Some Thoughts for Dick Cheney

Cheney's ravings about us being less safe now than under the Bush-Cheney regime would have had a Democrat making the same allegations whisked off to some black hole of a CIA detention facility in a country where English is not even a second language.

Besides showing a lack of good judgment, Cheney proves himself to be the cowardly sort that starts at every creak of the floorboard.

I have thought much of the Bush/Cheney program rooted itself in cowardice or in what Gore Vidal calls sissiness in some of his political essays. I never understood what he meant until half way through the Bush's first term.

The following articles from The Washington Post underscore just how stupid we have been.

Detainee's Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots :

"In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said."

General's Paper Sheds Light on Counterinsurgency:

Claims that the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan handles only security "have no place in this campaign," Gen. David D. McKiernan, commander of the U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, wrote in a guidance paper sent to his troops.

Instead, he directed his command to "focus on governance, development and security concurrently" because "success in Afghanistan will not come from the sole pursuit of a security line of operations by military forces."

McKiernan's three-page counterinsurgency guidance paper, which was provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week by Gen. David H. Petraeus, puts in practical terms hard lessons learned by the U.S. military over the past eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

rce in Afghanistan handles only security "have no place in this campaign," Gen. David D. McKiernan, commander of the U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, wrote in a guidance paper sent to his troops.

Instead, he directed his command to "focus on governance, development and security concurrently" because "success in Afghanistan will not come from the sole pursuit of a security line of operations by military forces."

McKiernan's three-page counterinsurgency guidance paper, which was provided to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week by Gen. David H. Petraeus, puts in practical terms hard lessons learned by the U.S. military over the past eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Big Idea: Want to Fight Terrorists? Try Mocking Them:

"With the Taliban regaining strength and Osama bin Laden still on the loose, President Obama announced a new strategy Friday to 'disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda' in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In addition to new funding for Pakistan's democratic institutions and more U.S. troops to train the Afghan security forces, here's another anti-terrorism tactic the president might consider: Make al-Qaeda boring."

Which might sound silly but I learned long ago that if I could get someone to laugh at an opposing party's case, that was the end of that case.

Adios, to Mr. Cheney's favorite water sport.

Dick Cheney - The (Long ) Goodbye Tour

Enough already, I was going to title this Dick Cheney - Great A**hole Ever to Be Vice President? but thought better of it. Could the Vice President and his equally embarrassing President just shuffle off to some corner and let us forget we let ourselves be hoodwinked by these two whose only great achievements were their incompetency and their mendacity.

Meanwhile, I must take issue with the following paragraph from The New York Times editorial The World According to Cheney:

"So Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush managed to stop short of repeating two of the most outrageous abuses of power in American history — Roosevelt’s decision to force Japanese-Americans into camps and Lincoln’s declaration of martial law to silence his critics? That’s not exactly a lofty standard of behavior."

I cannot defend either FDR's treatment of Japanese-Americans or Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, but the Times overlooks one major difference between FDR and Lincoln and Bush. Neither Lincoln nor FDR repudiated the role of Congress as has Bush.

Palin, Cheney and The Vice-Presidency

Seems I am not the only one who is up in arms about Palin's idea of expanding the Vice-Presidency (see below for my take of the debate). The New York Times has an editorial on the subject Dick Cheney, Role Model.

It is hard to tell from Ms. Palin’s remarks whether she understands how profoundly Dick Cheney has reshaped the vice presidency — as part of a larger drive to free the executive branch from all checks and balances. Nor did she seem to understand how much damage that has done to American democracy.

Mr. Cheney has shown what can happen when a vice president — a position that is easy to lampoon and overlook — is given free rein by the president and does not care about trampling on the Constitution.

Mr. Cheney has long taken the bizarre view that the lesson of Watergate was that Congress was too powerful and the president not powerful enough. He dedicated himself to expanding President Bush’s authority and arrogating to himself executive, legislative and legal powers that are nowhere in the Constitution.

She is wrong but I am thinking she is not proposing this idea as ignorantly as some.

What the Constitution has to say about the Vice-Presidency's duties:

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

***

3. If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.

***

1. In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.

***

3. Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President.

4. Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Back to The New York Times:

Any president deserves a vice president who will be a sound adviser and trustworthy supporter. But the American people also deserve and need a vice president who understands and respects the balance of power — and the limits of his or her own power. That is fundamental to our democracy.

So far, Ms. Palin has it exactly, frighteningly wrong.

Not to mention that conservatives always talk about the letter of law and strict interpretation of the Constitution. At least they do so when condemning the United States Supreme Court to get political donations.

