Overstaying his welcome

You know, it's a strange thing. Dick Cheney, during his period in the Vice Presidency, was almost a cipher: his name became synonymous with the term "undisclosed location." But suddenly, now that he's no longer a public figure, the man is everywhere. For some reason, he decided to make the rounds of the talk shows, saying ignorant crap like the policies of the Obama administration "will in fact raise the risk to the American people" (apparently ignoring that it was the administration that he copiloted that made the American people hated in every corner of the globe). Cheney felt the need to peddle his particular brand of fecal matter on Face the Nation, on Sean Hannity, on every show willing to book him.

Now, why would he do that?

Well, it's simple. While "undisclosed location" is two words, the best synonym for Cheney is "complicit." He and Bush, working together, authorized the torture of prisoners by people acting at the behest of the American government. They decided that the best way to combat terrorists was to use the tactics of a petty dictator. And Dick Cheney knows that if he can't cloud the water and raise false arguments on the subject, he has a good chance of going to jail. (He's already had to cancel any travel plans to Spain, after all, where they're investigating the whole mess - unlike other countries like the USA, for example.)

Of course, his argument, "it doesn't matter what we did - we protected America!" ignores a number of factors. It ignores the fact that you can't prove a negative: would America have been attacked if Bush and Cheney didn't disregard every moral guideline developed back to the Bible that they both claim to revere?

It ignores the fact that attacks on American soil by foreign agents are few and far between. Before 9-11, you had to go back to the World Trade Center bombing of 1993.

It ignores the Americans killed in foreign countries (including almost 4300 American military members in Iraq - gee, I'll bet their families feel safer).

It completely ignores the anthrax attacks, against American citizens and on American soil that the Bush Administration was never able to solve.

And it ignores one simple question: if the only way to preserve the American Way of Life is to completely destroy every moral value that America has ever held, is it really worth it?

And the people who are listening to this pompous, fatuous, fat-headed former Vice President - the people who believe that Dick Cheney, who would collapse in seconds if he was ever subjected to even the mildest forms of abuse that he authorized and still supports - every one of these people is ignoring one important, overwhelming fact. A simple thing that puts the current statements of our boy Dick into a slightly different light.

Dick Cheney is a liar.

He's practically pathological about it. He started lying when he got into office, and he's continued ever since.

(OK, that statement is probably unfair: I suspect that he was a liar long before he got into office, but that's the period that's important to us, so let's run with it.)

Dick Cheney consistently and continually lied to the American people that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, which they were willing and able to use on Americans. He also actively attempted to press a non-existent connection between the 9-11 hijackers and Iraq.

He manipulated intelligence reports, he shredded documents, and he gave millions of dollars in no-bid contracts to his former company, Halliburton; he simultaneously claimed that he had no connection to Halliburton, despite the fact that he was getting millions of dollars in severance payments from them every year for the first five years of his vice presidency. (Gee, I wonder if that would give him a reason to ensure that their profits stayed up?)

And Dick Cheney would not only lie, he would even lie about his lies. Correspondent Gloria Borger interviewed him on CNBC's Capitol Report on June 17, 2004, and asked about a claim he had made, saying that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had a meeting in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi agent. "You have said in the past that it was 'pretty well confirmed'."

Cheney was firm in his answer. "No, I never said that. I never said that. Absolutely not."

Unfortunately, she was quoting him from a Meet The Press interview from 2001, when he'd been speaking with Tim Russert (in an interview that even appeared on the White House website at the time).

Well, what we now have that's developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that's been pretty well confirmed, that (Atta) did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.

Later in that same interview, Cheney admitted that the report from the 9-11 Commission had concluded that there was no relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, but said that he, Dick Cheney, disagreed with the report. So Borger asked the obvious question.

"Do you know some things that the commission does not know?"

"Probably."

(Logically, the 9/11 Commission asked him to present this information to them. He didn't. And finally, after months of stonewalling, they released a fairly terse statement on the subject. "The 9-11 Commission believes it has access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq prior to the 9-11 attacks.")

During the 2004 presidential campaign, Cheney stood up onstage with John Edwards, and made at least six blatant lies that he never had to answer for or explain.

