Why Nixon and not Bush?
In a discussion thread that started with my last post, I was asked why I think the Bush people got away with all the criminality we’ve seen and the Nixon people didn’t. It’s a really complicated question. I may not have time to fully flesh out my thoughts on it in the near future, so let me just offer up some basics.
First, I’m not convinced they will get away with it. There are some serious people who have been involved with war crimes trials who believe that members of the Bush administration, if not Bush himself, may end up indicted I have real worries about how the Obama administration may react to that. Obviously, no US president is going to allow a former US president to go on trial for war crimes. It won’t happen. What do they do if a senior Bush administration official gets indicted, though? The American people, by and large, seem to think that we’re above being judged by other countries. We’re the good guy. Period. It would be wholly inconsistent for Obama not turn one of those guys over and it would be a nightmare politically if does. Anyway…
One suggestion for why the Bushies haven’t been caught is that they’ve learned from the mistakes that the Nixon and (to a lesser extent) Reagan administrations made. There’s something to that, for sure. Impeachment is a wholly political thing, though. So if you’re talking about Bush or Cheney, specifically, politics is your answer. For the first six years of his administration, Bush had a Republican House. He had a Republican House where the majority was created by guys like Newt Gingrich who thought that “bipartisan” was a dirty word and who saw themselves as revolutionaries. Party loyalty rules. I suspect that some of the high profile Republicans (especially some of the more libertarian ones) who “retired” from Congress during Bush’s presidency did so out of party loyalty. They couldn’t go along with what was happening, but they couldn’t criticize their party while they were office holders, either. On the Democratic side, the politics are different, but no less prevalent. The Democratic leadership is timid. They’ve largely been unable to successfully frame the issues and they’ve been scared to death of being labeled shrill liberals. They also learned exactly the wrong lessons from Clinton’s impeachment. Pelosi et al are afraid that impeachment would have made Bush more popular, themselves less so, and resulted in losing seats in the next election.
Nixon had a very different House. The Democrats had been in charge for a generation and weren’t too worried about losing that. The Republicans of that era would just about all be considered RINOs today. They were more northeastern, more liberal, and less partisan that what we’ve got today in the GOP. Nixon had a very different set of crimes, too. Burglary and cover up are easy for the average person to wrap their heads around. The target of that burglary–the other party– left little doubt that this was simply a crime with no defense. Bush’s crimes have been harder for the average person to wrap their heads around. They’ve also come with a lot of legal justifications from his own lawyers, often as or before they were committed. To see Bush’s crimes you have to be willing to honestly evaluate the US’s place in the world. You can’t just assume we’re the good guys. If your knee jerk inclination is to trust authority and admire the “stern leader” who does what he thinks is best for you, then you’re not likely to see those crimes. I believe there’s a huge chunk of the US population who will never, could never, see the actions of the Bush-Cheney administration as criminal.
In the commercials for Frost/Nixon, one of the moments that is clearly meant to draw a reaction from liberals shows an inflamed Nixon saying something like “I’m saying if the President does something, it isn’t illegal”. I bet there are enough Americans who have a knee jerk inclination toward believing that to allow Bush to sleep easily at night.
Edit: Let me add here that Nixon committed some far worse crimes in SE Asia than what he was impeached over. There’s been talk here and there over the years of indicting Kissinger over some of those, but nothing ever came of it that I’m aware. Bush’s crimes are much more like the things that Nixon got away with in SE Asia than what he got impeached over.
