Bonus Citation du Jour

Dick Cheney on FoxNews this morning:

"We didn't get elected to be popular."

Mission Accomplished, Mr. Vice President, mission accomplished.

Dick Cheney FOX News
Thanks to Mustang Bobby at Shakesville for pointing that one out.

Undermining the President, not the Troops

If you listen to the members of the minority party in Congress, you'd think that holding a debate - any debate - on the 'Surge' in Iraq would lead to unmitigated strategic disaster. The terrible consequences of debate would be to 'undermine the troops' or to send them 'mixed messages' resulting in very bad but unspecified things. How and why this catastrophic failure would happen (or how it would be any different from the current situation in Iraq) remains unexplained by Republicans or their media enablers.

On January 25, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed a non-binding resolution stating, "It is not in the national interest of the United States to deepen its military involvement in Iraq." Asked what would happen if the Senate passed a similar resolution, Dick Cheney is on record saying "it would be, I think, detrimental from the standpoint of the troops."

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) has said, "I do not think you can send a message that is going to raise the morale of the troops while at the same time sending a message that we don’t support the mission."

It's a simple and pervasive talking point, but is it true?

As the Senate debated the non-binding resolution that Dick Cheney so feared, Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace had this to say:

"As long as this Congress continues to do what it has done, which is to provide the resources for the mission, the dialog will be the dialog, and the troops will feel supported."

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told Congress that the troops understand that debate is an effort to find the best way to execute the war, not an effort to undermine them:

"I think they [the troops] are sophisticated enough to understand that that's what the debate's really about."

So why all the effort to force this false meme upon the public? Why has the White House expended so much energy ensuring that a non-binding resolution supported by the majority of Senators never sees the light of day?

Because questioning the President's plan doesn't undermine the troops. It undermines the President.

The President and his party don't want to have any debate about Iraq just as the 2008 Elections appear on the horizon.

The President isn’t concerned about the psyches of our troops in Iraq. If he were, he wouldn't continue to order more extensions of duty, repeat tours in Iraq, and 'stop loss' measures. The President and his party are only worried about their own political skins.

War in Iraq Surge Senate Debate Undermine the Troops

Warnings Have Gone Out

I'd like to thank everybody who was thoughtful enough to bring this to my attention. Upon realizing what this meant, I immediately called all of my friends and family members in Pennsylvania and advised them to take appropriate precautions.

They'll all be wearing bright orange and staying indoors because Dick Cheney is duck hunting in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Cheney will be in possession of a firearm within just 20 or 30 miles of where my Aunt and Uncle live. They're taking extra precautions, spending the day in the basement.

The rest of my friends and family, though hundreds of miles removed from 'Dead-Eye Dick's' hunting location will remain vigilant.

You can't be too careful with terrorists Dick Cheney wandering around with a shotgun in his hands.

Dick Cheney Hates Families!

Or so the rhetoric would have you believe. From the Washington Post:

Mary Cheney, the vice president's openly gay daughter, is pregnant. She and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, are "ecstatic" about the baby, due in late spring, said a source close to the couple.

It's a baby boom for grandparents Dick and Lynne Cheney: Their older daughter, Elizabeth, went on leave as deputy assistant secretary of state before having her fifth child in July. "The vice president and Mrs. Cheney are looking forward with eager anticipation to the arrival of their sixth grandchild," spokesman Lea Anne McBride said last night.

So either Lea Anne McBride is lying about what Dick Cheney thinks or the Vice President of the United States is a full-on supporter of the Gay Agenda! He wants every American family to be DESTROYED by evil sodomites! Oh, God, Dick Cheney think Homosexuals should be able to raise children - the ultimate child abuse - he's EVIL! THE CHILDREN, THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

* * * * *
Ok, snark aside, it amazes me that Dick Cheney can see how the rhetoric and agenda of his party, the one in which he is second in command, affects his daughter and not be disgusted with the hatred and bigotry and political opportunism at the expense of people like Mary Cheney.

