Bush's own Saturday Night Massacre

Dan Froomkin, writing today in The Post:

Amid all the other news yesterday, the attorney general's startling revelation that President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation into the administration's controversial secret domestic spying programs hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.

Bush's move -- denying the requisite security clearances to attorneys from the department's ethics office -- is unprecedented in that office's history. It also comes in stark contrast to the enthusiastic way in which security clearances were dished out to a different group of attorneys: Those charged with finding out who leaked information about the program to the press.

It is not common for a president to personally intervene to stop an investigation of his own administration. The most notorious case, of course, was the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, during which President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor who had been appointed to investigate the Watergate scandal. Among the many major differences, however: In that case, Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus resigned rather than follow Nixon's order.

Bush's action is also another example of what I have previously noted is a consistent White House modus operandi: That time and time again, Bush and his aides have selectively leaked or declassified secret intelligence findings that served their political agenda -- while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information that would tend to discredit them.

Which leads one to a couple of conclusions: 1. Abu Gonzalez, unlike his predecessors in the waning days of the Nixon White House, has no professional self-respect, and considers preznit, not the citizens of the United States, his client (in this, he more closely resembles an earlier occupent of the job in the Nixon White House, the affable, pipe smoking John Mitchell); and, 2. , Bush knew that the wiretapping would be deemed illegal.

But it's not a blowjob, so who cares?