Sunday, December 18, 2005

He Was A Good One

Jack Anderson died yesterday; he was 83.

Mr. Anderson's work enraged those in power. President Richard M. Nixon tried to smear him as a homosexual, the CIA was ordered to spy on him, and, according to the Watergate tapes, a Nixon aide ordered two cohorts to try to kill the journalist by poisoning.


No reporter today, aside maybe Seymour Hersh, has the guts Jack Anderson had. But then such courage could have gotten Anderson killed. Read this interview with the diminuitive Nazi, G. Gordon Liddy. Nothing is new under the Republican Son Sun. Bush wanted to bomb al-Jazeera; Nixon's thugs wanted to murder Jack Anderson.

The WaPo obit quotes Anderson as saying "I have to do daily what Woodward and Bernstein did once". That's not too much of an exaggeration. In many many ways, it's a pity that Woodward & Bernstein, rather than Anderson, developed Watergate, because it's pretty clear that Anderson would have not subsequently gone the Hollywood, make-kissy with the Establishment route that W&B have travelled with red light on and legs spread.

Jack Anderson was a consistent pest to our criminal overlords, especially to that arch-criminal Richard Nixon. He shined the first light into the various ITT (the Enron/Halliburton/Bechtel of the 70s) scandals, the tentacles of which connected Nixon, the RNC, ITT, and Chile in a clusterfuck of corrupt, evil shit. I especially recommend Anderson's reportings on this subject: the cast of characters -- from Dita Beard to the hilariously vile E. Howard Hunt -- make them a great read.

Anderson can't be responsible for some of the creeps who started out in his employ, notably Brit Hume and Howard "Show me a Republican, I show you my kneepads" Kurtz: they became media whores through their own herculean efforts.

Mormons who are rightly embarrassed by the veritable Danite Band of LDS thugs out there -- Orrin Hatch, The Romneys, Orson Scott Card -- can take pride in Anderson, who was an observing LDS, and therefore something of a duckbilled platypus among the chain-smoking, boozing press corps of his era.