Even more alarming, Mary Cheney herself has been a strong and devoted supporter of a party that seeks to demean her, strip her of her rights and her equality, and make her a second class citizen.

Of course Mary Cheney doesn't have to worry about any of this for the same rich people don't have to worry about abortion being banned. If you have money and you want an abortion, a safe one will be available to you - either in Canada or from a private doctor. Only the poor will suffer.

Mary Cheney has enough money to not have to worry about whether her partner has parental rights. She can afford lawyers to make sure that everything will work out. It's just poor people that get screwed.

I'd like to take an opportunity to wish Mary Cheney well. I hope that she and the baby are happy and healthy. I just also hope that this experience will make her wonder what kind of country her party is creating for her child...

Mary Cheney Dick Cheney Gay Marriage Gay Parenting

Dick Cheney Interview

Here's the article they're talking about in Vanity Fair. Excerpts:

I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding." Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder. It was February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of his long campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.

Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington, D.C. It is October, the worst month for U.S. casualties in Iraq in almost two years, and Republicans are bracing for losses in the upcoming midterm elections. As he looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious deliberation, Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."

According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."

Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists."

Damn. Richard Perle pretty much throws BushCo. under the bus. And just three days before an election! Surely Mr. Perle is an isolated incident. The neocons as a group, as a movement haven't actually abandoned George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, have they?

Yep. They have. Here's my summary:

David Frum, ex-Presidential Speech Writer who wrote the "Axis of Evil" speech, says that defeat is inevitable because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." He blames Bush.

Kenneth Adelman, Pentagon insider and Defense Policy Board member said this: "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

Adelman goes so far to say that the tennets of Neoconservatism, "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world" will be radioactive for at least a generation. After Iraq, nobody's going to touch it with a 10 foot pole.

David Rose, the author of the Vanity Fair article, tells us that his full findings on the state of the Neoconservative movement will be published in the January issue of VF. This is a bit silly. If the editors at VF had any sense, they'd have had Rose one this story earlier so that it would have mad it into the November issue instead of just giving us a teaser.

But then again, after watching Cheney and George Stephanopoulos, maybe the teaser was enough.

I leave you with the quote that spoke most clearly to me about the absolute ruination that this administration has brought in Iraq.

David Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

Dick Cheney George W. Bush Neocons Failure War in Iraq

Just a Reminder

The Conservative South African leader who tried vainly to maintain the apartheid system in that nation has died.

While in congress, Dick Cheney voted against anti-apartheid legislation directed at South Africa. Maybe Dick just admired Botha's style of governing.

P.W. Botha Dick Cheney

Why Isn't This News?

From McClatchy:

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney has confirmed that U.S. interrogators subjected captured senior al-Qaida suspects to a controversial interrogation technique called "water-boarding," which creates a sensation of drowning.

Cheney indicated that the Bush administration doesn't regard water-boarding as torture and allows the CIA to use it. "It's a no-brainer for me," Cheney said at one point in an interview.

Cheney's comments, in a White House interview on Tuesday with a conservative radio talk show host, appeared to reflect the Bush administration's view that the president has the constitutional power to do whatever he deems necessary to fight terrorism.

I won't hold my breath waiting for this to end up on the 11 o'clock news. Or for that matter, even on the 24 hour news channels.

There is a record of a sitting Vice President admitting that the United States of America engages in torture - but nobody cares.

Lee Ann McBride, a spokeswoman for Cheney, denied that Cheney confirmed that U.S. interrogators used water-boarding or endorsed the technique.

"What the vice president was referring to was an interrogation program without torture," she said. "The vice president never goes into what may or may not be techniques or methods of questioning."

The White House's official transcript seems to indicate otherwise:

Q [Scott Hennen] I've heard from a lot of listeners -- that's what we do for a living, talk to good folks in the Heartland every day -- and I've talked to as many who want an increased military presence in Iraq as want us out, which seems to be the larger debate, at least coming from the left -- cut and run, get out of there. One fax said, when you talk to the Vice President, ask him when shock and awe is coming back to Iraq. Let's finish the job once and for all.

