From The Hill's Pundits Blog:

Torture Tapes are the Watergate of Our Times

Brent Budowsky

As I write these words on the morning of Wednesday, Dec. 19, high- and low-level officials of the Bush administration involved in torture, and the destruction of the torture tapes, are consulting their criminal lawyers as The New York Times reports that highest-level lawyers in the administration had discussed the destruction of the tapes.

I predict there will soon be new stories about more torture tapes that were destroyed and new stories about more high-level officials that were either tainted or corrupted by this scandal, and others who opposed this travesty who will ultimately testify about who they approached to attempt to prevent it.

Washington and America will momentarily ask once again: What did the president and vice president know, and when did they know it?

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At least one very well placed Republican believes that the situation for his party may actually be worse than it was following the Watergate scandal.

"The state of the Republican Party is worse than any time since Watergate, and arguably this is worse than Watergate," says party strategist Vin Weber, a former congressman, "because that was about an event, whereas this may reflect a trend."

And as if the long term trends for the party were not bad enough, events keep on turning up that make it increasingly difficult for the GOP to right its course. Take, for instance, the Larry Craig scandal. For as damaging as that event was for the party, at the least it seemed that the bleeding might stop as voters turned their focus to other matters. Not so, though, given the Senator's decision to float the possibility that he would withdraw his guilty plea and his decision to resign. NBC's First Read talks a bit about the ramifications of this move.

And here's another topic we will probably see the GOP candidates respond to tonight... As Arlen Specter hinted at on Sunday, Larry Craig is indeed reconsidering his decision to resign. Mitch McConnell's worst nightmare may now be realized: There's nothing the Senate GOP wants less than to see Craig drag this out. That said, Craig's clearly looking for a fight, and since he feels as if everyone in the Senate abandoned him (sans Specter), he probably isn't willing to listen to any reason from his GOP colleagues. Perhaps the compromise the party could hope for at this point is for Craig to stay in office but not run for re-election. The REAL nightmare for McConnell and Co. would be for Craig to be on the '08 ballot. What's not clear in all this is what Craig wants to get out of this. Will fighting really rehabilitate his image or only begin encouraging more rumor-mongering and stalling any hope he has of actually doing what he's setting out to do: proving his innocence? Should be interesting tonight to watch the GOP presidential candidates on stage tonight having to react to this latest Craig news.

A TPM reader is even more to the point.

If Sen. Larry Craig reconsiders and steps all over Gen. Petraeus' week of surge, Bill Kristol's head will explode. That Penatagon media war room they set up will be useless in the face of this cable TV zoo.

It just seems that, even outside of the profound differences Republicans have with the American people on issues ranging from Iraq to Social Security to healthcare, all of which make them remarkably unpopular with voters, the GOP just cannot help but be harmed by every bit of news that comes out these days. This is not limited to the ongoing and potentially unending Larry Craig scandal, though it's a good example of how things are going for the GOP these days. So maybe the climate is actually worse for the Republicans than it was following Watergate.

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While a great number of Republicans already seem content labeling uber-lobbyist and actor Fred Thompson as their savior for 2008 before he has even formally announced his campaign, it's not taking a great deal of time for folks to start finding a number of major chinks in Thompson's armor. For one, Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press has penned a blistering piece of analysis on Thompson under the headline "Thompson strong on style, not substance", which gets to the heart of one of the major problems with Thompson as a candidate -- there's very little there there. Robert Novak (via email; link not yet available as best I can tell) relays a related concern from Republicans in his column this week.

Far more troubling are the fears among Republicans that there is less to Thompson than meets the eye. He could still seize the nomination and prove a disappointing candidate in the general election. In appearances across the country, from New Hampshire to South Carolina, his speeches have ranged from "pretty decent" to "quite underwhelming." He has not yet had the knock-out performance he will need in order to prove that he is worthy of frontrunner status.

