Water Under the Gate

Chickens seem to be coming home to roost for the Bush Administration, and comparisons to Nixon and Watergate are on the rise. These comparisons go back years, however, and with every fresh scandal the press floats a raft of new "Could This Be Bush's Watergate?" stories.

I'm not sure what it says about our culture that we are continually shocked...shocked!...to discover our elected leaders monkeying with facts. Carl Bernstein calls this administration the most dishonest he's ever seen. Fair enough. But as readers of this blog know, I hesitate to take modern superlatives at face value. In fact, while all the lies and deceit of the Bush Administration fill the nightly news, HBO dresses up some good old-fashioned Roman history every weekend to help us put things in salacious perspective.

Bush and his cronies are amateurs when compared to those ancient Romans and their realpolitik. Want to outflank the Senate? Call their leader a traitor, send an assassin to cut off his hands and nail them to the chamber door. Need to fund a surge of troops? Kill the richest families in town and pocket their fortunes. Worried about securing delivery of a key commodity from an unstable foreign land? Provoke a war based on trumped-up evidence (oh wait, I guess our guys read that chapter after all).