The mistreatment of prisoners has long been one of Cheney's favorite subjects to stretch the truth about. One of the most fascinatingly strained examples of tortured logic from Mr. Cheney occurred in 2005, when the human rights group Amnesty International had the unmitigated gall to complain about the All-American torture of Guantanamo detainees. Cheney's response was unique.

Occasionally there are allegations of mistreatment. But if you trace those back, in nearly every case, it turns out to come from somebody who has been inside and been released back to their home country and now are peddling lies about how they were treated.

Let's break down that statement.

1. ...it turns out to come from somebody who has been inside... Who else would complain?

2. ...and been released back to their home country... And they were released for a reason, too, Dickie. Those are the people who the government was unable to make a case in front of a judge and continue to hold them. (Maybe because they were... I don't know, I'm just guessing here... maybe they were innocent?)

3. ...and are now peddling lies about how they were treated. "Lies," Dick? Aside from the fact that no member of the Bush administration seemed to understand that the concept of "lying" might actually be a bad thing, why would innocent people, released back to their home country, need to lie? Because "they hate America"? And why would they hate America? Maybe because we threw them into prison, abused them, and never gave them any hope of release? Gee, imagine that…

Does anybody remember Dickie going on Larry King Live in June of 2005? You remember, when he said that he felt that Iraq was "in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency."

Sure, everybody remembers that. But nobody remembers him, four months later, contradicting himself, saying that "Like other great duties in history, it will require decades of patient effort." ("Decades?" That's a long throe.)

Which brings us around to the most important question: if Dick Cheney is unable to talk without lying, why are people still listening to him? And why has the supposed "liberal media" given him a place where he can spread these lies?

You Don't Know Dick, part II

It's fascinating. We have Darth Cheney half a world away, saying that Nancy Pelosi's plan would embolden the terrorists, and when Pelosi gets a little miffed, saying that Cheney is questioning her patriotism, he refuses to back down from his statement, saying that "I didn't question her patriotism. I questioned her judgment."

Well, gee. That makes it all better, doesn't it?

It also showed that he wasn't listening to what she said.

"You cannot say as the president of the United States, 'I welcome disagreement in a time of war,' and then have the vice president of the United States go out of the country and mischaracterize a position of the speaker of the House and in a manner that says that person in that position of authority is acting against the national security of our country," the speaker said.

By the way, the President wasn't willing to talk to her. She only managed to talk to Josh Bolton, Bush's chief of staff.

And Frank Rich raised some interesting points about the "War on Terra."

Who is losing the war on terrorism?

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. The public would not learn about that failure until April 2002 (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it's revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away. It was on Dec. 9, 2001, that Dick Cheney first floated the idea on "Meet the Press" that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. It was "pretty well confirmed," he said (though it was not), that bin Laden's operative Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague months before Atta flew a hijacked plane into the World Trade Center...

The president now says his government never hyped any 9/11-Iraq links. "Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq," he said last August after finally conceding that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. In fact everyone in the administration insinuated it constantly, including him. Mr. Bush told of "high-level" Iraq-Qaeda contacts "that go back a decade" in the same notorious October 2002 speech that gave us Saddam's imminent mushroom clouds. So effective was this propaganda that by 2003 some 44 percent of Americans believed (incorrectly) that the 9/11 hijackers had been Iraqis; only 3 percent had seen an Iraq link right after 9/11.

Though the nonexistent connection was even more specious than the nonexistent nuclear W.M.D., Mr. Bush still leans on it today even while denying that he does so. He has to. His litanies that we are "on the offense" by pursuing the war in Iraq and "fighting terrorists over there, so that we don't have to fight them here" depend on the premise that we went into that country in the first place to vanquish Al Qaeda and that it is still the "central front" in the war on terror. In January's State of the Union address hawking the so-called surge, Mr. Bush did it again, warning that to leave Iraq "would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and invite tragedy."