And terrorist interrogations and that debate is another example. And I've had people call and say, please, let the Vice President know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives. Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I do agree. And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation. [Emphasis mine.]

Disambiguation:

Scott: Our listeners like water boarding, do you?

VP: Yes. "That's been a very important tool that we've had."

Think about that. They're doing this in your name.

Alexis de Tocqueville said "America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great." Dick Cheney probably prides himself on never listening to Frenchmen, but the Bush/Cheney prosecution of the Global War on Terror^tm has done more to destroy America's 'Soft Power' and weaken our standing in the world than anything in the last 50 years. Even Vietnam was less damaging, if only because our power was seen as opposed to the Soviet Union.

My Grandparent's generation fought World War II and earned America her place atop the world's power structure. It took 405,399 American deaths and 671,846 wounded to earn the world's trust. It won't be regained in my life time. All so that BushCo and the Republicans can play 'tough guy' for political gain.

Dick Cheney Torture War on Terror

Birds of a Feather

Have nothing to fear from these guy's shotguns.

Rawstory reports that Dick Cheney will be campaigning for Rep. Randy Kuhl (R-NY).

The Vice President and Kuhl have each earned a measure of infamy for incidents involving firearms. Cheney accidentally shot his hunting partner Harry Whittington in the face earlier this year, while according to divorce records obtained by Raw Story, Kuhl once bullied his wife with shotguns. Raw Story has archived the divorce filing here.

Roll Call (registration restricted) has a great quote:

Cheney, the man who may always be remembered for accidentally shooting his good friend on a hunting trip, has agreed to do a private photo-op at a Sept. 22 fundraiser for Kuhl in Rochester, N.Y. And, yes, you guessed it, Kuhl is considered vulnerable this year.

As one Democratic operative told HOH, "I can't tell what Cheney likes best about him—Kuhl's penchant for rubber-stamping the president or for combining beer with firearm use."

Bolds mine. Hilarity aside, this is the party that runs on the 'Family Values' ticket. The GOP is also supposed to be the 'law and order' party. Also the party of the NRA.

Also of interest is the fact that when the V.P. comes to town, the candidate hides him away in a private photo-op. One would assume that any campaign donor that wants a picture with the Veep could probably find his or her way into the photo shoot (ha!) for a generous donation...

Dick Cheney Rich Kuhl Republicans Family Values

How Disappointing....

According to US News & World Reports, White House Strategists are disappointed about the terror plot foiled by the British. It seems they didn't get the political 'bump' they were hoping for.

That's right, a Republican Strategist in the White House went on record saying that he or she was really hoping to get more political benefit out of an attempt to kill large numbers of innocent civilians.

It seems that BushCo. and his Republican lackeys can't get their prize dog to run anymore. That must be scary.

It probably also explains why the Vice President is busy telling people that if they vote for Democrats, they're going to die in a fiery terrorist attack.

Might have something to do with Orrin Hatch twittering about terrorists waiting for Democrats to win, then mounting a new offensive.

But I really doubt it has anything to do with Tramm Hudson waxing on the inability African Americans to swim.

GOP racism aside, I'm surprised that the Bush Administration hasn't been playing with the color coded terror alert system. Maybe they think it's still a little early to bring out that trick. The only issue that the GOP has to run on is Iraq/Terrorism. The Economy sucks. They've outlawed gay marriage in all the states that will outlaw gay marriage...

WAIT!

I forgot about immigration. They can still run on not letting brown people into the country. While saying it's important to spy on other brown people once they're in this country, especially when they're calling brown people in their home countries. Oh, and the importance of continuing to bomb brown people in Iraq.

I guess all the main planks of the Republican Platform fit together better than I thought...

