The difference between a woo-woo conspiracy theory and a conspiracy is the amount of hours and ingenuity spent by innovative investigative journalists. The many conspiracy theories that abound today are a direct reflection on the lack of good investigative journalists today.

There are a few. Seymour Hersh, Greg Palast, Joshua Micah Marshall (and his team), plus Dana Priest and Anne Hull (who broke the Walter Reed veterans’ neglect story for the Washington Post) are among the very few that immediately come to mind. Yet the mainstream media that existed 30 years ago has fallen in disrepair from too few of them since.

One only needs to compare Bob Woodward’s work since 2000 to his work on the Watergate Scandal to see the decline in his quality. Or note that DC’s premier muckraker, Jack Anderson, (who nearly was assassinated by E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy) once depended on the research of reporter Brit Hume, now the managing editor of Fox News.

Which leads me to my favorite current conspiracy theory. I can feel it in my bones that my speculation is right, and can only hope enough “innovative investigative journalists” will persist and prove these old bones right. And I should note that my research on Nixon’s red-baiting, Checkers speech days had me convinced when the Watergate Hotel break-in first hit the newswires, that Nixon was behind it all. I was 19 then, yet I thought it obvious that it had all the marks of an inside Nixon job. Thankfully, Woodward, Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and Mark Felt produced the evidence to prove me right.

My theory began as a partisan joke. Shortly after the 9-11 attacks, as I studied everything I could find about Al Qaida, radical Islamicists, and Middle Eastern history, I learned - as many political activists did - about the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). I took it a step further, studying the backgrounds of each of the signers to the old appeal to take out Saddam that they’d forwarded to then-President Clinton.

From that group, I noted how two political chums had been involved in every GOP administration since Nixon’s day: Rumsfeld and Cheney. That was the genesis for my partisan joke, that of all the scoundrels and crooks in the Nixon administration, the shrewdest were the two weasels that got away.

It wasn’t entirely a joke, even then. As I pondered the foreign policy misadventures that had occurred in administrations they had influence in, I wondered how much might have occurred at the behest of the suspicious duo. It has become clear over time that both had major influences over the foreign policies of the inexperienced Bush.

I’m certainly not alone in the suspicions about that. Even the mainstream media now concludes both have had an inordinate say over foreign policies and military strategies. But today, an extra lightbulb went off that told me their influence was even greater than that, particularly Dick Cheney’s. The secondary joke, that Cheney was the ‘real’ president, now seems too true.

In reality, Bush is the real president, but my theory now holds that he chooses to do so as a figurehead, while delegating the real work to Cheney. And it’s done in such a way that Bush is often deliberately kept in the dark about the details precisely because Cheney’s deliberately designed the modus operandi to work that way, arising from the lessons he gained during Watergate.

Let me delineate my theory further, because it has direct relevance to the current US attorney purge scandal.

My lightbulb went on as I watched an old movie yesterday - ‘All the President’s Men’ - for the first time in many years. As I watched Woodward & Bernstein tracking down the puzzle pieces of the Watergate story, I felt a whole lot of deja vu.

By the end, my conspiracy theory had solidified: Dick Cheney, far more than Rove or Bush, is the primary source of most of the scandals now beginning to get investigated by Congress.

Bear with, as I’m just uncorking the examples.

Let’s start with Vietnam. From 1966 to 1974, that war steadily grew more unpopular in this country. It exhausted the nation’s tolerance for any but a defensive war for many years after. Reagan’s support of the repressive leaders of El Salvador and Nicaragua was opposed by a majority of Americans and Congress. The only war he launched that the public went with was to repel a Communist takeover on the tiny island of Grenada.

Yet by the end of his presidency, 14 years after our Vietnam withdrawal, a combination of events that included a massive global anti-nuclear-proliferation movement, his bellicose anti-Soviet rhetoric, the ascension of the peace-seeking Gorbachev, a massive military budget expansion by the Gipper, the union-led liberation movement of Lech Walesa in Poland, the resistance movement of Afghan jihadists (which blew back our way a few years later) and especially the flawed and crumbling Soviet economy, caused the breakup of the USSR a few months after Reagan left office. Ever since, the rightwing has proclaimed that Reagan singlehandedly won the Cold War. And have done so so convincingly, that the public regained its taste for war.

Still, even with George H.W. Bush’s entry into the first Gulf War 17 years after Vietnam, the media still made mentions of the old conflict initially. Support for the new war soared to over 80% on the strength of a massive PR campaign that was advanced by the government of Kuwait and a major PR firm, featuring the false horror stories of Iraqi troops dumping preemie babies from incubators.

