A Couple of Good Billman Hits

First, we have The Friday Flush. Here's one wipe from the piece:

I doubt few "mainstream" journalists are prepared to consider – much less cope with – the possibility that the U.S. government is waging information warfare against them (and, by extension, against the American people), even though Rummy and company long ago all but declared their intention of doing just that.

(emphasis added)

Read the rest of his post, it's, as usual, worth it.

& secondly, we have this from The Whiskey Bar, Sore Throat, indeed. It has been amazing how Pat Buchanan continues to lose his mind on TV. I mean, it's like watching that old, old movie called Rage, in which the frothing at the mouth guy had rabies. Maybe that is Buchanan's problem, undiagnosed rabies. Pat, I urge you to have a doctor check it out. Please.

Read it all, but here's some good medicine from the piece:

And yet, as this week's nostalgic caterwauling over Deep Throat indicates, justice has not been done, and isn't likely to be done in our lifetimes.

I can think of some specific, institutional reasons for that failure:

* Bush's crimes are more deeply embedded in his presidential war powers than Nixon's were (although heaven knows Nixon also tried to hide behind those same powers.)

* One party rule has choked off investigations armed with the subpoena power to go where journalists and the ACLU cannot tread.

* The administration's cunning use of extra-territoriality and military secrecy has made it vastly harder for any would-be Judge Siricas to pierce the veil of executive privilege.

* Last but hardly least, the weapons of information warfare in the Bush White House propaganda armory are infinitely more subtle, powerful and effective than the Nixon stonewall. Or, as Salon puts it:

The Bush administration has developed so many ways of manipulating information that anonymous sourcing would now be of little use. Secret "military" tribunals, indefinite detention without charge, torture, kidnapping, dressing up official press releases as news stories for complicit publishers –these all make the Watergate coverup seem quaint.