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This is a truly remarkable story, so much so that even the Washington Post's editors find it disturbing. The wonder to me is that GWB ever truly believed that he and his appointees could behave this way as a matter of routine, yet somehow prevent it from becoming common knowledge at some point.
The evidence -- indisputable, I think -- is that they tried, and now, to virtually no one's surprise except their own, they've failed. Many here think that Plan B will be to strong-arm and stonewall every critic, every investigator, until the next election.
Maybe so, but I doubt that under the circumstances, such a plan is any more likely to be successful than GWB's peculiar form of omerta has been. Will the Republican Party choose to throw kindling on its own funeral pyre, once it becomes clear that the price of colluding in GWB's intransigence is likely to require it? Very unlikely, I think. It's too soon for firm predictions, but there may yet come a time when the party will deputize someone to lay a (symbolic) revolver on the President's desk, just as it did in 1974.
I wonder who they'll choose. (I can't imagine, at this point, that they'll have any volunteers.)
