As Capain Beefheart would say, "The past sure is tense."

As Nixon prepares to go to China...

I'm sorry. Did I say "Nixon?"

My mistake, I meant George W. Bush.

Seems like its getting harder and harder to tell the two apart, even with the chasm of 35 years separating them.

The documents also show Nixon's political calculations when it came to defending the previously secret U.S. bombings and troop movements in Cambodia.

On May 31, 1970, a month after Nixon went on television to explain his actions, asserting that he would not let his nation become "a pitiful, helpless giant," the president met top military and national security aides at the Western White House in San Clemente, Calif.

Revelation of the operation had sparked protests and congressional action against what many lawmakers from both parties considered an illegal war. Nixon noted that Americans believed the Cambodian operation was "all but over," even as 14,000 troops were engaged across the border in a hunt for North Vietnamese operating there.

In a memo from the meeting marked "Eyes Only, Top Secret Sensitive," Nixon told his military men to continue doing what was necessary in Cambodia, but to say for public consumption that the United States was merely providing support to South Vietnamese forces when necessary to protect U.S. troops.

"That is what we will say publicly," he asserted. "But now, let's talk about what we will actually do."

He instructed: "Do not withdraw for domestic reasons but only for military reasons. We have taken all the heat on this one. Just do it. Don't come back and ask permission each time."

The release of 50,000 additional documents from the Nixon archive aren't providing many revelations, but they are yet another reminder that a war efforts sustained by lies, half-truths, and political calculation is doomed to lose support if it goes on too long.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 - White House advisers convene secret sessions about the political dangers of revelations that American troops committed atrocities in the war zone, and about whether the president can delicately intervene in the investigation. In the face of an increasingly unpopular war, they wonder at the impact on support at home. The best way out of the war, they agree, is to prop up a new government that they hope can unite the fractured foreign land.

No, Iraq is nothing like southeast Asia in the 1970s. But the Cheney administration is a lot like the Nixon one (without the liberal tendencies).