As I watch the halls of government come crashing down around all the president’s men, I am reminded of President Nixon more than 30 years ago. That president, with several of his aides in trouble for lying and forced out of their jobs, was facing impeachment and he resigned.

Am I suggesting Bush resign before he causes even more damage to our great nation? Yes, but then we would be left with the vice president from whom he was cloned. Hastert, anybody?

Should we add many of our other leaders in Washington to the quit list? Yes, but the corruption is so widespread, who would be left to run the country?

We have House Majority Leader Tom DeLay under indictment for allegedly planning a political fund-raising scheme to put more Republicans into the Texas Legislature and Congress.

And the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s sale of millions of dollars of stock in HCA, the Nashville-based hospital chain founded by his father and brother. Frist sold his stock two weeks before prices fell by 9 percent.

It is no wonder the public’s opinion of the federal government has fallen from 59 percent favorable last year to 45 percent, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

No doubt, it is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Top advisers to Bush and Cheney are in criminal trouble in the CIA leak investigation, which on the surface pertains to illegally making a CIA operative’s name public.

What the case really concerns, however, is the lying and deception that the Bushites used to justify the Iraq war and their attempts to keep people from finding out about it.

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who is Cheney’s chief of staff, and top presidential political adviser Karl Rove have been investigated. Remember Haldeman and Erhlichmann from the Nixon days?

Why would these Bush and Cheney big shots want to reveal a CIA agent’s name? Because her husband, retired diplomat Joseph Wilson, had said publicly that the Bush administration had twisted intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion of Iraq.

But some of us have known for a long time that there were no WMDs and the Bushites lied. It’s taken much of the nation a lot longer to come to grips with a dishonest administration. Don’t forget, just less than a year ago, 59 million voters gave the president four more years.

Further troubles arose when the final week of Bush’s month-long vacation was ruined by Hurricane Katrina.

With hundreds dead, hundreds of thousands homeless and New Orleans under water, he had to leave his sunny ranch early and head back to Washington to belatedly deal with a tragedy his buddy at FEMA should already have taken care of.

Actually, he probably was happy to be back in D.C. and away from Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war protester whose son was killed in Iraq. She and dozens of supporters had been camping down the road from the ranch for weeks, waiting for a meeting with Bush.

But, hey, you can’t really blame the president for Katrina. A hurricane is an act of nature. Even the rich and powerful can do little about that — except maybe pollute it. It would help, though, if FEMA hadn’t been robbed of millions of dollars to be used instead for a misguided Department of Homeland Security.

What about gasoline prices? They’re human-generated, and the Bushites and their big oil supporters sure raked in the cash at our expense over the last several months.

BP and Exxon-Mobil, the first two major oil companies to report on third-quarter financials, said profits soared 34 and 75 percent respectively.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the world’s five biggest oil companies were expected to collectively report record-breaking third-quarter earnings of almost $28 billion — while consumer gasoline prices zoomed past $3 a gallon.

Surprise. Only 20 percent of people said they have a favorable view of oil companies — down from 32 percent in 2001, the Pew poll showed.

Then there’s Harriet Miers, Bush’s private attorney and White House counsel, whose loyalty he rewarded with a Supreme Court nomination.

She was forced to withdraw Thursday because of a lack of support from Bush’s Republican and conservative allies. She was being attacked from all sides for either being a Bush crony, being too far left or right, or for being unqualified.

Realizing that Washington’s a pretty weird place where lots of strange things happen, you still have to ask, what is going on down there? And we’re facing three more years of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and the rest of the gang.

The Nixon-Watergate and Clinton-intern scandals pale compared with the controversies in Washington today.

I know there are a lot of people who regretted voting for Bush once. And now many are regretting making the same mistake twice.

Can we get through it? Will a country we’re proud of survive? Probably. But let’s hope not too many more people die in Iraq and not too many more suffer because of government incompetence at home.

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Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at (607) 432-1000, ext. 217, or cary@thedailystar.com.