But now more than ever, the opposite is true. It is precisely by pouring still more of our finite military and intelligence resources down the drain in Iraq that we are tragically ignoring the lessons of 9/11. Instead of showing resolve, as Mr. Bush supposes, his botch of the Iraq war has revealed American weakness. Our catastrophic occupation spawned terrorists in a country where they didn't used to be, and to pretend that Iraq is now their central front only adds to the disaster. As Mr. Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official, reiterated last week: "Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to address the threat to America, that's where it is." It's typical of Mr. Bush's self-righteousness, however, that he would rather punt on that threat than own up to a mistake.

That mistake - dropping the ball on Al Qaeda - was compounded last fall when Mr. Bush committed his second major blunder in the war on terror. The occasion was the September revelation that our supposed ally, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, had negotiated a "truce" with the Taliban in North Waziristan, a tribal region in his country at the Afghanistan border. This truce was actually a retreat by Pakistan, which even released Qaeda prisoners in its custody. Yet the Bush White House denied any of this was happening. "This deal is not at all with the Taliban," the president said, claiming that "this is against the Taliban, actually."

(OK, if you want to read the source article and really don't want to deal with TimesSelect and their "14-day free trial," read most of the column here, here or here.)

(In the course of his flip-flopping on Osama, Bush swung to both extremes: from completely ignoring him one moment, to telling the late Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel, that if he ever caught bin Laden, "I will screw him in the ass!" Isn't that a lovely visual? Our boy Bush is always such a cultured, well-spoken representative of the United States, isn't he?)

During his interview in Australia, Cheney also said something kind of startling.

In the interview, Cheney also said Britain's plans to withdraw about 1,600 troops from Iraq — while the United States adds more troops — was a positive step. "I look at it and see it is actually an affirmation that there are parts of Iraq where things are going pretty well," the vice president said.

As Jay Leno put it, "The British announced they were pulling their troops out of the Iraq. Dick Cheney immediately called it good news. He said, 'It's a sign that we're winning.' How come when our allies pick up and leave, that's a victory for us? But when we leave, it's a victory for al Qaeda? How does that work?"

So let me just come right out and say it. I don't believe that George Bush, the inarticulate C-student, would be as destructive as he has been, if he didn't have Cheney leading him around on a leash. Dick Cheney has consistently lied to the American people about Iraq, about the Al Qaeda, and now about Iran. While he was second-in-command in America, Halliburton was enriched to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, which consequently made Dick Cheney massive amounts of money. American actions in the Middle East under his watch have destroyed the international respect for our country, beggared our treasury, and has spawned a massive groundswell of terrorists in the Middle East who did not exist before.

More American citizens have now died in Iraq than were killed in the World Trade Center. Who, then, is the bigger threat to America? Al Qaeda, or Dick Cheney?

I definitely question Dick Cheney's judgement. And I also question his patriotism.

If you think that, you don't know Dick...

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, November gave us a victory for freedom and the American Way, right? The Democrats were swept into office by a wave of people who finally got tired of being lied to, and for the next two years, Bush and his cronies are going to find their hands tied, right? They won't be able to launch any bizarre neocon plots, and butterflies and puppies will rain down on the people of this once-great land, right?

Don't be too sure.

Yes, Democrats now have a majority in both houses of Congress, but don't think that's going to change anything. The next two years are probably going to be one fight after another, with George Bush trying to do something, Congress shooting him down, and Bush going ahead and doing it anyway. And why?

Two words: Dick Cheney.

Cheney has been a big supporter of the President-as-King theory of democracy (or, in the more graceful Republican-talk, the "unitary executive") for much of his career. Or, at least, that part of his career where he served under Republicans, anyway.

You see, that's the rough part about being a politician. Your life becomes public record. And people like Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe can turn up all kinds of fun facts about you. Like the time in July 1987, when Cheney was talking about the Boland Amendment, which banned aide to anti-Marxist militants in Nicaragua. To be exact, Cheney said "I personally do not believe the Boland Amendment applied to the president, nor to his immediate staff."

You remember that point in the Reagan administration? It was called "Iran-Contra" - a bunch of the president's aides were selling arms to one group of terrorists in Iran, so that they could funnel money to another group of terrorists in Nicaragua. And Cheney said to the committee investigating Iran-Contra that the president didn't have to follow the laws passed by Congress.

