Tag: Cheney

Dick Cheney’s cloudy vision

The vice president made what is being described as a surprise visit to Iraq today and proclaimed the war a “successful endeavor.”

“If you reflect back on those five years, it’s been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavor,” the vice president said at a news conference in the Green Zone, where he was flanked by Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the chief U.S. commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, the top U.S. civilian official in Baghdad. “We’ve come a long way in five years and it’s been well worth the effort.”

I guess this is what he means by successful.

A bombing on Monday evening killed 43 people near the Imam Hussein shrine in the Shiite holy city of Karbala, penetrating one of the most secure perimeters in Iraq, and Iraqi police officers at the scene and several witnesses said it had been carried out by a female suicide bomber.

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Constitutional crisis

The U.S. Constitution is in crisis. The president has placed himself and his closest advisors above the law, raising partisanship to a new level and allowing the White House to function as a small-time mafia family in the process.

Read this and this and this and this. (Only a Washington insider would make the case that Michael Kinsley makes today, shifting the discussion back from perjury and cover-up to a culture of leaks, finding a way to equate Clinton’s sex life with the vengeful activity of an administration run amok and the president’s willingness to hold his cronies to a separate standard than the rest of America and the world.)

I think he needs to take Keith Olbermann’s advice and resign.

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Guilty guilty guilty

Scooter Libby is looking at some jail time — unless President George W. Bush uncaps his pardon pen and signs his get-out-of-jail-free card.

And given the stakes here, that “unless” looms pretty large. (Josh Marshall says it all with this post.)

Consider: This was a trial about obstruction of justice and perjury that, despite the protestations of the conservative punditocracy, raised serious questions about the lengths to which this administration would go to protect the powers it has claimed for itself.

If the administration — via the vice president’s office — was willing to engage in the kind of unsavory activities that led to the indictment and conviction of Libby to protect its prerogatives, why wouldn’t the president pardon Libby to close off whatever trail is left?

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Cheney’s Nixon moment

I really long for the days when political satire on Saturday Night Live had that nasty edge. How wonderful would a young Dan Ackroyd be as a seething, angry and irrationally dangerous.

I was struck by this image as I read this post from Glenn Greenwald on his Unclaimed Territory blog on Salon:

Since the smashing repudiation his party suffered at the hands of the American voter in the 2006 midterm elections, Dick Cheney’s behavior has become palpably more secretive, combative, and scornful. The embittered interview he gave to Wolf Blitzer was the most vivid, but far from the only, instance. He seems to harbor such scorn for the democratic process that he literally no longer cares whether the answers he gives to reporters’ questions even make any sense.

Ackroyd’s debased and demented Nixon, right?

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The Blog of South Brunswick
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