every major non-story during the Reagan administration was the Democrats' tacit alliance with Reagan."

That tacit alliance included going easy on Reagan and his vice-president-turned-successor, George H.W. Bush – despite the Iran-Contra scandal that exposed their roles in the illegal funneling of aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, a CIA-backed army that intentionally killed civilians in Nicaragua while trying to implement Washington's goal of overthrowing the Sandinista government.

"For eight years," Karp wrote in mid-1989, "the Democratic opposition had shielded from the public a feckless, lawless president with an appalling appetite for private power. That was the story of the Reagan years, and Washington journalists evidently knew it. Yet they never turned the collusive politics of the Democratic Party into news."

Today, words like "feckless" and "lawless" seem like understatements when applied to the current president. A pattern of mendacity, callousness and appalling priorities has brought deadly consequences from Baghdad to New Orleans. The administration appears to be nearly drowning in scandals. Yet the news media – again with notable assists from Democratic leaders in Congress – are doing much to keep the Bush regime afloat.

Predictably, the Oct. 15 referendum on a constitution in Iraq provided the Bush administration with a new opportunity to roll out a retooled line of propaganda vehicles. A manipulative process, massaged under the duress of occupation, yielded a "yes" vote among Iraqis who chose to participate. Seen through a narrow lens – keeping the carnage and intimidation out of the frame – the election was a victory for democracy. Seen more broadly, it was a travesty.

Like two decades ago, the absence of tough Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill – combined with an overly respectful press – enables the White House to retain extensive political leverage. While the day of reckoning in human terms is every day in Iraq, the political day of reckoning on Iraq policy has yet to come in Washington. And at the rate things are going, many more years will pass before the need for withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq becomes incontrovertible in American media and politics.

Part of the Reagan legacy is the Washington press corps' refusal to ask tough questions with even tougher follow-ups. Although the polls say that President Bush and his Iraq policies are very unpopular, Democrats in Congress and reporters are still hanging back. Their polemical statements and probing stories are the political and journalistic equivalents of slapping the wrist rather than going for the jugular.

Nothing is more dangerous than a cornered wild beast. And if the day comes that its political survival appears to be at stake, the Bush administration will counterattack with extreme ferocity. Judging from the past, there are solid reasons to doubt that the press corps – and leaders of the overly loyal opposition – are inclined to pursue key issues of White House deception to the point that the administration will be truly backed into a corner. As usual, the tasks of demanding truth and affecting the course of history for the better will fall to independent journalists and grassroots activists.

I lived through it too. It was very tense.

If that horrible description were to occur I don't think he would worry too much about using the Supreme Court. He will probably just go straight for the military to retain power.

Just in case anyone thinks that I am saying that this WILL happen I would like to repeat that my description was merely to illustrate the point of why it is important to keep an open mind.

Pardon my ignorance, but can someone please describe what is meant by the 'Saturday Night Massacre'? It sounds like the series of events that led to Nixon's resignation, but I'm not certain of that. I was a child when Watergate happened, and I don't recall hearing the term before.

If he uses the military to retain power it will be the last mistake he'll ever make, a lot of people take the oath to protect and defend the constitution seriously.

Nixon couldn't stop the Watergate investigation so he started firing people who were investigating, this abuse of power was pivotal in his being forced to leave office.

Thanks!

However, Starr, as he realizes now, freaked up his career but good.
He was on all Republicans short list to be Supreme Court Justice.

After Clinton, well, those dreams died hard.

I do not believe Starr would have dumped it, although the situation is not the same.

And again, I do not believe Alberto Gonzales will ruin his career further for Bush.
Especially as Bush stabbed hiim in the back nominating Miers and not him.

And Fitz cannot be shut up. And won't.

The only reason I can see for the website is for the indictments.
Fit already said he would not release a final report, meaning the indictments will
have to be tried and there is no final report

You are correct to surmise that it was a series of events that led to Nixon's resignation. However the Saturday Night Massacre is the description of a series of events that happened on a Saturday night. Nixon fired the Attorney General who refused to call off the investigation. When the Deputy Attorney General similarly refused to implement Nixon's order, he also resigned in protest. This is just a very brief description. But it was the firing of the Attorney General that remains etched in everyone's mind.

Good article Snuffy. It really goes to the heart of what is wrong with the Democratic Party. It is their failure to be a true opposition party. How did we get from tough cookies like Truman to wimps like Daschle?

That and the fact that Robert Bork was willing to fire the prosecutor and did so.