The lesson John Dean learned from Watergate: The Republican Party, as evinced by Nixon and his crew, is growing ever more insane, cruel, and amoral. Follow their lead at your peril.

The lesson Dick Cheney learned from Watergate: Boy, it sucks to get caught. Glad I didn’t — now I can work to get revenge on those who caught my buddies!

That statement revolves on the goals of the person who is defining “effective.” From Cheney’s perspective, it was totally effective.

The PSP was such a closely guarded secret that few of the operational people who were really hunting terrorists were read into the program; and, when PSP information reached those operational people, its provenance was disguised so they could not distinguish between what was useful and what was noise.

This program was obviously not designed to help anti-terrorist agencies find the terrorists.

The operations people were not setting the targets for the information capture, but only those priviledged few who were “read” into the program.

Likely Cheney and Addington were setting the targets and obtaining the results personally. We can be sure that journalists were on the list, as whistle-blowers have told us that journalists were prime targets. Then, of course, there would be Democratic and Republican congressional representatives, the administration’s own top officials and employees.
Financial institutions and other corporations? Why not?

Information was power to Cheney — and through PSP he could access information on whoever and whatever he wanted.

Let us hope that a congressional investigation will demand to obtain the names and job capacities of everyone who set the targets and those of all who were targeted. What a massive “enemies list” that will produce. Nixon will look like a piker compared to Cheney.

Maybe once our spineless congress people discover their own names, telephone and e-mail records in Cheney’s private information bank, they will finally put impeachment on the table. It still can be done.

Follow the money. If only we could.

Thank you!!!!!!

You just synthesized what I was groping toward, but couldn’t quite distill.

And there has to be more ‘black money’ involved than any person can get their head around. This is the Dick Cheney who refused to intervene when Enron was politically destabilizing the entire state of California — an episode that we’re still seeing ripples from today. And add on the other ‘economic tools’ overseen by Phil Gramm, and it sure looks like economic treason.

If Cheney were to account legally, through due process, it’s my view that could take the some of the heat out of a lot of the frustrations and disgust that we and others around the globe feel.

Yeah, I’m a dreamer…
But it does seem as if some kind of subterranean shifts are occuring in pretty rapid jolts right now. Something’s weird…