Thursday, June 02, 2005

 

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being G. Gordon Liddy

As we careen from one disaster to the next, in the hellbound handbasket we call the Dubya Era, one small forensic detail of the Watergate break-in should be kept foremost in mind:

While doing his rounds at the Watergate Hotel in the early morning of June 17, 1972, security guard Frank Wills came across a door, located between the basement stairwell and the parking garage, that was being prevented from latching by a piece of tape. He removed the tape and continued his rounds. Returning to the same spot later, he discovered that someone had re-taped the door. His curiosity now aroused, he called the police.

Yes, wingnuts (like the Liddy Black Bag Brigade, as well as the current Neocon Death Cult) are batshit crazy. Yes, they love to play at this kind of cloak-and-dagger, national-security stuff.

But here's my point (and I do have one): Fortunately for us, they're ludicrously incompetent. At the Watergate hotel, they managed to get caught by desultory-to-the-point-of-incompetent private security policing. Taping over the lock on that door the first time was just stupid. Taping it over the second time, without (evidently) trying to figure out who removed the first tape, was pathologically idiotic. (Freud might well say that, on some level, the Watergate burglars wanted to get caught.)

So take heart, liberals: The Bush crowd, in their arrogant ignorance, apparently learned not one single thing from the Vietnam War. What makes us think they've learned anything from the fall of the Nixon presidency?

posted by Michael 11:33 PM