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Posted on 04/06/2004 11:18:15 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
John Dean appeared Monday on CBS’s Early Show and MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, following a cozy segment Friday night on PBS’s Now with Bill Moyers, to tout his new book, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. CBS’s Harry Smith at least challenged him a bit, but not Olbermann who seemed enthralled with Dean’s polemic.
Olbermann trumpeted how Dean “has produced a book with perspective. And that perspective is simply terrifying. The bottom line: George Bush has done more damage to this nation than his old boss, Richard Nixon, ever dreamt of.” Olbermann saw ominous signs that Bush is leading America toward an Orwellian world, insisting that “the feeling that I had been left after reading Worse Than Watergate was that this could have been the historical, essentially, prequel to George Orwell's novel 1984, that if you wanted to see what the very first step out of maybe 50 steps towards this totalitarian state that Orwell wrote about in his novel, this would be the kind of thing that you would see.”
Dean’s book “is 198 pages long,” Olbermann reported before boasting about how “in my copy I have the corners of 27 of them turned over and about 60 of the passages underlined.”
-- CBS’s Early Show, April 5. Harry Smith set up the session with Dean, which didn’t air until the 8:30am half hour: "President Richard Nixon will always be remembered for the Watergate scandal that forced him to resign. But one top official in the Nixon White House says he believes the extreme secrecy of the current administration could lead to a scandal just as big. John Dean who was Nixon's White House lawyer tells us how in a new book called Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. And Mr. Dean is with us this morning.”
Smith’s questions, as taken down by MRC analyst Brian Boyd:
# “First of, one of the things you say right at the top, is you say this is a polemic, this book is a polemic. Explain what that means real quick."
# "You make this argument basically is what it is. We should also say from the get-go there's no attempt here to be 'bias free' so-to-speak." Dean maintained: “It is really not a partisan issue, in a traditional Republican/Democratic sense, because I don't really carry that kind of baggage around anymore. It certainly is a partisan issue in the sense that it's a good government issue, good/bad government issue. And I'm making the case that it's bad government to use secrecy as obsessively as this administration is. We've been there, we've done that, we've found it doesn't work, we've found it's inherent with problems and whether they are Republican or Democrat they should pay attention to this issue."
# "What do you think is the worst sin, from your perspective, that this administration has committed."
# "Here's the question though: the administration would say 'these were the facts as we knew them at the time.' They would of also said 'there were people from the Clinton administration who said this is what we knew, at least what we thought we knew when we made this case for war."
# "A clear question could have been asked, if knowing what people had known, if they had asked for that vote say two days before the war actually started, would the vote have been the same?"
# "Some of the administration's attitude has been we kind of know what the deal is here, this is how we're going to run our ship. And I think there seems to be a large group within the population who says 'we like it this way, this is the government we asked for.' Do you disagree with that notion?"
-- MSNBC’s 8pm EDT Countdown with Keith Olbermann, April 5. Olbermann teased at the top of the hour, as caught by MRC analyst Brad Wilmouth: “'Worse Than Watergate’: The explosive new book from John Dean. Richard Nixon's White House counsel during Watergate calls the presidency of George W. Bush worse. John Dean joins us. Exclusive."
Olbermann set up the subsequent lead segment, his number 5 of 5 stories of the night: "One year ago this month, on this newscast, a Republican Party operative insisted that George W. Bush was one of the greatest Presidents in American history. Today, even his own campaign committee admits that all polls indicate that Mr. Bush currently has no better than a 50-50 chance of re-election. And six books decrying his administration now populate the various top 25 bestseller lists. The newest of these is easily the most strongly worded. Our fifth story on the Countdown, Worse Than Watergate. “Richard Clarke may have produced a book with anger, and Al Franken may have produced a book with humor, and Michael Moore may have produced a book with cynicism, but John Dean, who was at the center of the greatest political scandal in this nation's history, has produced a book with perspective. And that perspective is simply terrifying. The bottom line: George Bush has done more damage to this nation than his old boss, Richard Nixon, ever dreamt of. The former White House Counsel to President Nixon, John Dean, joining us here in the studio.”
