The One and Only Reason to Love Bush
Leaving Bush behind, the old bedraggled Texan that he is now, will be easy and somehow just pitiful. Cheney, on the other hand, I’d love to see burn in hell. He’s the sinister force behind Bush’s (I’m being generous here) vulnerable ignorance. Cheney took the office of the vice president to new levels of executive control, at times even bypassing (“protecting”) the president from controversial executive decisions.
Past vice presidents have attempted to assume greater authority, with results that just look quaint next to Cheney. From Mark O. Hatfield and the Senate Historical Office:
In assuming substantive policy responsibilities, vice presidents often ran afoul of cabinet secretaries whose territories they invaded. As administration lobbyists, they also irritated members of Congress. My favorite example of this problem occurred in 1969. President Nixon had pledged to give his vice president a significant policy-making role and – for the first time – an office in the White House itself. Spiro Agnew was determined to make the most of that role and to expand his legislative functions as well. Since he lacked previous legislative experience, he had the Senate parliamentarian tutor him on the intricacies of Senate floor procedure. Soon he began to inject himself into the course of Senate proceedings, contrary to the well-worn practice that constrained his predecessors. During the debate over the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty, Agnew approached Idaho Republican Senator Len Jordan and asked how he was going to vote. “You can’t tell me how to vote!” said the shocked senator. “You can’t twist my arm!” At the next regular luncheon of Republican senators, Jordan accused Agnew of breaking the separation of powers by lobbying on the Senate floor, and announced the “Jordan Rule.” Under his rule, if the vice president tried to lobby him on anything, the senator would automatically vote the other way.
What did Cheney do?
According to a 2004 Executive Intelligence Review article, Cheney was already, pre-2004 election, racking up impeachable offenses. Remember the invisible weapons of mass destruction? The author says:
Cheney, beyond all other Administration officials, was the Joseph Goebbels of the Iraq war. As recently as his media interviews in Switzerland and Italy in late January, he continued to lie about Iraq’s weapons, claiming that several trailers seized by American inspectors, following the March 2003 invasion, were mobile bio-weapons labs.
David Kay, the CIA’s chief weapons inspector in Iraq until his hasty mid-January resignation, made clear in interviews and in testimony at the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 28, that these trailers had nothing to do with WMD. Former CIA chief of counterterrorism Vincent Cannistraro told Salon magazine on Jan. 29, “It’s disgusting. I just can’t find words to describe how horrible it is…. It just illustrates the peculiar worldview Cheney has and how distorted it is.
Here’s a quote from an NPR article in which Washington Post reporter Bart Gellman, author of Angler, discusses Cheney:
“Cheney created a new doctrine in which the president was accountable to no one in his decisions as commander in chief,” Gellman said. “What was new and innovative here, and quite radical, was the notion that the president’s interpretation could not be challenged, that because the executive is a separate branch, courts and Congress could not tell the president, in any way, how to exercise his powers as commander in chief.”
Indeed, so pervasive was Cheney’s control that when lawyers from the National Security Agency, which was conducting the domestic surveillance, went to the Justice Department to look at the legal opinion authorizing the warrantless surveillance, Cheney’s lawyer, Addington, showed up and angrily told them they had no right to see it.
On keeping Bush in the dark about the surveillance program, Gellman says:
“You had the FBI director, attorney general, the next five levels of officials — which is a couple of dozen people — in the Justice Department, the general counsel of the CIA and the FBI, were all going to resign, in principle because they believed this program was unlawful,” Gellman said. “And George Bush didn’t know it until an hour before it was going to happen.”
And are you ready for this? The New York Times reported last week that Bush rejected Israel’s request for bombs to drop on Iran. According to the NPR article:
When the president refused to give bunker-busting bombs to the Israelis for use against Iran’s nuclear sites, the president’s decision was made over Cheney’s objection, according to a high-ranking former administration official.
The Bush legacy is not pretty. But PROPS to Dub because in the end, he saved us from Cheney.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Cheney Claims No Connection Between Iraq and al Qaeda, You Silly People
- Cheney is Creepy and I Think He Eats Puppies.
- Polls, Pols, Poles!
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Please review the each and every reference listed and tell me where one branch of government was violated by another. Tell me why a democratic congress did not impeach the offenders in the executive branch. When did lobbying for one’s cause fall out of the norm for Washington?
When did interjecting counsel to prevent the Justice Department from accessing information from the NSA become a crime? Jamie Goerlick made it law under the Clinton administration and this was conveniently omitted from the article. She also sat on the 911 commission and failed to disclose authorship of the legislation while passing judgment on the Bush administration for not sharing information when she in fact prevented that action by a law authored by her own hand.
Goebbels was responsible for the Nazi propaganda machine that furthered the socialist agenda by striking fear in the hearts of ordinary Germans and justifying genocide by demonizing Jews as the cause of every problem endured by the average citizen. The authors of these article fit the description more than Cheney or Bush. Bush and Cheney were smart enough to seize control of the nation two elections in a row, yet they are accused of being dumber than any individual from which they seized power? Please! Brilliant politicians, but retarded administrators? If that is true, we can only assume it is the love and respect Democratic leaders have for these two indiciduals that have not only kept them from prison, but kept them from even being charged with a crime.
The reference to “a high ranking former administration official” is my favorite. We have a lame duck president, both houses of congress are dominated by democrats, and a nation that is overwhelmingly in favor an opposition that hates this administration. Yet, we can’t get a name to verify the accusation. What is “high ranking” anyway? What is he or she afraid of? The list of dead people opposed to the Clintons is far longer than any similar list assembled by the various whack jobs opposed to this administration.
Bart Gellman is a first rate hack. How does any VP create a doctrine that the President is accountable to no one? Don’t say it! Explain it! Did the Democratic party run out of constitutional attorneys one day and the VP got this unprecedented legislation through in the dark of night? Did Addington tell the highest profile attorneys in the land to be quiet and they were to scared to protest the action on their own accord? Raising a challenge is not the same as usurping power. Why did they decide not to resign in the end? Does any one really believe they backed off and remained quite because Cheney would take them hunting and shoot them in the face? Gellman is an embarrassment to what we used to consider journalism.
For the references from the article, feel free to take up fact checking with NPR/Gellman since they’re the sources. Here’s a quote from Politico: “We did not exceed our constitutional authority, as some have suggested,” Cheney insisted. “The President believes, I believe very deeply, in a strong executive, and I think that’s essential in this day and age. And I think the Obama administration is not likely to cede that authority back to the Congress. I think they’ll find that given a challenge they face, they’ll need all the authority they can muster.”
IMHO, it comes down to whether you agree that the executive branch should tip the scales in its direction. It’s tough to say (less tough now that Obama’s in office, haha) since Congress has its proverbial head somewhere dark, that the executive should yield to Congress’ authority especially in foreign relations. However, I don’t trust a too-strong executive branch because by its nature it’s a less democratic body, not intended as the branch where legal decisions are made. Cheney does not explain the deep need he sees for the executive branch to expand its authority — that’s what I’ve never trusted about Cheney. He’s far too covert a power figure for what I truly believe needs to remain a country ruled by its people, not some covert oligarchy. From the surface, he seems WAY too hawkish, and an Executive going to war without Congressional authority, though definitely precedented, is still scary as hell. I am exceptionally happy to return to strong diplomacy over guns.