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Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot…

Lest We Forget   

The Bush Administration may look sleepy, and the President himself may be trying for wistful, but someone’s minding the store.

Dick Cheney, everyone’s Uncle Shifty, continues his lunge for power and secrecy even as he goes out the door.

In a court filing over a challenge to his control of Vice Presidential papers, Cheney essentially says that regardless of what you may imagine about the claims of history, a public right to know, or what the law would appear to require,

“The vice president alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records, how his records will be created, maintained, managed and disposed, and are all actions that are committed to his discretion by law.“

Cheney is under court order not to mess with his papers for now, but can the law’s imagination comprehend what  such a towering institutional ego might do as he exits?

Good Times Won’t Be Forgotten 

Frost/Nixon lumbers onto more of the nation’s screens this weekend, but America’s infotainment complex apparently believes in putting  a little touch of Nixon in everything they do.

Up next: HBO thrills once more to Washington Post Publisher Katherine Graham as all that stood between us and fascism.

Her storied Pentagon Papers and Watergate confrontations with the Nixon administration are tales we tell children in Washington, while passing swiftly over her heroic union busting immediately afterwards.

Nixon stories are well on their way to being the thoughtful person’s Woodstock anniversary, events endlessly replicated in news and pop culture until the issues are reduced to “iconic” personalities,  anyone alive at the time dies or rioting spoils the party.  

 Classy   

From the latest Nixon document dump, the Los Angeles Times has further evidence of Richard Nixon’s bottomless boorishness.

The President’s first year in office was marked by a memo from Presidential  aide Alexander Butterfield, giving Nixon a progress report on efforts to purge the White House of past president’s photographs.

Particular focus was given to the office of Edna Rosenberg, a civil servant since the Hoover administration. Nixon had spotted two photos of John F.Kennedy in her office,  one inscribed to her by Kennedy.

Butterfield reported triumphantly that she had been forced to remove the photos, and the White House was now predecessor-free.

“On January 14th,” Butterfield reported to Nixon, “the project was completed and all 35 offices displayed only your photograph.”