Could it be that Palin wants more to be co-President? Even more so than what we think Cheney has been a co-President? I think The Times underestimates her ambition (albeit Talking in Points from The Times does come close and then veers off). Do I overestimate her intelligence? Better to overestimate a danger than to underestimate it.

Update: I found an article, Historical Manglings, from The New Republic that discusses Palin and Biden's errors regarding the constitutional role of the Vice Presidency. I have two quibbles with thus article: first, Burr was not Vice President when he allegedly committed treason (see this Wikipedia article for the dates) and the writer gives us no examples where the Vice President has much of any importance to the Senate as its President.

For a different view than I have: The Vice Presidency from Keith Jackson's blog.

Maureen Dowd Nails George W.

I do like what she does in the last two paragraphs of American President Pleads Guilty to Hopeless Idealism :

"He said “history will judge whether or not, you know, more troops were needed earlier, troops could have been positioned here better or not.” But going in, he said, was right despite the “doubters.” “There is some who say that perhaps freedom is not universal,” he asserted, adding that he rejected as elitist the notion that “maybe it’s only, you know, white-guy Methodists who are capable of self-government.”

If there’s one thing W. and Cheney have proved, beyond a sliver of a shadow of a doubt, it’s that at least two white-guy Methodists are not capable of self-government."

McGovern Favors Impeaching Bush/Cheney

So he says in The Washington Post: Why I Believe Bush Must Go Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse. The punchline:

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

I agree with the idea in principal, but just do not see where showing them and the Republican Party the door is just a better way to go.

For the person who sent me the editorial, thanks.

Bush, Presidential Power and some new books

The New York Times Reviews two books on Bush and Presidential power.

....The salient question of the moment, then, is about Bush’s legal legacy. After his tenure, what will come of the changes his lawyers have wrought, especially their attempts to expand executive power?

Two new books offer contrasting answers. Charlie Savage, the author of “Takeover,” depicts a presidency on steroids, pumped up by Vice President Dick Cheney. For decades, Savage argues, Cheney has “wanted to permanently alter the constitutional balance of American government, establishing powers that future presidents would be able to wield as well.” And because presidential power once accrued generally sticks, Cheney is likely to get his wish. In “The Genius of America,” Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes also rue the increase of presidential power at Congress’s expense. But they think our system of government can recover, if only we can remember and keep faith with the crucial accomplishments of the Constitution’s framers. Viewed through this lens, Bush’s lawyers seem smaller and their influence less enduring.

***

Today, however, we’re too weary of our own strife to remember all of this. “The message we are hearing is that our government does not work,” Lane and Oreskes write. “The message we should be hearing is that our government is a reflection of our own divisions.” If Congress is supine, that’s because we’ve helped to beat it down. If we recalled the lessons of the nation’s founding, on the other hand, we’d quit looking for shortcuts and falling for imperially-minded presidents. We’d see the Bush-Cheney march of executive power for the threat that it is. And we’d put a halt to it. A rallying cry, perhaps, for the post-2008 era.

Maybe we should wonder if our educational system failed us. Why are so many people willing to give up so much because the President says we must? The President - and here I write of the office and not the present ninny in the Oval Office - has two major jobs: execute the laws passed by Congress and act as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. He is not Der Fuhrer and we have no fuhrerprinzip. So now do Americans act like we should?

Was Syria playing with nukes?

Take a look at How close were we to a third world war? from The Sunday Herald.

Though officially carrying a cargo of cement, according to intelligence sources quoted in the Washington Post newspaper, the Israelis believed that on board the ship was a consignment of nuclear material or equipment.

On September 15, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler wrote that "an Israeli official provided the US with evidence of Syrian-North Korean co-operation on a nuclear facility".

Many veteran Middle East intelligence hands believe this to be plausible explanation. Among them is Ray Close, a former CIA analyst in the Near East Division and former station chief in Saudi Arabia, who served for 27 years as an "Arabist" for the agency.

According to what Close himself admits is a "speculative" analysis, he believes that: "The Israelis offered us the US intelligence that Syria is beginning to develop a nuclear capability based on North Korean technology and urged the US to co-operate with them in mounting a military attack to destroy the Syrian site."

So is our government getting confused again about the real Middle East danger? Why are we seeing these kind of headlines: Cheney: Iran faces 'serious consequences' over nuclear drive?

