Another American Empire

In Bloomberg today:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-30/manning-s-crime-stealing-the-dirty-secrets-of-war.html

When the Pentagon Papers were first leaked to the New York Times, White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman shared a fascinating insight with President Richard Nixon. Haldeman had been talking about the papers with another Nixon aide -- Donald Rumsfeld -- who had said that “to the ordinary guy, all this is a bunch of gobbledygook.”

“But out of the gobbledygook comes a very clear thing,” Haldeman told Nixon. “You can’t trust the government. You can’t believe what they say. And you can’t rely on their judgment. And the implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the President wants to do even though it’s wrong, and the President can be wrong.”

(emphasis mine)
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