But perhaps an even greater concern for Republicans about Fred Thompson is not "that there is less to [him] than meets the eye" but rather that there is more to him than meets the eye. While Thompson's name recognition has been on the rise for some time, most Americans don't know too much about his record -- like the fact that as a career lobbyist he lobbied on behalf of folks like the now deposed Haitian ruler Jean-Bertrand Aristide. And digging further into Thompson's record, The Boston Globe's Michael Kranish finds that during Senate's investigation into the Watergate scandal Thompson apparently used his position as minority counsel to serve as a rat for the Nixon White House. The details are rather stunning and could be quite problematic for Thompson's candidacy.

The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.

Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with "no authority" in divulging the committee's knowledge of the tapes, which provided the evidence that led to Nixon's resignation. It was one of many Thompson leaks to the Nixon team, according to a former investigator for Democrats on the committee, Scott Armstrong , who remains upset at Thompson's actions.

"Thompson was a mole for the White House," Armstrong said in an interview. "Fred was working hammer and tong to defeat the investigation of finding out what happened to authorize Watergate and find out what the role of the president was."

Thompson's Southern accent and tenure on NBC's "Law & Order" may lead some to believe that he is an outsider, but he is as establishment a Republican as they come -- so wedded to the establishment, in fact, that he was willing to work to try (however unsuccessfully) to torpedo the Senate's Watergate investigation by leaking like a sieve to the Nixon administration. Thompson is a Beltway insider whose presidency would be inimical to the type of change so needed and so wanted today. His role as a fundraising and flack for the "Scooter" Libby defense fund indicates as much. And according to Marc Ambinder, he as all but admitted as much.

Also, Thompson, a former lobbyist, Senate and Washington lawyer, admitted that he's no outsider. "I've never used the word 'outsider," he said.

This is all not to say that Thompson would necessarily be a pushover in a general election. But at the same time, it's not clear to me that Americans are particularly clamoring for their next President to be a lobbyist who actively sought to protect Richard Nixon from an investigation into the latter's improprieties. So perhaps Democrats don't have quite as much to fear from a Thompson candidacy as some now do.

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Yesterday's Huffington Post featured a post by Arianna reviewing Carl Bernstein's new biography on Hillary: A Woman in Charge. Arianna starts by comparing the supposed "operating in the shadows" of Hillary to the very dangerous secrecy of Dick Cheney. A comparison that is completely absurd!

Bernstein writes: "Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with the truth." We learn that Hillary refused to admit (for 30 years) that she failed her first attempt at the bar exam. Oh my! And this is important why? Haven't any of you done something you weren't exactly proud of and willing to tell the whole world about? And if indeed she was such a failure, why did she serve as a staff attorney for the Children's Defense Fund and also on the House Congressional Impeachment Inquiry staff in 1974. I guess maybe the next time she took the bar exam she aced it.

And what is it with a rehash of the Whitewater nonsense. Hillary and Bill had every right not to cooperate with the non-stop republican witch hunt. And after all the years and all the investigations they found exactly no laws broken. Not a frickin single one. Arianna Huffington should know something about the constant barrage of hate attacks rained on Hillary during the first Clinton presidency because she issued them. So please, when you read her commentary, take care to note the source. We are not hearing from a non-biased source. We are hearing from a person that brought her hate for Hillary with her when she switched sides.

Arianna also finds it important to include Bernstein's quote from George Stephanopoulos, a person that undoubtedly has nothing but warm fuzzies for the Clintons. A real champion of the left. Yeah, right.

And finally Arianna would have us believe that there is something sinister in "the way she glossed over in her memoir her summer internship at the law firm of Treuhaft, Walker, and Burnstein -- one of the most renowned left-wing law firms in the nation." Oh my! Damn, you mean she is a liberal after all and that is something we should be afraid of.

The only ones that have anything to fear are the Republicans. Well, and maybe Arianna Huffington.

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Gerald Ford, former President of the United States, died today December 26th, 2006. One day after Christmas, a day he loved.

Many will remember that it was President Ford who became the first President or Vice President to ascend to the office without being elected.

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