Tin Soldiers and Cheney's Comin...

The dark lord lurks in the bushes.



Yes, he is watching from the side, lurking in the shadows, pulling the strings.

Never take your eyes off the man.

The Washington Post has a four-part series on the dark lord this week. Read it. Study it. Put it in a time capsule to show your grandchildren so they don't think you're exaggerating when you speak in hushed tones of the lawless power-hungry villains who ruled this land illegitimately during the twenty-aughts.

Despite comprehensive rules regarding the records and documents of the executive branch, the Vice President has been classifying everything in his path, thanks to a little-noticed 2003 executive order that gives him the power of the president in such matters. According to the Post, Cheney's office has refused since 2003 to report its handling of national security documents to the National Archives and Records Administration. When the NARA complained, Cheney tried to get their funding cut. When that didn't work, he claimed he is not a part of the executive branch.

Seriously. Cheney's office is actually claiming that he is neither in the executive branch or in the legislative branch (when it suits them to claim that). Actually, any basic college course in government with tell you that as the President's right-hand man, he is part of the executive, AND, as the president of the Senate he is part of the legislature. So he's both. But according to his lawyer, he is an unaccountable super-branch of government that can do whatever the fuck he pleases. Here's a clip of a White House press flack trying to explain it to reporters. Listen to the way her rationale keeps changing and how she keeps saying she doesn't have a legal mind. Yeah, no shit.

Cheney's not fucking around. Neither is his lawyer, David Addington.

The issue of the OVP having the power to classify or declassify documents at will was at the heart of the investigation into whether he participated in outing a covert CIA agent. We'll never know if he did or not, since Cheney's former chief of staff Scooter Libby jumped into the investigation and started stinking it up with lies, derailing the investigation by perjuring himself. Libby was recently sentenced to 30 months in prison for his troubles, but, hey, that's what presidential pardons are for, right? Law is a tool. Besides, most of the GOP assholes who impeached Clinton for perjury involving a blowjob, are now arguing that Libby's perjury involving smearing a CIA agent is no big deal.

Oh, and by the way, do you think it's a coincedence that the most paranoid office in the White House just happened to be harboring a spy? That's right, this guy stole classified documents from the OVP and passed them to a foreign government. So when wingnuts like that smarmy little prick Bill Kristol go on CNN and say that the OVP doesn't need bureacrats snooping around checking whether or not they're properly handling classified information, well, that's a bit of a wank.

The final note I would like to leave here regarding this horrible hateful treacherous draft-dodging motherfucker (our Vice President), is this little quote from former Vice President Dan Quayle regarding a meeting the two had shortly after Cheney was elected:

In his Park Avenue corner suite at Cerberus Global Investments, Dan Quayle recalled the moment he learned how much his old job had changed. Cheney had just taken the oath of office, and Quayle paid a visit to offer advice from one vice president to another.

"I said, 'Dick, you know, you're going to be doing a lot of this international traveling, you're going to be doing all this political fundraising . . . you'll be going to the funerals,' " Quayle said in an interview earlier this year. "I mean, this is what vice presidents do. I said, 'We've all done it.' "

Cheney "got that little smile," Quayle said, and replied, "I have a different understanding with the president."

"He had the understanding with President Bush that he would be -- I'm just going to use the word 'surrogate chief of staff,' " said Quayle, whose membership on the Defense Policy Board gave him regular occasion to see Cheney privately over the following four years.