War and Deliverance

From Newsweek.com comes the movie Deliverance as an analogy for Iraq War. Written by James Dickey's son. Ordinarily, I would call this kind of exercise a stretch (hmmm, Dick Cheney yelling sooeee while the country plays Ned Beatty?). Instead, we get a subtly written piece about character and characters. Something the writer does not point is that Cheney and Rumsfeld are of an age with the characters in Deliverance. Here is an excerpt I liked from War and Deliverance:

"Normally, the role of government—of civilization—is to curb our sense of personal license when civilized society is under pressure from anger and fear. Government is supposed to put a brake on cynical, self-serving calculation, especially at times of great danger and confusion. Nobody knows that better than professional soldiers, who are trained to understand the laws of society and of war. But the core coterie around Bush and Cheney, who never were soldiers, pushed for war with Iraq at all costs and as an end to almost all constraints."

As much as I like that quote and the article from whence it came, I suggest reading this post on Masson's Blog: Cheney’s Law.

Last night I watched the Frontline story entitled Cheney’s Law. If half of that is true, any real patriot would be pissed off at the monstrous power grab Dick Cheney, David Addington, and John Yoo have tried to execute on behalf of the executive. I paraphrase, but essentially what these chowderheads are arguing is that the President gets to be a king and there’s not a damn thing Congress can do about it so long as the President mutters the terms “commander-in-chief” or “war” every so often. It’s been dressed up under the moniker “unitary executive theory” but I don’t see any practical limitations that distinguish it from monarchy.

Please, read it all.

Book review worth reading - Bush and the Secret Government

Take the time to read Shadow government Inside the Bush administration's sweeping, often secretive efforts to expand the power of the presidency. The Boston Globe published a balanced review of the currents books looking at how Bush has secretly governed the country.

The larger issues raised by Savage and Goldsmith are how we govern ourselves as a people. The Bush-Cheney team has been insisting that in time of war the Constitution and common sense tell us that the president must be entrusted with the power to protect the nation as he and he alone sees fit; neither the Congress nor international treaties agreed to by the United States should bind him. The administration has a legitimate point that the president and his team must be able to act quickly and forcefully in the face of threats. But in its zeal, as Savage and Goldsmith argue, it has been defying the Founders' express desire for checks and balances. As much as Madison and Hamilton wanted an effective executive, they also wanted to avoid an autocratic president. Down that road, as they saw, is a loss of liberty, so they invented instead, as Richard Neustadt observed, a system of "separated institutions sharing powers." If there were any remaining question, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor surely provided the answer in the Supreme Court's decision of 2004 in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case: "A state of war is not a blank check for the president."

Torture, Israel, and Us

Ok, terrorism means to scare us as much as possible. The true problem lies in how we deal with our fears. George W. Bush got the Democratic Congress to approve more warrantless wiretaps. I say that shows the terrorists have scared us. So does the Vice President's defending torture, so is Gitmore.

So how do we compare with a country that deals with terrorists on a daily basis on its own territory?

In Israel, even noncitizens captured outside the country and designated unlawful combatants are entitled to due process in Israeli civilian courts. They are guaranteed judicial review of their detention within 14 days of capture. They are guaranteed the services of a lawyer no later than 34 days after capture. And they are guaranteed a review of their detention by an Israeli district court judge every six months thereafter. If an unlawful combatant is captured in the occupied territories of the West Bank, the case proceeds through Israeli military courts, with similar guarantees of judicial review and legal representation.

The Israeli system is not without critics. Advocates of civil liberties there point to procedures that allow a judge to review evidence introduced by the government that the defense has not seen or been allowed to rebut. And detainee advocates, such as the Israeli group HaMoked, suggest that the government enjoys an overwhelming advantage, as evidenced by the relatively few detentions that have been forbidden by judges. According to its Web site, the group challenged 142 detentions in 2004; 11 of those challenges prevailed.

That is from The Washington Post editorial Israel's Example Fighting terrorism without sacrificing due process. Worth reading in full.

Bush and Cheney Books Reviewed

Not here but at Legal History Blog. Check out Reviewed: New Books on Bush and Cheney.

While on the subject of Bush and Cheney and their power grab for the Executive Branch, take a look at Conscience of a Conservative which is slated for September 9 in the New York times Magazine. This is an excerpt:

The Bush administration’s legalistic “go-it-alone approach,” Goldsmith suggests, is the antithesis of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s willingness to collaborate with Congress. Bush, he argues, ignored the truism that presidential power is the power to persuade. “The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense,” Goldsmith concludes in his book. “This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.”

Opposing persuasion is force and/or subterfuge. What kind of government imposes its policies through lies or force?