So what had changed? The military-industrial-chickenhawk-politico complex had learned to control the message and the media. Everything including the consolidation of the corporate media to the end of the Fairness Doctrine to the image control of the upbeat visage of a confident and reassuring Big Brother Ronnie, brought a new, improved pro-war propaganda machine to the hands of GOP hawks.

For those left of center, and for military pragmatists, Vietnam provided lessons about avoiding manipulations like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, about adding transparency and Congressional oversight to our intelligence agencies, and about defining goals and strategies before entering conflicts, with a strong preference for diplomacy to prevent war as long as possible. All of that had been trumped by the time we launched the first Gulf War because the MICP complex had learned an entirely different set of lessons because its motivations differed from that of the majority of the US public.

Paraphrasing Smedley Butler, war was a profitable racket.

As Rumsfeld and Cheney were involved in many ways with that rightwing foreign policy transformation, they were eager pupils of and assistant architects to these new propaganda tactics. And after the USSR collapsed, rather than handling any redirection of or reward to the Afghan jihadi resistance fighters, they simply ignored them. And with the first Gulf War, provoked them. Giving rise to Al Qaeda.

Still, with PNAC, they marshalled an effort to take down the well-contained and weakened Saddam and created an ideological impetus to marshall the might of the US in the expansion of an American empire. The flashpoint of the 9-11 attacks, which took 8 years of planning and coordination for a small braintrust of terrorists to achieve, granted them the opening to mobilize the Saddam takedown.

Now think about the tenor of the media rhetoric between the 2000 Presidential campaign and today. That campaign featured elements of Karl Rove strategies that had been seen in previous Texas campaigns. Planted stories about opponents. Voter disenfranchisement. Ballot irregularities. Political operatives masquerading as a populist movement in post-election challenges.

With the 9-11 attacks, the tone and rhetoric of the media manipulation had changed dramatically, which I believe resulted from the control Cheney exerted after that. Though Rove’s techniques could still be seen and utilized, they became a subset of a far more sinister media manipulation that Cheney led.

The major evidence of that was the amount of references being made to Vietnam. Well before John Kerry began his campaign for the 2004 election, echoes of Vietnam could be heard, possibly beginning in the Saxby Chambliss campaign to unseat Senator Max Cleland, a decorated triple amputee Vietnam veteran. That campaign was so vicious that other elected GOP Vietnam vets protested, including John McCain and Chuck Hagel.

From that point on, the Mighty Wurlitzer of the mass media has constantly reiterated themes that seemed more bent on demonizing opponents of the Vietnam War than dissing even Al Qaida. Anyone who questioned administration policy or opposed it were tied to that failed war. People like me were America haters, terrorist sympathizers or (as Atrios defined) just dirty fucking hippies. They reached further back to excoriate the entire nation of France for its failure against Hitler and the term ’surrender monkeys’ came in vogue, along with the even more ludicrous ‘freedom fries’ and ‘freedom toast.’ And a trio of talented singers were traitors deserving of death threats because its lead singer said she was embarrassed by George Bush in the country that was our top pro-war ally.

Not every aspect of this fresh campaign came from Cheney’s noggin. But the use of an executive of the PR firm, Hill & Knowlton (of the incubator story and much, much more) as the lead Pentagon spokeswoman at the outset of this war, remains a reminder of the image control that was mastered during the first Gulf War, when Cheney was present, but Rove was still back in Texas.

Add to that the actual strategies employed in fighting this war. Up until Rumsfeld left the scene, the initial visuals of Shock and Awe were replaced by rosy Westmoreland-ish progress reports and a non-strategy best described as Persist and Profit. Which is as simple a definition of what Cheney and Rummy learned from Vietnam as I can describe.

Forget war opponents. Public opinion be damned. Forget tactics and military strategy. Don’t listen to those worried about sectarian divides and skip all the history lessons. Everybody, including our opponents, has a price and can be bought off. All we have to do that didn’t get done in Vietnam is to control the storyline via the media, and stay forever (persist) till every remaining opponent is simply exhausted and submits.

Sounds kinda loopy, doesn’t it? But that’s where Woodward & Bernstein’s movie comes in. As I watched the puzzle pieces come together, one thing that I’d never noticed before is how very close Nixon’s team came to pulling it off.

It took years of work, intense competition between the two Washington Post reporters and investigative journalists for the New York Times, and a few lucky breaks to expose it all, and to this day, I doubt that it ‘all’ was fully exposed.

Had the numbers of people with access to bits of info been reduced, had more silence been directly bought, it’s conceivable that none of it would ever have been directly tied to the White House. Consider, for example, that a few scribbles found on E. Howard Hunt were the only initial link that the White House had been involved.

So imagine that Cheney, Rummy and the elder George Bush reviewed the whole process and determined where key mistakes were made that led to its exposure. By eliminating those mistakes, they could easily develop a more failsafe operation that could do the thing the whole operation was really about.

