Shades of Watergate

Starting with a third-rate burglary:

The burglary over the weekend at the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s Concord headquarters came five weeks after a break-in at a Democratic Party office in Manchester.

The door to the Manchester Democratic Committee office was broken down sometime over the weekend of Jan. 20 to 21, according to party officials and the Manchester police. Raymond Buckley, chairman of the city Democrats and vice chairman of the state Democratic Party, said he doesn’t believe anything was taken from or vandalized in the Manchester office, and he dismissed any connection between that incident and the burglary of the party’s headquarters in Concord last weekend.

Several Democrats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that laptops and other equipment had been taken from the [Concord] party headquarters, though they said it appears that any sensitive information was protected by passwords or stored on servers that were not taken from the building.

The Bush administration really does have old Nixon staff members, don't they?

The Great Undoing

The Bush administration, peopled as it is with ex-Nixon/Ford staffers, has done a wonderful play-by-play of Watergate. It isn't the crime, it's the cover-up that gets you.
Mustang Bobby:

For those of us who remember Watergate, it wasn't the "third-rate burglary" that brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon. It wasn't even the hush money paid to the burglars or the dirty tricks planned at the hands of G. Gordon Liddy in order to undermine the Democrats in the 1972 election. It was the cover-up that did them all in; the lying to the FBI, lying to Congress, and the obstruction of justice in the investigations that did it. The initial incident was nothing compared to the attempt to kill the result.

The same is true here. The leak of Valerie Plame's name, as odious and craven as it was in the attempt by the Bush administration to get back at someone for embarrassing the White House for calling them out on the infamous sixteen words, turns out to have been an inadvertant slip of the tongue by Richard Armitage, an innocuous public servant who, as far as anyone can tell, had no political motives when he did it. He just plain goofed. But given the paranoia and revenge-filled mindset of this White House, led by a president who can never make mistakes and enabled by willing toadys like Karl Rove within and the right-wing orcosphere without, it is not surprising that suspicion immediately fell on the higher-ups like Rove, Cheney, and even the president himself.

For a front row seat at the Great Undoing of the Glorious Neocon Rule, go to Firedoglake for the liveblogging of the Libby Trial.