Getting Past the Watergate Fixation

By Russ Baker, TomPaine.com. Posted May 11, 2006.

We knew this was big back in March, when a court sent ex-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif. -- convicted of taking $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors -- off to serve eight years in prison, the most severe sentence ever handed out to a member of Congress. From then on, the sleaze chain has been metastasizing. More members of the House might be implicated -- and even top CIA officials. Now it is being described as the largest federal corruption scandal in a century. With stories of prostitutes and all-night poker games at the Watergate hotel, it is one scandal that truly is deserving of the "-gate" suffix that has become such a dreary journalistic cliché.

No matter how big the affair grows, though, it is likely to follow in the path of so many of its predecessors -- distracting public attention from a larger and more important reality: Today, "the largest corruption scandal in a century" is not WatergateGate -- it is the everyday performance of the U.S. government. The worst sleaze in Washington is mainly legal, as the old saying goes; and that includes the sorry state of the entire intelligence apparatus -- beyond whether the #3 CIA official improperly participated in those late-night, high-stakes card games.

Too many in the media treat a juicy mess like the Cunningham Affair as a shocking aberration. Consider the wording in a New York Times article on Sunday, which described "a growing suspicion among some lawmakers that corrupt practices may have influenced decision-making in Congress and at executive-branch agencies."

Who would have thought? Don't the editors read their own paper? It's been clear for some time that corruption in the Bush administration has exceeded a Washington standard that already was pretty tawdry. Some of the stories are known already, especially to TomPaine.com readers: White House procurement chief taken out in handcuffs in connection with a sprawling lobbying corruption investigation; the vice president's chief of staff indicted for perjury; the unseemly setup between Bush's first FEMA director and Brownie, the incompetent neophyte who replaced him.

But many of the larger misdeeds have gone unreported, in part because -- technically illegal or not -- they represent business as usual in Republican Washington today. Virtually every federal agency is now captive to the corporate interests it is supposed to regulate. The reach of corporate influence has even compromised the science agencies on whose fact-finding and truth-telling crucial questions of national safety and even survival depend.

Russ Baker is a freelance journalist and essayist. His web site is www.russbaker.com.

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