I'd rather not beat the horse of questioned timing as it lay dying (it's taken us a long way lately and has long deserved a decent burial) but I couldn't help noticing that within the final five minutes of PBS's awkardly-titled "Watergate plus 30: Shadow of History" (re-aired last night) there were repeated reminders that someone in the White House today could very well be keeping secrets, that Watergate didn't scrub the walls clean, and sad as it is to say, the only lesson may have been, "don't get caught."

One of the rather stately looking gents in a tie seated in front of a fireplace or a flag (or a shelf of leather bound books or something) said that this is not an attack on George Bush, I mean, other Presidents have done the same things.

But what has he done, honestly? Ah ... but what we don't know!

You can't add all that up and fail to see it as an effort at subtly placing Bush in Nixon's shadow, or rather at making Bush the shadow of Nixon's history. The way the piece closed was like a quiet lament; it seemed to say "we know they're up to no good, but they learned from Nixon and they hide their sins better these days."

Jeb McGruder's claim (prefaced with the caution that only he knows whether his claim is true) that Nixon ordered the break-in came just before the final flourish of doubts on lessons learned.

(I leaned toward the Artie Lange approach to the Mike Walker game on the Stern show: When McGruder hinted at his Nixon impression I smelled a fake, but that's neither here nor there.)

Perhaps this is paranoia from overexposure to the left (I am an academic afterall) but the lesson here seemed to be that -- save Jeb McGruder and three decades -- the sins of Presidents tend toward the grave. If Bush has sinned we won't have the evidence for quite some time.

So learn the lesson of history! Don't let the work of those brave men go unheeded! You can effect change by voting out Nixon's shadow!