So damned tired of Bush

Early this morning I heard a comedy record from the early 70's. Nixon and Watergate was the topic. Geez, I just about miss Nixon. (Don't worry too much about me missing Nixon. I really miss being thirteen sometimes, too, but I am pretty sure I do not want to repeat the last 34 years). After all, Tricky Dick seemed competent in about everything except hiring plumbers while Bush seem oblivious to being an outright boob. Nixon seems so damned concerned about not appearing as a crook while Bush seems bent on being unconcerned about everything including his own lack of honesty.

What got me thinking about the Boob-in-Chief? Alberto Gonzales started it all. Watching him testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was thinking: The guy practiced law? He was
a Texas Supreme Court Justice?

I could take a reasonably intelligent person and they could have done a better job. A shift manager at McDonald's has more ability to manage the Justice Department than this idiot. Then I read this article by Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post and I am reminded that his boss created Gonzales and cannot be excused from this mess. It was a hard week this week and I am tired and I felt a major depression coming after thinking about Bush and Gonzales. So, I quit thinking about them. Or, I tried.

Daily Kos has a post here that got my blood pressure going again and so did this article from The Washington Post.

Enough, Congress just needs to impeach Bush, Cheney and Gonzales. Enough of using them as punching bags while they push the country further into ridicule and the government into a corruption of a democratic republic.

The Federal Contractor Misconduct Database

Just found out about this morning. While more of an interest to my business side, I just could not resist posting a link to it here: http://www.contractormisconduct.org/.

About POGO's Contractor Misconduct Database
The government awards contracts to companies with histories of misconduct such as contract fraud and environmental, ethics, and labor violations. In the absence of a centralized federal database listing instances of misconduct, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is providing such data. We believe that it will lead to improved contracting decisions and public access to information about how the government spends hundreds of billions of taxpayer money each year on goods and services.

Halliburton is #6 on its top ten list. You can even report contractor abuse from the site.

Impeaching Cheney

John Nichols writes in The Online Beat (7/13/07) about how the movement for impeaching Cheney is gathering steam:

Four more members of the U.S. House signed on this week as cosponsors of H. Res. 333, the measure that outlines articles of impeachment against Vice President Dick Cheney for actively and systematically seeking to deceive citizens and Congress about an alleged threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and an alleged relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and for openly threatening aggression against Iran.

***

According to recent polling by the American Research Group, 54 percent of Americans want Cheney impeached. Among Democrats, that number rises to 76 percent. A majority of self-described independents back action to hold the vice president to account, as do a striking 17 percent of Republicans. With conservatives such as former Reagan administration lawyer Bruce Fein coming out strongly for Cheney's impeachment, the numbers of Republicans who are pulling for accountability is likely to grow.

I still think this is a good idea. Read the entire post and the comments, too. Then decide whether we do not need to jerk a knot in the Bush-Cheney tail.

Today, George Will annoyed me

Will can be annoying when he pushes the party line. The time he absolutely cannot be annoying is when he writes on baseball. Today's column, Declaration of Dependence, he is pushing a party line. True, he is also reviewing a book but he makes no or little distinctions between the book and his own views.

Mr. Will starts rehashing history. Or bits of history, I should say.

The Depression's persistence, partly a result of such policy flippancy, was frightening. In 1937, during the depression within the Depression, there occurred the steepest drop in industrial production ever recorded. By January 1938 the unemployment rate was back up to 17.4 percent. The war, not the New Deal, defeated the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt's success was in altering the practice of American politics.

Yes, it was frightening. I had a grandmother who was 39 years old in 1937 and one of her daughters was 14 that year (for the curious, my own mother was only 4 years old ). The Great Depression engendered a fear that never left them.

What Mr. Will introduces as a startling discovery - the New Deal - did not solve the Great Depression, has always been known even if the myth exists that the New Deal solved the Great Depression. Mr. Will omits that the New Deal dying in 1937. (I did not understand this until I read Robert Jackson' book, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy: A Study of a Crisis in American Power Politics.)

Mr. Will does mention the court packing scheme:

In 1938, when the New Deal's failure to spark recovery made Roosevelt increasingly frantic, he attempted to enlarge the Supreme Court so he could pack it with compliant justices. He said Americans had the right to "insist that every agency of popular government" respond to "their will." He included the court among "popular," meaning political and representative, institutions.

