Lorna’s Reviews > Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush > Status Update

“Nixon’s infamous enemies list, and use of incumbency to hurt those who were against him and help those who were friends, is one of the distinguishing features of Watergate and its related abuse of presidential power.”

“Clearly, they are proceeding one step at a time, one war at a time. But to make it work, they must lie to the American people and mislead Congress and continue their extraordinary abuse of power. In short, this presidency has adopted a pure Nixonian end-justifies-the-means mentality. But Nixon was trying to end a war, not start one.”

“Even those who got their news from Comedy Central. . . knew that Bush and Cheney planned to take out Saddam Hussein, long before it became their publicly declared policy. But the way they sold this war to Americans and Congress would cause even a gauntlet thrower like Richard Nixon to blanch, for he never played the world—or his government—for fools.”

“Ironically, his best image moment was an unscripted event the day he visited Ground Zero. When he climbed up a mountain of debris from the fallen Twin Towers to visit the working firemen, an aide handed him a bullhorn. . . Bush, standing with his arm draped around a fireman’s shoulders, shouted back: ‘I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. . . ‘“