Terrorism George W. Bush Dick Cheney Orrin Hatch Tramm Hudson

Ridge Slams Cheney

Think Progress reports that the 8/21 issue of Newsweek quotes fromer Head of Homeland Security Tom Ridge,

"[Responding to Cheney'’s claim that Lamont'’s victory would encourage 'al Qaeda types'’], former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge bridled at his former colleague's remark: "‘That may be the way the vice president sees it,"’ he sees it, "‘but I don'’t see it that way, and I don'’t think most Americans see it that way.'"”

Somebody hasn't been getting his ration of koolaid lately...

I haven't seen the article, but I'm hoping that somebody in the media is going to start calling Republicans on their scaremongering. We're fighting a war in the middle east to bring them democracy but when democracy works in Connecticut, it encourages terrorists. Then why the fuck are we sending American soldiers to fight and die in Iraq to bring them democracy?

Tom Ridge Dick Cheney Ned Lamont Terrorists

The Lamont Effect

WNYC, New York Public Radio, has a story on Hillary that shows the effect Ned Lamont's victory will have on our party:

Senator Hillary Clinton has denounced Vice President Dick Cheney for saying terrorists would be emboldened by the results of Connecticut's Democratic Primary.

[...]

CLINTON: I don't take anything he [Cheney] says seriously anymore. I think that he has been a very counterproductive even destructive force in our country and I am very disheartened by the failure of leadership from the president and vice president.

Being seen as a Hawkish Democrat is now a bad thing. Watch for more Democrats to start racking up 'I'm against the war' points. Many will couch their comments in 'I'm against this war' or 'I'm against the way Republicans have conducted this war' frames, but the effect, both politically and in the real world will be the same: More pressure on Republicans to take responsibility for a 'stay the course over the cliff' policy that nearly 6 in 10 Americans disagree with.

Even if Ned Lamont loses in November, his victory over Joe Lieberman made it politically safe to be critical of the war.

Hillary Clinton Dick Cheney Ned Lamont War in Iraq

I missed it the first time...

Lazy Friday Post:

Found this little bit of commentary and, though I'd like to take credit for it, I can't. I will, however, reproduce it here for your perusal.

Dick Cheney deserves a Golden Globe for best director of a period piece. On his watch, the Bush White House has done a masterful job of recreating the 1970s: from rogue intelligence-gathering, energy shocks, and widespread corruption to war protests and fears about Big Brother.

Cheney certainly isn't playing to the crowd. Parents want to relive the '50s; liberals want to relive the '60s; conservatives want to relive the '80s; Has-Beens want to relive the '90s, but nobody wants to relive the 70s.

Yet even the opposition goes along. The nonfiction book atop the New York Times best-seller list is Our Endangered Values by Jimmy Carter. Carter is simply reprising the most successful role of his career: campaigning against the Nixonian excesses of Washington.

At every stop on the campaign trail in 1992, Al Gore would ask, "What time is it?" The answer then was, "It's time for them to go." The answer now is, "1974."

Executive Privilege: I was a teenage Nixon hater. But I can't help wishing Democrats could shed our Nixon reflex. Nixon and his followers committed a host of sins against democracy: Watergate, "Peace is at hand," the racist Southern strategy, and the first wedge issue, law and order. But perhaps the greatest harm Nixon did Democrats was to make our party lose faith in the presidency. We're still getting over it.

"Nixon's destiny was to carry the logic of the imperial presidency to the point of no return," Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in The Imperial Presidency, his 1973 treatise on the abuse of presidential power. The Nixon White House broke laws, kept secrets, obstructed justice, and trampled civil liberties. Most leaders wrestle with the tradeoff between the ends and the means. For Nixon, the ends and means were the same: his administration abused power simply to hold onto power. And for four years, he not only got away with it, but was rewarded with a 49-state victory.

The anguish of George W. Bush's re-election still pales in comparison to the liberal crisis of faith over watching a crook win the biggest Republican landslide in history. With nowhere else to turn, Democrats learned to love Congress, a branch of government liberals had largely despised well into the 1960s. Democrats also began to depend on the Supreme Court to check the White House, a dependence that would come back to haunt us as we discovered how losing one would eventually cost us the other.