Perhaps, Mr. Will assumes his fellow Americans recall their history lessons. The United States Supreme Court consistently struck legislation implementing the idea that the United States was an economic unity. Now, the United States Supreme Court had had no problem with this concept when Congress sought to protect the railroads from local regulation. Mr Wills' sentence turns about the causal sequence when he has the failing of the New Deal leading to FDR attacking the Supreme Court. The sequence actually should go like this: the court kept striking down New Deal legislation, the removal of legislation was held as impeding the New Deal proposal, the court packing bill was proposed and then the firestorm broke out. This Wikipedia article has a chronology.

I would suggest that Mr. Will would not disagree that the United States Supreme Court should not ignore the popular will in such areas of gun control and abortion. I feel more certain that his fellow travelers in the conservative movement would think the Court has erroneously ignored the public will.

He finally gets to the book and its thesis in these paragraphs:

Republicans had long practiced limited interest-group politics on behalf of business with tariffs, gifts of land to railroads and other corporate welfare. Roosevelt, however, made interest-group politics systematic and routine. New Deal policies were calculated to create many constituencies -- labor, retirees, farmers, union members -- to be dependent on government.

Before the 1930s, the adjective "liberal" denoted policies of individualism and individual rights; since Roosevelt, it has primarily pertained to the politics of group interests. So writes Shlaes, a columnist for Bloomberg News, in " The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression." She says Roosevelt's wager was that, by furiously using legislation and regulations to multiply federally favored groups, and by rhetorically pitting those favored by government against the unfavored, he could create a permanent majority coalition.

Which leads me to the view that author and her reviewer only dislike the politics of group interests when they are groups they favor. Surely Mr. Will knows how the federal government supported business at the time of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 or the Andaconda Strike? Why would some listeners think of themselves as forgotten men?

In the process, says Shlaes, Roosevelt refined his definition of the "forgotten man." This man had been thought of as a general personality, compatible with the assumption that Americans were all in it together. "Now, by defining his forgotten man as the specific groups he would help, the president was in effect forgetting the rest -- creating a new forgotten man. The country was splitting into those who were Roosevelt's favorites and everyone else."

Mr. Will does not tell us Ms. Shlaes' groups. I assume farmers and factory workers and perhaps even military veterans.

Another thing is apparent in these paragraphs: the lack of context. First, no one had any experience in dealing with a crisis such as the Great Depression but there were ideas floating about. Second, those ideas had found credence with certain people in certain places and were gaining political credence. Among those ideas floating about the political sphere were such international ideas as Communism, Socialism, National Socialism, and Fascism. Domestic ideas included Huey Long's Share the Wealth plan.

The United States avoided the clashes between Communists and the Fascists/National Socialists as seen in France and England and Germany and Spain. I suggest keeping a liberal capitalist society functioning when anti-capitalist forces were offering rather attractive alternatives (for those that are not aware - both Fascism and Nazism are anti-capitalist political movements) merits a great deal of praise. I would go so far as to suggest that managing the change from a government backing the plutocrats to a government supporting all its citizens is the true legacy of FDR. Certainly, it is the part of the New Deal that its opponents go without mentioning and have spent so much energy since 1964 in reversing.

When a nation has a large number of unemployed people without hope and there are those willing to fan hopelessness into action, I suggest that the complaints about FDR's hyper-activity
are taken out of context. When put into context, a government not acting would have been not merely hapless but helpless against its competitors. Weimar fell from (among other things ) such haplessness but even before that Mussolini came to power in Italy. Remember Benito got the trains running on time and his efficiency made Fascism an attractive temptation for those disenchanted with liberal democracy.

I do appreciate Mr. Will's mention of Wendell Willkie - local boy made good. However, in the same paragraph Mr. Will mentions Willkie, he finally mentions that a war was going on somewhere. The Second World War began in Europe on September 17, 1939 but does ignore the Spanish Civil War without any justification (I do overlook the Japanese invasion of China as the Japanese offered no political theory comparable to Nazism). The United States began its peacetime draft after September 16, 1940. Then comes Pearl Harbor, World War Two ends with a devastated Europe with a Soviet Union looming over it, and we cannot go home again.

If Mr. Will wants to find a Democratic President as a villain for his peace, I suggest Mr. Truman. Mr. Truman began what Gore Vidal calls the "National Security State" but I think that will not appeal to Mr. Will. For upon the structure of this National Security State came the means to fight the Cold War which once was the forefront of the Goldwater Republicans and now has been used to such an extreme point by President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney. I confess I find a government built upon compassion more attractive than one built upon the needs of a few to exercise power for the sake of exercising power.

I would have preferred Mr. Will not to have overlooked these historical points. His eliding of these points speaks to me more of a need to make a partisan point rather than a honestly intellectual one.