Controlling elections.

Now, consider Josh Marshall’s explanation of the US Attorney Purge and why it matters.

The bottom line there? Controlling elections.

Certainly, I could be wrong that it’s Cheney, not Rove, behind this latest scandal. My main reason for thinking it’s Cheney is because the Iraq War non-strategy seems so connected to the longterm anger Cheney and his ilk have towards the old failed war. If the approach utilized in Iraq from 2003-2006 was to correct their perceived mistakes of that earlier war, it leads to the speculation that many of the election control schemes were based on correcting the mistakes of CREEP (Nixon’s overt and covert re-election team). And Cheney, more than Rove, had the bird’s-eye view of the original versions being corrected.

Proof? I don’t need no steenking proof. This is a conspiracy theory from a liberal moonbat dirty fucking hippy, remember?

But my gut tells me there’s more ‘there’ there.

Above all, why this really matters can be found in the spin going on around The Purge. The White House is portraying it as normal politics permissible at the pleasure of the president. The corporate media, early on, was completely dismissive of any scandal at all. And initially, it WAS difficult to make sense of as it wasn’t readily clear that any actual laws were broken. Unlike Watergate, where a clearly illegal break-in occurred. So was this just a corrected version of Watergate? The evidence isn’t all in yet, but it seems pretty plausible, after seeing that movie again.

The Purge IS about using government agencies to wrongly portray political opponents as guilty of something crooked that could be cooked up long enough to win elections before the ‘evidence’ disappears into thin air. However, the case may be too thin to win prosecutions of people who leaned on US Attorneys to either back off prosecutions of Republicans or to trump up stuff against Democrats.

It may be that the only prosecutable mistake made in this new operation was made by Gonzalez, when he lied to Congress. That would be an important mistake that got repeated from the Watergate scandal, where the act of covering up ultimately proved to be the most prosecutable.

If my theory’s correct, you can bet Cheney’s really fuming at the one loose link in his rebuilt chain. But there’s another part of this corrected version we should fully consider.

Plausible deniability.

It’s quite likely that Cheney kept Bush completely out of the loop on all these machinations. By doing so, he’d limit any risk to Bush. Bush can only be found to have dirty hands if he is aware of the details and actively engages in covering them up. And it’s certainly conceivable that his resistance to the calls for dumping Gonzalez are rooted in his lack of knowledge that anything potentially illegal had been going on at all.

Bush, like Warren G. Harding in the Teapot Dome Scandal, may be clear of any direct wrongdoing in this scandal. So long as he breaks no laws or gets recorded saying the wrong things during this phase of resisting the investigation, he can remain above it all, escaping any legal harm.

If Cheney’s role in this remains undetected, it’s conceivable that only Gonzalez will be thrown under the bus, while Rove gains any remaining heat that lingers after.

Far more important than simply gaining Gonzalez’s removal is to look at the big picture, something that Hal Holbrooke as Deep Throat kept advising. Disenfranchising Democratic voters, hacks of computer ballots lacking paper trails, phone-jamming, rumor-mongering, media manipulation, and now, The Purge. Even the Valerie Plame outing fits the big picture of maintaining message control to protect Bush’s odds in the 2004 election.

All of them undercut the foundation of our democracy by thwarting every aspect of elections, from the voters permitted to participate, to misinforming them via the use of government agencies, to falsified ballot results, to thwarted recount efforts.
It’s startling that so little of all these events has proven to be prosecutable or even fully investigatable. But remember what I noted at the beginning:

The difference between a woo-woo conspiracy theory and a conspiracy is the amount of hours and ingenuity spent by innovative investigative journalists. The many conspiracy theories that abound today are a direct reflection on the lack of good investigative journalists today.

So far, it’s been because of the work of Greg Palast, Josh Marshall (and his team), Bev Harris, and very few others that has staved off the invisibility of this overall democracy-killing scheme.

With or without benefit of my conspiracy theory, we’d all be wise to keep reminding our Congress not to ignore the big picture, but to develop fresh protections from the dangers inherent.

If they fail, the plot to assassinate democracy is likely to succeed.

Postscript: It’s also important to note that if my theory someday is proven correct, then it explains why no success will ever be possible in Iraq. Instead of sound military and diplomatic strategies that flex to fit current and future conditions (a reality-based strategy), we might continue the Cheney-Rummy travesty of refighting the old war they want instead of the new war we actually have.

While pondering all this, go re-read the book or see the movie again that stimulated this post. A tinfoil hat is optional.

Better yet, go donate cash or solid tips to Josh Marshall’s team. Or at least, keep reading them daily. They really could be saving all our asses. And I can’t ever express all the gratitude I feel for that.