Before that, in December 1974, during the Ford administration (with Cheney as Deputy Chief of Staff), Seymour Hersh, writing for the New York Times, disclosed that the CIA was tapping phones, opening mail, and breaking into the homes of anti-war protesters. (Sound familiar? That's what Bush keeps trying to do.) And when Democrat Frank Church of Idaho headed up a Senate committee that started investigating the CIA's role in all of this, Cheney wrote that they needed to head off "congressional efforts to further encroach on the executive branch."

A few months later, when Hersh wrote an article about US subs spying on the Soviet Union, Cheney wanted to have Hersh arrested.

Making an example out of Hersh, Cheney wrote, would "create an environment" that might intimidate both the press and Congress. "Can we take advantage of it to bolster our position on the Church Committee investigation? To point out the need for limits on the scope of the investigations?" Cheney wrote. The idea, however, was scrapped to avoid attracting the Soviets' attention to Hersh's article.

And later, as Bush 41's defense secretary, Cheney didn't like the idea of telling Congress that troops were about to attack Iraqi's in Kuwait. In the 1996 PBS Frontline documentary, Cheney explained "I was not enthusiastic about going to Congress for an additional grant of authority. I was concerned that they might well vote 'no' and that would make life more difficult for us... From a constitutional standpoint, we had all the authority we needed. If we'd lost the vote in Congress, I would certainly have recommended to the president that we go forward anyway."

That's the way Cheney thinks. He honestly believes, just like Nixon, that "when the president does it, that means it's not illegal." Cheney said on ABC This Week in January 2002, "in 34 years, I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job." And he wants to do all he can to make the president all-powerful. (Do you really think that a C-student and frat-boy came up with the idea of the "signing statement" on his own?)

And he's doing it again. In the November 27 issue of the New Yorker, Hersh reported that, a month before the midterm elections, Cheney was in a national security roundtable.

"If the Democrats won on November 7th, the vice president said, that victory would not stop the administration from pursuing a military option with Iran," Hersh wrote, citing a source familiar with the discussion.

Cheney said the White House would circumvent any legislative restrictions "and thus stop Congress from getting in its way," he said.

So, unless Congress is willing to take firm action and get oversight on everything that the president and vice president do, we could very well get into another endless war in the Middle East. And there are still people out there who'd support it, too.

There is one thing that we can do. It will never become law, because very few politicians are willing to have their names attached to it, but the first thing we need to do is institute a draft. Because Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has it right: the only way that a lot of the American public are going to oppose going to war is if their children are definitely going to be in the foxholes. War is good for business - look how much money companies like Halliburton (and, uh... former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney...) have made off this last one.

It's All About The Lies

Why is the fact that Dick Cheney shot a man in the face important? What is it about that act that makes it the perfect touchstone for the problems of the Bush Administration?

Is it because our boy Dick shot a man in the face? Is that all it is? Simple schadenfreude? Well, yes and no. It's nice when someone so blatantly unlikable, so wildly unconcerned about his fellow men, has a bad day. That's a simple fact about the human psyche - if you don't like someone, you don't want him to succeed. But that's not the most important factor here.

And, incidentally, nobody really wants Whittington to die. But consider the ramifications for old Dead-Eye Dick if one of those pellets that he pumped into that 78-year-old lawyer causes an embolism, or migrates into his heart. Dick has already openly and publicly done something unique in the Bush White House: he accepted blame for his actions. So what happens if it turns out that Dick committed "negligent homicide"? Does he go to jail like an ordinary citizen?

Probably not. But now we've touched on part of the problem. Cheney refused to go to the hospital, and was able to avoid law enforcement officials for an entire day. So is it any wonder that people ask if alcohol was involved in the shooting? He violated the most basic rule of firearms and a man went to the hospital because of it. At the very least, anyone else would have been forced to take a Breathalyzer test. But if you think that our vice president is going to be humiliated like that, then you don't know Dick.

There is no accountability in any of this Administration's dealings with the public. How can you tell when the White House is lying? When they make an official statement on any subject. They took us to war against Iraq based on lies.