Impeaching Cheney

I think it is a great idea. For more detailed reasons why:

1. From The Nation, Cheney on the Defensive. Which where most of these other links are from. If you do not want to read the blog article at The Nation, just skip to the following.
2. Daily Kos: Forget the Leadership. Convince the Judiciary Committee
   
3. Impeachcheney.org. Guess the name says it all.
   

Scooter Libby

Ok, not a pardon but only a commutation of the sentence.

The commutation--which is not a pardon and does not erase Libby's conviction--is a reminder that Bush and his crew do not believe in accountability. Bush has been rather stingy in the use of his pardon power. And regulations issued by his Justice Department note that recipients of pardons should serve their sentences and demonstrate contrition before obtaining presidential absolution. (Libby had expressed no remorse and was not scheduled to report to jail for several weeks.) Yet with this commutation, Bush ducked those requirements, and he is allowing Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, who was found guilty of lying to federal investigators in the CIA leak case, to go unpunished. The fine will be no problem for Libby. His neoconservative friends and admirers will kick in to cover that tab. (Perhaps even Cheney will send a check.)

I have now seen Nixon pardoned, the Iran-Contra gang pardoned, and Mr. Libby's sentence commuted. I remain convinced that the Republicans believe that the law applies to others and order is what feathers their nest best. This from today's Washington Post editorial:

IN COMMUTING I. Lewis Libby's prison sentence yesterday, President Bush took the advice of, among others, William Otis, a former federal prosecutor who wrote on the opposite page last month that Mr. Libby should neither be pardoned nor sent to prison. We agree that a pardon would have been inappropriate and that the prison sentence of 30 months was excessive. But reducing the sentence to no prison time at all, as Mr. Bush did -- to probation and a large fine -- is not defensible.

Both the Post's editorial and The Nation's report highlight the neoconservative attacks on Libby's trial and conviction. I do not get the comparisons to Clinton or to Sandy Berger. Clinton was impeached by the House but not convicted by the Senate. I do fully understand that the Republicans ought not be criticized for their outlandish support of this fellow as many of us Democrats were outlandish in our support of Clinton. On the other hand, Clinton lied in a deposition during a civil trial and Libby lied during an investigation into who outed a CIA agent. I do see a bit of difference between the contexts of the lies just as there is a difference between the actors. In the end, that comparison fizzles for me.

The Sandy Berger argument falls even flatter and faster. Berger enters into a plea agreement offered by the relevant United States Attorney. United States Attorneys, if one has forgotten or been asleep for the past three months, are appointed by the President. I presume the one making the plea offer to Berger was a Republican. The U.S. Attorney has the discretion to make his offers which the District Court judge lacks under the federal Sentencing Guidelines. Blame the Congress for the Sentencing Guidelines, blame the U.S. Attorney for his poor judgment in making plea offers, but the Berger case offers no good grounds for dealing with Libby. Unless, of course, those same voices raging on about Libby's mistreatment now want to reform the federal Sentencing Guidelines. Considering Mr. Libby's friends, I doubt they care about anything other than protecting one of their own from the snares they set themselves. After all, how often have these people attacked or opposed any such leniency for another lawbreaker?

Is Dick Cheney nuts or just sinister?

Yeah, I know old news. Sorry, to have gotten so far behind the times. Here is the story as I understand: our Vice President has decided not to comply with an Executive Order regarding classified information since 2002 and now says that he does not need to do so because he is also part of the legislative branch.

I have an idea how to decide this issue. Let us look at the Constitution: Article Two creates the Executive Branch while Article One creates the Legislative Branch. Here is what Article One says about the Vice President:

SECTION. 3. ***
The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

Does he sit on any committees? Does he propose legislation as any other Senator would do? No and no. You know the saying about if it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck....?

How does Cheney do this without laughing at himself? If I made this kind of argument, I would be sent off to a rubber room. So why make the argument at all?

Keith Olbermann on MSNBC has some great stuff on this here and here. One of those brought up the unitary executive theory. If you do not know about this theory, follow the link and come back. Seriously, it is that important to know about this idea. Back already? Ok, the President is a dictator over the Executive Branch.

Happily, I never even considered for Bush and Cheney. I wonder who did that thought they were bringing this idea into their offices. Of those who did vote for our fearless leaders, I wonder how many like this idea. More importantly: h0w many of those happy Republican warriors championing Gore's Florida defeat would feel the same if Gore were in office and making these kind of pronouncements?

Other than advancing a political theory, does Cheney's position have any practical effect? Is there a reason for him not wanting others to know how he is handling classified documents? None that anyone has mentioned but then we do not know what documents he has been playing with, do we?

