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10/6/08
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11 comments
Editorial
Cheney Unmasked
For those want to know more about Vice President Dick Cheney’s role in the troubled Bush administration, a gold mine awaits. It is a new book, “Angler,” by Barton Gellman, a Washington Post special projects reporter. It starts off with a bang, about how Mr. Cheney, as head of the search committee for a vice-presidential nominee, drew a mass of personal secrets from a “short” list of eight candidates through a questionnaire of nearly 200 questions, studied them in secret, and then proposed himself for the job — without submitting to the questionnaire. The dossiers, including embarrassing details, were studied by only four people — Mr. Cheney; his elder daughter, a lawyer; David J. Gribbin III, a loyal Cheney retainer since high school, and David Addington, the hard-boiled attorney who now is his chief of staff. At least one of the personal secrets leaked out and ruined the career of Republican Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma. Others have ever since had reason to worry, according to the book. Similar secrecy, even while the disputed 2000 election was in litigation, surrounded the selection of top officials for the new administration. Mr. Cheney volunteered for the job, and Mr. Bush let him handle it. Working with much the same small group at his kitchen table in McLean, Va., Mr. Cheney started with secretaries of state, treasury, justice and defense. He interviewed them and escorted them to Austin for Mr. Bush’s approval. He not only filled out the rest of the Cabinet but also chose like-minded allies for subordinate posts. It was all with Mr. Bush’s acquiescence and made the first Master of Business Administration president a manager who left much to his subordinates — and to the vice president’s office. The heart of the book is an account of a struggle over warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. It started as a secret vice-presidential project. Authorizing orders and memos were locked, not in the White House, but in the vice president’s office in the adjoining Executive Office Building. Questions about its legality arose early and boiled up when high Justice Department officials refused to continue a routine sign-off on the program. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Addington insisted that the president’s inherent powers as commander in chief sufficed. Mr. Bush, unaware of the secret details and the seriousness of the struggle, at first signed an order without the Justice Department’s OK. But when he learned that Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and a half-dozen top Justice Department officials were determined to resign over the issue, Mr. Bush reversed himself and ordered acceptable changes in the program. Details still are so secret that few Americans realize that the Cheney-Addington demands came close to pushing the first Bush administration over a cliff and dooming its re-election prospects. The little known story helps explain Mr. Bush’s relative independence of Mr. Cheney’s influence in the second administration.
Comments
More pornography for the Bush haters from one of the best peddlers out there. What will the editorial page of the Bangor Democrat News opine about when the big bad George Bush is out of office? One thing for sure it will never be democrats or liberals. Hard to believe that you will have any great ideas of your own either. You lifted the idea of "soft bigotry of low expectations" editorial on October 4 from an op-ed Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe had published on October 3. I anxiously await your month long push to get Barry Obama elected. ...and I wonder if Dickie Cheney ever thought of shooting Bush in the face with a shotgun as his next victim? Hey Folks,
Any guy who would turn out one of this country's operatives for political purposes says everything about him. Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and George W. Bush along with Donald Rumsfeld are the worst of the worst and will go down in American history as everyyhing this country should not be about. One word; DISGUSTING, says it all about them. For those that are interested, there was this interview with Barton Gellman on Democracy Now! here:
http://tiny.cc/JMScm I wonder if the BDN editorial staff gave such a glowing recommendation of the book The Obama Nation?
PS: to Johninphilippines, that comment was tasteless I wonder if the BDN editorial staff gave such a glowing recommendation of the book The Obama Nation?
PS: to Johninphilippines, that comment was tasteless I wonder if the BDN editorial staff gave such a glowing recommendation of the book The Obama Nation?
PS: to Johninphilippines, that comment was tasteless Let's all take a break and blame it on the Jews!:
"NEO-CON JEWS AND THE WAR IN IRAQ Who does the War in Iraq really help? Who sits on the sidelines without casualties while Americans bleed and die to fight their enemy? Israel. Look beneath surface reasons for the War in Iraq and you will find the Jews and the Christian Zionists. Look for who manufactured the rationale for the war and you will find neo-con (neo-conservative) Jews who, as Patrick Buchanan said "have a passionate attachment to a nation not their own" and Christian Zionists. We did not need a third war and the war in Iraq is just starting. The average insurgency lasts 9 years. At this writing we are in year three. Then there is the War on Terror and the war in Afghanistan..." source: http://wake-up-america.net/NEO-CON%20JEWS%20AND%20THE%20WAR%20IN%20IRAQ.htm
Thinking more and looking at what the Cheney/Bush administration has been up too for the past eight years, I would say these clowns would have been right at home in a Nazi Germany. David889327...watch out for ckc1996...you, too, will get a "tasteless" comment from that online poster! ckc1996 ought to tune into international broadband radio and satellite tv, and more news programs in the US, and see what is being said about Bush...my comment about Cheney was pure-in-heart compared to what else is out there. Is this another example of some people never going anywhere, doing anything, and thinking they know so much about everything in the world that is going on? Presumably so. Look...maybe my comment about Cheney and his shotgun pun was just a little out of character, ckc1996. I was trying to impress the joke that Cheney, from what the congressional reports and the news stories depict from the internet archives on Cheney's administration as Vice-President, and his hundting episode, was indicative of most of his WH tenure...simply non-productive, and sometimes comical. No irreverence made to George Bush. |
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