…about Bush and the whole leaking/lying/covering-up scandal: He might not have known all the details about everything his close aides (Cheney, Rove, Libby, DeLay, Frist, et al.) have done. He might not have wanted to know; he might have wanted a degree of what was known in the Nixon years as “plausible deniability.”

But he was a sharp political operative, and he chose to place these men around him because they were also sharp political operatives. He may have told them all to do whatever it took to sell the Iraq war and to wreak retribution on anyone who impeded that drive. He might then have left Cheney, Rove, Libby, and co. to carry out his directives in their own ways.

He should have known what to expect from that point on, since all three branches of the federal government are now completely run by people who think the only thing Nixon did wrong was get caught.

Yes, this presidency is “imploding,” to use Carl Bernstein’s word. But there are differences between the old Watergate scandal collection and this new batch, a “Watergate 2.0” if you will.

The original Watergate mess was focused on a re-election campaign that employed a vast series of illegal “dirty tricks” to influence and crush the opposition. This scandal isn’t about anything as relatively minor as an election campaign. It’s about the governance of this country, and the ruling cabal’s relentlessness in starting that stupid, stupid war.

The right-wing sleaze machine is so vast and so well-funded that Watergate 2.0, at this point, is only a chink in its armor. When the whole system begins to break down and collapse, which will probably occur as the scandal inevitably spreads, bad things will happen, and not just to the people whom you might think deserve it.