The questions posed by Olbermann, al of which after the first two were simply prompts for Dean to spout off his agenda:
# “Do you have a political agenda in this? Do you have an axe to grind? Is there something the reader should know before he picks up the book?”
# “If, because of the secrecy that you go into such detail about, this really is worse than Watergate, why has no lid blown off? Where are the tapes? Where are the smoking gun memos? Where is the fingerprint of the secrecy that you allude to?”
# “But you analogize from your own experience in that White House of 1971, '72, '73, the parallel between Richard Nixon's obsession with secrecy that was unleashed, I guess, would be the best word to describe it, after Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times, and a desire for secrecy that was similarly inspired in the Bush administration after 9/11. Explain why that parallel is valid and why people at home are going, 'Well, that's 9/11. That has nothing to do with something like the Pentagon Papers.’”
# “When we talked about this previously, I said that the feeling that I had been left after reading Worse Than Watergate was that this could have been the historical, essentially, prequel to George Orwell's novel 1984, that if you wanted to see what the very first step out of maybe 50 steps towards this totalitarian state that Orwell wrote about in his novel, this would be the kind of thing that you would see. And I know that a lot of people have concerns about, about civil rights and how the edges of democracy seem to have been worn down since 9/11. But you quote many of them. You quote Dick Armey, of all people, in the middle of the book. But do you really feel that the Bush administration has gone past that and is actually putting not just an element or two of democracy at risk, but democracy at risk?”
# “You describe the administration, particularly the President, as misleading the country into war. And, in particular, you're devoting a lot of time in this book to the President's response to the congressional authorization for war in Iraq as opposed to weapons of mass destruction, the Niger stories, all of that. This, just the legal paperwork between Congress and the President, which you compare to LBJ hoodwinking the country in the Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon's rationale for bombing Cambodia, and your account of what Bush did to respond to Congress' authorization. Reads kind of like the old story about two men who want to climb a 20-foot wall and the first one says, 'I'll get up on your shoulders and then we'll be up 12 feet, then you get up on my shoulders, we'll be up 18 feet, and then finally I'll get back up on your shoulders and we'll be on top of the wall.’ What was wrong with how the President responded even after he had gotten the authorization from Congress?”
# “Let me move to the topical. This week Dr. Rice is going to testify on Thursday before the 9/11 Commission. This is something the White House fought and ultimately lost. Maybe it's because of the 9/11 speech that she didn't give in which basically it dismissed terrorism as the major issue. Maybe it was about the daily security briefs, whatever it was. Join the Commission for me for a moment, John. You get the first question to Dr. Rice. What do you ask her on Thursday?”
# “Last point, the terrifying part, at some points you see a political dispute, you see a secrecy in a presidency throughout your book. But the terror comes at the end. You describe what the people of this country have not been told regarding emergency preparations for situations that would make 9/11 look like just a bad day. What this President or indeed any President could do, you've seen similar documents and similar instructions as to what would happen. What don't we know?”
# “We've seen that once before in your lifetime. I don't want to see it again, not in mine certainly....I don't know if you at home will like it or if you will try to throw it through a window. All I know is that the basic text is 198 pages long, and in my copy, I have the corners of 27 of them turned over and about 60 of the passages underlined. John, many thanks for coming on."
Amazon’s page for Dean’s book: www.amazon.com
SHEESH! Keith, why don't you just lather it up with vaseline, bend over, grab your ankles, let the DNC have it's way with you?
All I know is that the basic text is 198 pages long, and in my copy, I have the corners of 27 of them turned over and about 60 of the passages underlined.
Make that an extra slab of vaseline, Keith.
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STOP BY AND BUMP THE FUNDRAISER THREAD- |
I guess he was just excited to meet an author who never played baseball.
Which step was it when Hillary got her mitts on the unedited FBI files of hundreds of political opponents?
Olby would consider that an honest mistake. Meanwhile any attempt to protect the USA from terrorists is considered by Olby to be a prelude to an Orwellian Society. BTW, speaking of the later, Olby has probably tossed that FBI file incident down the memory hole.
Lie # 1.
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