"The trauma of Watergate, which brought down a president who seemed pathologically compelled to deceive, came toward the end of that extended exercise in governmental folly and deceit, Vietnam. Taken together, these two disasters, both of which shook the nation, provided a case study in how citizens should view their government: with extreme skepticism," writes Bob Herbert on today's New York Times op/ed page.

Now, with George W. Bush in charge, the nation is mired in yet another tragic period marked by incompetence, duplicity, bad faith and outright lies coming once again from the very top of the government. Just last month we had the disclosure of a previously secret British government memorandum that offered further confirmation that the American public and the world were spoon-fed bogus information by the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

President Bush, as we know, wanted to remove Saddam Hussein through military action. With that in mind, the memo damningly explained, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

That's the kind of deceit that was in play as American men and women were suiting up and marching off to combat at the president's command. Mr. Bush wanted war, and he got it. Many thousands have died as a result. . . .

The lessons of Watergate and Vietnam are that the checks and balances embedded in the national government by the founding fathers (and which the Bush administration is trying mightily to destroy) are absolutely crucial if American-style democracy is to survive, and that a truly free and unfettered press (which the Bush administration is trying mightily to intimidate) is as important now as it's ever been. . . .

Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, drunk with power and insufficiently restrained, took the nation on hair-raising journeys that were as unnecessary as they were destructive. Now, in the first years of the 21st century, George W. Bush is doing the same.

Congress and an aggressive press ultimately played crucial roles in bringing the truth about Vietnam and Watergate to light. A similar challenge exists today. . . .

You are right of course, Mr. Herbert, and I admire your tough point of view. The problem is, there is no courage or honor left in this Republican controlled Congress. And there is no such thing as an aggressive press left in America.

For example, your executive editor, Bill Keller, sat on a journalism panel out in California a few days ago in a show broadcast on C-SPAN. He basically sat there and took it while a British journalist from the Financial Times described how the European press is much more skeptical of government and courageous in questioning public officials, while the American press corps basically touts the official administration line and shows an incredible reluctance to ask tough questions in the face of ostracism from access to press conferences - which Mr. Keller admitted are no place for news anyway.

Your own newspaper has been soundly criticized for failing to demonstrate the "requisite skepticism" of the WMD claims by the Bush administration in the run-up to war in Iraq.

Here's a fact for you that I've never written about to date. While free-lancing for the New York Times out of New Orleans prior to the war, I tried to convince the national assignment editor that the Times should allow me to do some digging to find the think tank study planning the war in Iraq prior to the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

My efforts were completely blown off by your own national desk. I still have all the e-mails about that, which I'm considering talking about in my own memoir of the news business.

This is not unusual, apparently. History shows that the New York Times showed a similar reluctance to get out in front on the coverage of the Watergate story when Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post were given the freedom to dig all the way up to the Nixon White House.

If the Times doesn't have the staff writers with the requisite cajones to take on the Bush administration, perhaps y'all should consider hiring some free-lancers who have demonstrated the guts to question authority. This might be a better strategy than one of your editors, formerly with the Wall Street Journal, who is so afraid of e-mail and blogs that he is willing to entrust the reporting of a certain trial here to less experienced correspondents who are known as "buddies" with the U.S. attorney in Birmingham and who tout the Justice Department line - in spite of the fact that the Times was the only major news organization denied press credentials to cover the trial.

Where is the courage in that? Seems like there are all kinds of truth and deceit alive in this land.