In the 1970s, Democrats passed a number of laws to rein in the executive branch, from campaign finance to CIA and FBI reforms to the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act that Bush skirted in the current flap over domestic spying. Even with Carter in the White House, Democrats were more comfortable with the role of congressional oversight than with presidential leadership. Our heroes were referees and whistle-blowers like Sam Ervin, John Dean, Judge Sirica, and Woodward and Bernstein, not rogues and swashbucklers in the great American tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and John Kennedy.

That was an understandable and necessary reaction to a constitutional crisis that had shaken public confidence in government to its core. But it had unfortunate side effects. Before Nixon came along, Democrats had controlled the White House for 28 of the previous 36 years. After Nixon, many Democrats came to wonder whether the presidency was worth having.

Despite landslide defeats in 1980, 1984, and 1988—or perhaps because of them—Democrats in Washington became far more concerned with holding onto Congress than with taking back the White House. As the first Democratic president to win re-election since FDR, Bill Clinton tried his best to transform Democrats into a presidential party. But to this day, most Democrats think of themselves first as the party that used to control Congress.

It's a paradox: The party with grand ambitions for government is suspicious of the office that could best achieve them, while the party broadly opposed to the use of government power wants to get its hands on as much of it as possible.

For that, we can blame Richard Nixon. By following in Nixon's footsteps, Bush seems determined to make Democrats hate the presidency for another generation. That would be a terrible shame. Under FDR, the Democratic Party virtually invented the sweeping, modern presidency. The success of Democratic presidents like Truman and Clinton was their determination to tame a rotten Congress, not submit to one.

I share Gore's opinion of the current administration and Congress. "The Congress we have today is structurally unrecognizable compared to the one in which my father served," he says. "The legislative branch of government, as a whole, under its current leadership now operates as if it were entirely subservient to the Executive branch."

But in my view, that's not a constitutional crisis—it's an argument for a new Congress. Gore worries that "we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power." But checks and balances don't have to be a zero-sum game. It is possible to have energy in the executive and energy in the legislative. Indeed, given the obstacles to progress in today's sclerotic political environment, we may need both branches to push the envelope before we can get anything done.

Now More than Ever: We could get by without a strong, assertive presidency in the '70s, but we desperately need one today. As Gore recognizes, we won't win the war on terror with congressional hearings. To win it, we need commanders in chief with panache and integrity, who can inspire confidence at home and abroad, win the respect of our allies, and instill fear in our foes.

On the home front, it will take an unapologetically powerful leader to break Washington from its transactional rut. At the same time, we need a vigorous Congress with a sense of urgency that can hold the executive branch accountable not only for the rule of law but for results.

Al Gore is right that like Nixon, Bush acts like an imperial president. But the best way to curb the imperial presidency isn't for Congress to tie the next president's hands. It's for Americans to elect a new president and Congress who will go all-out to earn the public's trust.

I copied this as left work yesterday and didn't remmber to get the link back to the original post. For whoever wrote this, thank you and my appologies for not being able to give you credit...

I missed the Seventies the first time around and if this is what they were like, I'm glad I missed them.

CURRENT READING: The Untied States of America : Polarization, Fracturing, and Our Future by Juan Enriquez.

This book is not like other books you've read. The page layout is not standard left justified paragraphs, complete sentences, etc. It's a collection of declaritory sentences and clauses spread across the page in various fonts, sizes, and arraingements. This drove some of the reviewers on Amazon a bit crazy, but it's really a great way to have the page itself contribute to the power of the words.

Enriques raises interesting questions like "how many stars will the US flag have in 50 years?" and points out the fact that citizenship can be understood as 'brand loyalty' to the nation. It collects and distills alarming trends and compares America to less stable areas in the world. Fascinating. More analysis and commentary when I've finished it.