Reading: History refresher from Digby

I'm a little late in adding this to the Reading list on the sidebar, but better late than yada yada yada.

Digby points out that domestic bugging, dirty tricks, and ratfucking are not apparent anomalies of Bush's second term; They're the mother's milk that Karl Rove and his ilk were raised on in Nixon's GOP:

Remember: Watergate was about bugging the Democratic National Committee. The "3rd rate burglary" was to replace an illegal bug that had been planted on the telephones of prominent Democrats.

The lesson of Watergate for the chagrined Republicans was that they needed to be more forceful in assuming executive power and they needed to be more sophisticated about their campaign espionage. This is what they've done.

Anybody who even dreams that these guys are not using all their government power to spy on political enemies is being willfully naive. It is what they do. It is the essence of their political style. This is Nixon's Republican party and they have finally achieved a perfect ability to carry out his vision of political governance: L'etat C'est Moi. If the president does it that means it's not illegal.

There's more, including the education of young Karl, all leading to the point that what's being exposed now is nothing extraordinary for Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest; it's just business as usual. The only thing extraordinary is the exposure and the possibility of a political (and legal) price to be paid.