Olbermann Channels the Zeitgeist

I'd heard that Keith Olbermann did an excellent commentary on the whole Scooter Libby commutation thing, but I didn't get a chance to see it or read the transcript until this evening. Crooks and Liars has the video and transcript, so give it a look. In one segment, he compares Bush's action here to Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre.

When President Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous "Saturday Night Massacre" on October 20th, 1973, Mr. Cox initially responded tersely, and ominously:

"Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men, is now for Congress, and ultimately, the American people."

President Nixon did not understand how he had crystallized the issue of Watergate for the American people.

It had been about the obscure meaning behind an attempt to break in to a rival party's headquarters; and the labyrinthine effort to cover-up that break-in and the related crimes.

But in one night, Nixon transformed it.

Watergate — instantaneously — became a simpler issue: a President overruling the inexorable march of the law. Of insisting — in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood — that he was the law.

Not the Constitution.

Not the Congress.

Not the Courts.

Just him.

Just - Mr. Bush - as you did, yesterday.

The twists and turns of Plame-Gate, your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the "referee" of Prosecutor Fitzgerald's analogy… these are complex and often painful to follow, and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.

But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush — and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal — the average citizen understands that, sir.

It's the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the pre-arranged lottery all rolled into one — and it stinks. And they know it.

Nixon's mistake, the last and most fatal of them, the firing of Archibald Cox, was enough to cost him the presidency.

It remains to be seen whether the Libby commutation will be a turning point in the survival of the Bush administration. Editor & Publisher has a run down of newspaper responses, virtually all of them negative toward the President (though The Wall Street Journal's problem is that the commutation wasn't a full pardon). It's worth noting that Nixon didn't resign until nine-and-a-half months after the Saturday Night Massacre. To get any kind of a similar result here will require quite a bit of effort and time. (And even then it might not be possible--Nixon was also pushed into a corner by a Supreme Court that wouldn't let him get away with hiding behind executive privilege. I'm not sure the same factors exist today.) Back to Olbermann:

t is nearly July 4th, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a King who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them — or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them — we would force our independence, and regain our sacred freedoms.

We of this time — and our leaders in Congress, of both parties — must now live up to those standards which echo through our history:

Pressure, negotiate, impeach — get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our Democracy, away from its helm.

And for you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task.

You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed.

Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed, on August 9th, 1974.

Resign.

We've crept into the wee hours of the Fourth of July. I guess any kind of unrealistic idealism isn't out of place today.