They keep bringing up the specter of terrorism to keep the American people fearful, but a look around will show that they aren't really doing more than spying on Americans and slapping a new coat of paint on the old, ineffective programs. They haven't guarded any of the various chemical plants around the country, and the ports are not only unprotected but one of the country's largest was recently sold to the United Arab Emirates.

They claim to support the troops, but, not only does Bush not bother to send in enough troops or give them adequate equipment, but he is trying to give them the lowest pay raise in decades - a pay raise that not only lags significantly behind inflation, but is also the lowest raise offered to people putting their lives on the line since 1988. (It's equal to the pay raise given the troops in 1994 - when none of them were being actively attacked - but you have to go back to Reagan and George Bush v. 1.0 to go any lower. For obvious reasons, the Military Officer's Association tracks that kind of thing, and they show how badly the military lags behind the civilian populace in pay parity.)

And the actions of the Bush Administration aren't just angering progressives and liberals. George Will is an old-school conservative (something becoming rare in the Republican Party these days), and he has started pointing out the flaws in everything from taking us to war based on a lie, and then illegally spying on American citizens.

And in the latest news, despite official statements that American troops will be withdrawn from Iraq as soon as the Iraqi military can fend for themselves, it's becoming apparent that the US military has no intention of departing Iraq any time soon, since we're sinking billions of dollars into Iraqi superbases.

Which brings us back to why Dick Cheney's hunting accident is such a big deal. Because it shows just how the White House deals with the public. And it's something that the average man can understand. God bless Dick Cheney and his itchy trigger finger.

And by the way, if American officials are going to buy a hunting shotgun, wouldn't it be nice if they bought American? TheSmokingGun.com has gotten their hands on the report filed by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, which shows that Cheney was using an Italian-made Perazzi shotgun. (Hmm... where have I heard about that brand of shotgun before?)

Shh! Be vewwy vewwy quiet! We're hunting honkies!

While hunting for quail in Texas on Saturday, the Vice President of the United States shot a 78-year-old millionaire lawyer named Harry Whittington. (You know, there might be a joke I could make about "Dick Whittington," but I guess it wouldn't really be funny.)

And today, there are more variations of the sentence "I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die" floating around the Internet than there has been during any Administration in the history of the United States, to include the presidencies of Washington, Lincoln, Wilson or Roosevelt.

It's relatively certain that the shooting was an accident, since rich white guys are the group normally referred to by the Administration as "our base."

Katharine Armstrong, the ranch's owner, saw what happened Saturday and told reporters yesterday that Cheney was using a 28-gauge shotgun, which shoots fewer pellets and has a smaller shot pattern than a 12-gauge shotgun, making it harder to hit the target. Whittington was about 30 yards away when he was hit in the cheek, neck and chest, she said...

It was Armstrong's decision to alert the news media. Cheney's office made no public announcement, deciding to defer to Armstrong because the incident had taken place on her property. Armstrong called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, and when a reporter from the paper called the White House, the vice president's office confirmed the account.

Yes, true to their policy of never informing anyone about anything, the White House wasn’t going to break this story. Katherine Armstrong got nervous about that whole "criminal charges" thing, and contacted the Corpus Christi Caller-Times (free registration required).

According to her account, the Vice President was about 30 yards away from Whittington, and both were wearing orange vests. The Vice President was said to have a valid hunting license, but a spokesman for the Texas Game & Fish Commission stated that lawyer season wasn't due to start for another three weeks.

First of all, one of the primary rules of using a firearm of any kind is to know your backstop: if you're going to shoot in any direction, you damned well better know what is past the thing you're aiming at, because bullets don't just fly up to the target and then quit moving – they keep going for miles, sometimes.

Secondly, how can the White House not think that this was important enough to pass along to the press? When was the last time that a sitting vice president actively shot another person? I'm thinking that we need to go back to Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr for that. Maybe, just maybe, if you dig a little, you'll find some historical significance in this.

But in actual fact, the rumor is that Cheney was heard stating that Mr. Whittington was known to have reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, and the people of Corpus Christi would greet him with open arms as a liberator.