Thursday, May 17, 2007

Bush Not-Quite-Ardent-Enough Friends List

The parallels with Nixon just keep coming. Today we learn that the Bush hit list of federal prosecutors metastasized from the eight previously known to at least 26.

In 1971, the Nixon Enemies list started with a modest 20 and ballooned into dozens. John Dean, then White House counsel and now full-time Bush critic, started it all with a memo (no e-mails then):

"This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration, stated a bit more bluntly--how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies."

The original targets included Paul Newman and, ironically, today's chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers Jr., who is leading an investigation of the Rove-Gonzales venture. Conyers' offense had been introduction in Congress of a bill to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday.

To be fair, the current crop is not exactly an Enemies List but more of a Not-Quite-Ardent-Enough Friends List.

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