Review

Worse than Watergate

By John W.Dean
Little Brown & CO. 2004
ISBN-0�316�00023-X

Reviewed by S.O. Waife
Online Journal Guest Writer

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April 14, 2004�The American people owe John W. Dean two debts of gratitude. The first for helping to break open the infamous Watergate case during the Nixon administration. As former counsel to the president, he was the one who told Nixon "there is a cancer on your presidency."  It showed courage and a sense of integrity in political goings-on.

The second debt is for his new book, subtitled "The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush." By carefully detailing (over 300 references plus footnotes) the sometimes unbelievable shenanigans of the Bush administration, he shows the similarities, and even the out-Nixoning immoral and illegal acts of the current regime.

Among the topics covered are the unsurpassed stonewalling, the deceit, the cover-up of the flawed decision-making and the attempt to wall off any investigation of their paranoid anti-democratic partisan beliefs.

Just one example of the lies: Dick Cheney told ABC "we've not done any business with Iraq . . . and I had a standing policy that I wouldn't do that."

Shortly after, The New York Times reported that the Cheney-led Haliburton Co. had sold more equipment to Iraq than any other company. Perhaps the classic quote is Chaney's "Principle is okay up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose."

The dirtiest of dirty tricks, says Dean, was leaking the identify of Valerie Plame Wilson as an act of revenge for her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, pointing our Bush's bogus claim that Niger sold yellowcake uranium to Iraq. NIxon, he said, would never have put a "hit" on a political enemy.

The smell of impeachment is clear. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be a "high crime" under the constitution's impeachment clause.

I hope the book will have a wide readership�not only among the anti-Bushites (who don't need more evidence)�but among the undecided, and even among the thoughtful Republicans, who put America above party politics.