For more reading: The Washington Post has an article, The New York Times has an editorial and an article.

If you want to do some more reading on the unitary executive theory, here is another article. There is more information on the United States Constitution here from the Library of Congress.

Washington Post and Iraq- a couple of articles worth reading

Robert Samuelson revisits an earlier column on Iraq and the costs of the war.

With hindsight, it seems almost incontestable that the Iraq war should never have been fought. It has eroded our global power, weakened our military and resulted in thousands of American and Iraqi deaths. What I most regret about my earlier column is that it seemed to bless a war, when I was mainly trying to focus attention on questions more important than money. Given the headline (I wrote it) and the fact that those questions came at the end of the column ("Is this war justifiable? . . . What would happen if we don't fight? What will happen if we do?"), the reaction was understandable. In truth, I was uncertain about the war then, just as I'm unsure of what to do now.

I usually do not join intelligent and Bush, but early one I was impressed with the Bush plan to use the Treasury to fight terrorism. Not that we have heard much of it - not quite as macho as sending US military into a meat grinder - but a column in the Post today shows its effectiveness. I still have to think its effectiveness probably has nothing to do with the President.

Authority for the new sanctions, as with so many other policy weapons, comes from the USA Patriot Act, which in Section 311 authorizes Treasury to designate foreign financial institutions that are of "primary money laundering concern." Once a foreign bank is so designated, it is effectively cut off from the U.S. financial system. It can't clear dollars; it can't have transactions with U.S. financial institutions; it can't have correspondent relationships with American banks.

Finally a guest op-ed piece that got my blood pressure up. David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey wrote about European prosecutions for our extraordinary renditions (kidnappings) on foreign soil.

An Italian court announced this month that it is moving forward with the indictment and trial of 25 CIA agents charged with kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric. These proceedings may well violate international law, but the case serves as a wake-up call to the United States. Overseas opponents of American foreign policy are increasingly turning to judicial proceedings against individual American officials as a means of reformulating or frustrating U.S. aims, and action to arrest this development is needed.

Put that way, it does seem that the Italians are just finding a way to jab us in the ribs. To make the Italians (and everyone else indicting Americans overseas) seem even more unreasonable, there is this passage:

The United States has used extraordinary renditions as part of the war on terrorism, but the continuing value of this tactic, particularly in Europe, is questionable. One of the primary European objections to the concept of a "war" on terrorism is the fear that U.S. forces will treat Europe as a battlefield. Although this fear is specious -- international law has long provided that, even in wartime, a nation cannot pursue its enemies into the territory of friendly countries without their express permission -- extraordinary rendition gets uncomfortably close to U.S. military operations on European streets. Moreover, unlike many other aspects of U.S. policy, extraordinary rendition can probably be abandoned without severely undercutting the war effort. That being the case, and given the obvious and increasing hard feelings the policy has prompted in Europe, extraordinary renditions should end.

Yet the United States must still vigorously resist the prosecution of its indicted agents. If they acted with the knowledge and consent of the Italian government (as The Post's Dana Priest reported in 2005), they are immune from criminal prosecution in that country. Although foreign nationals traveling abroad are ordinarily subject to local judicial authority, international law has long recognized an exception for government agents entering another country with its government's permission.

Then I got to this paragraph:

Because of this general rule, elaborate Status of Forces Agreements are negotiated before the troops of one state are stationed in another. These agreements usually narrow the jurisdictional immunities to be enjoyed by American troops stationed abroad, although under the NATO Status of Forces Agreements, to which Italy and the United States are both parties, America retains primary jurisdiction over offenses committed by individuals on duty -- as would have been the case here. If the Status of Forces Agreement does not apply -- as it might not, because intelligence agents are involved -- then the general rule applies. In either case, it is up to American, not Italian, authorities to determine whether any offense was committed in the capture and rendition of Nasr.

Obviously, the Italians and the Germans and the Belgians do not expect us to determine whether any offenses against their sovereignty, their laws, their citizens have been committed, and they have good reason to have low expectations of our government. The writers do not address this aspect of their case. As former Reagan and Bush I officials can they really be expected to acknowledge the damage done by the current Administration to American integrity and American interests with our own allies?

E.J Dionne's column from February 26 finds a theme in how Cheney approached Iraq with the spin on the Libby trial.

Whatever price Scooter Libby pays, the country is already paying for the divisive practices of a crowd that wanted to go to war in Iraq in the very worst way -- and did exactly that. As a result, we confront the mess in Baghdad and the continued threat of terrorism as an angry, polarized nation.

