From way back at the beginning of the thread:

"The big difference from Watergate and similar American things is that the system here is better geared to close down the can of worms and clamp it shut.

I would anticipate that when the report comes out it will be written in such a way that everyone important can say that it exonerates them. And it will have neatly avoided exploring any really embarrassing or damaging stuff. There'll be a few relatively low level symbolic early retirements and departures to spend more time with their families. If all else fails there will be some convenient retirements on health grounds."

Actually, there is no true comparison between this and Watergate in the US. The closest comparison is between this and what became known as the Iran/Contra scandal. What is playing out on the US side is nothing new. Substitute "Iraq" and "Palestinian" for Iran, and "Latin American drug wars" for "Contras". See my most recent post to the OBIT Sergio Vieira de Mello thread here:

thread.cfm?threadid=62242&messages=13

No one from the Reagan administration was ever brought to justice (they were either acquitted, absolved of their culpability due to Reagan's popularity and the "heroic" spin and polish job executed to perfection for TV audiences by Oliver North, or pardoned, as John Poindexter was), and in fact, the primary players of the Reagan administration have been wholly reconstituted in the Bush administration.

When I use the word fundamentalist, I mean it in a broad political ideological sense, not exclusively a religious one. The right wing ideological true believers in the political sense are no more Christian than I am martian. However, they are masterful exploiters and manipulaters of the not very intelligent right wing Christian "true believer" fundamentalists. And that is why they have barely skipped a beat from Reagan to Bush II, despite the Clinton years aberration. They only need to appeal to two groups of voters: fundamentalist Christians, and greedy urban/suburbanites--those very dangerous (as Saul Alinsky called them) "have a little, want a little more" voters, who will vote to punish others (for various and sundry reasons--these are the sorts who signed petitions for the California recall, voted for Jesse Ventura or Arnold Schwarzennager (ie iconic celebrities), or who attempted to stop the ballot count in California by making a big media splash by insisting the yellow press given them all the "15 minutes of fame" sort of attention these types of people cravenly seek. They are election wreckers, a rather new sort of American phenomenon that the political right, beginning with Reagan, have become masters at exploiting. The media covers them because they are so "colorful" and extreme.

The political graft and corruption that we are seeing both sides the pond these days is always sleight of hand. Currently, the better manipulaters are amassed on the right end of the political spectrum, both sides the pond, regardless of the labels attached (ie Clinton Democrat, Blair Labourite, Republican, Tory, Social Democrat, etc) in any of the first and second world countries. Right or left, the politicians in Europe and the US are simply fighting over who gets the biggest piece of pie, not about the issues that matter to us "little people".