I ran into this letter to the Editor in my Web Wanderings and thought the author made a good point.
History repeats itself
July 16, 2003
The Bush White House appears to have taken a lesson from the Nixon White House’s news management of the Watergate break-in.
When the cover story began to unravel, revealing a tangled web of deceit, Nixon and his henchmen considered alternatives to stone-walling. Presidential assistant John Ehrlichman suggested a partial confession of “errors.” His term: “A modified, limited hangout” of White House soiled linen.
Now Bush is under attack for misleading the American people in his call for preventive war against Iraq on multiple occasions this spring, citing Iraq’s possession of WMD and its alleged ties to al-Qaida. So far, the administration has not come up with convincing answers to these accusations.
I can well imagine Cheney, Rove, Wolfowitz, Fleischer and the rest of the Bush Brain Trust seizing upon admission of a single “error” in his January address as a way of diverting attention from the sorry reality of their prolonged propaganda campaign to convince the American people to back them in our country’s first “preventive war.”
—Craig B. Leman
Corvallis
http://news.statesmanjournal.com/article.cfm?i=64720