Getting Past the Watergate Fixation

We have been on red alert since December!

AlterNet: Getting Past the Watergate Fixation:

"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 clich.

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."