Amen.

Cheney Mentally Ill or Just Stupid?

From the AP:

Vice President Dick Cheney on Saturday renewed Washington's warning to Iran that "all options" are on the table if the country continues to defy U.N.-led efforts to end Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

At a joint news conference with Prime Minister John Howard during a visit to Australia, Cheney also said Washington was "comfortable" with Britain's decision to withdraw troops from Iraq and that it was up to Australia to decide if it would do the same.

From the Washington Post regarding the Cheney-Pelosi spat and al-Qaeda in Iraq:

The remarks also reflected Cheney's frequent suggestion that al-Qaeda is the United States' principal adversary in Iraq, a stance disputed by many experts inside and outside the government. A recent National Intelligence Estimate concluded that factors in Iraqi violence include "extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, al-Qa'ida and Sunni insurgent attacks on Coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence."

These remarks from the London Times about Tony Blair make some interesting comparisons with our warrior Vice President:

Only the fantasy world inhabited by Blair and Des Browne, his defence secretary, can now claim the four-year British occupation of Basra a success. A country that can be patrolled only by air or in armoured columns is not controlled, let alone governed. Blair promised last week “to publish a plan to develop the port of Basra later this year”. This is outrageous. Where was that plan before the invasion? The one happy note is that when the British leave the Shi’ite south, it should at least be spared the fury of the Shi’ite/Sunni conflict in the north. Mere gang warfare will ensue.

If Basra was uncontrolled and ungoverned, what does this say about Baghdad? Memory lapses seem to abound on both sides o the Atlantic (I listened to Olbermann's Countdown on Friday and a clip from Tony Snow had me laughing out loud. Since when did our President ever think the UN was an institution to follow? Gee, was John Bolton just putting us on?).

Last week’s decision has given new impetus to the Iraq blame game. Pundits vie for comparisons with the Dardanelles, Crete, Khartoum or Afghanistan. Such efforts demonstrate only that in matters of war politicians remember nothing and learn nothing. What is extraordinary is to watch the same mistakes made in Iraq — basically waiting on policy dictated from Washington — being repeated in the Helmand desert. Browne and his defence ministry profess confidence in their press releases while commanders scream for reinforcements. To expect a British cabinet to remember Crete or the Dardanelles may be asking a lot, but they seem unable to recall the day before yesterday.

As with the President, Mr. Cheney forgets Afghanistan. Or maybe he came to believe his own mendacity that Iraq had something to do with 9/11? The English have not forgotten Afghanistan and the Taliban. The AP article above had Australia John Howard saying something about the US being forced out of Iraq as encouraging Iran. Mr. Howard seems to forget that Afghanistan is on the other side of Iran from Iraq. Getting forced out of there would be a blow to us that I think Iran would find more bothersome and also encouraging. Bothersome because the Iranians hate the Taliban and encouraging because the Afghan situation is more of conventional military situation than Iraq. Failing in Iraq belongs to the civil/political side and not the military. Perhaps here lies the explanation for the Vice President's apparent delusion about Iraq - for a political failure means the fault lies with the Executive Branch and its eager chickenhawks. Emphasizing the military role obscures the true failure in Iraq.

Something more to think about from the London Times:

At first the Taliban were so soundly routed that they could do little. But gradually, encouraged by the West’s queasy commitment, they have used their bases in Pakistan to regroup. They are now a serious threat to western forces. British troops have seen tougher fighting in Afghanistan than in Iraq and more of our soldiers have died there. It is a bloody and dangerous struggle against a ruthless enemy, which is no surprise to anyone who knows a bit about British and Russian imperial history.

Lastly, this from John Nichols at The Nation, which focus on the importance of Cheney and our foreign policy:

Were Cheney a run-of-the-mill vice president, his inability to identify the line between fact and fantasy – or is it: truth and fiction – would be the stuff of comedy sketches. But, of course, Cheney is no ordinary second in command. Indeed, when it comes to foreign policy, he has for six years now been the real "decider." Only the most delusional observer of Washington fails to recognize that the Bush White House does what it does "because," as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill explained, "this is the way that Dick likes it."

So as the vice president, with his attacks on Pelosi, launches a new front in his war on reality, isn't it time to talk ask whether American can survive another two years of his misrule. Or, to be more precise: Hasn't he earned the sanction proposed by the bumper stickers that read: "Impeach Cheney First"?

If it were not that Congress has enough on its hands and other means for limiting Cheney's power, I would heartily agree with impeaching this idiot.