By Hanlon, on March 11th, 2009 at 10:28 PM
 Poe’s Law states that religious fundamentalism is so out of control that it’s impossible to tell satire from reality. If you doubt that, recall the Landover Baptist website that routinely gets hate mail. The implication is that one will read a piece of satire and the reputation of its target will be such that you believe the satire.
I submit then that Cheney’s Law is the same law from the opposite side. What you believe is satire will turn out to be reality. That’s why I didn’t write on Cheney’s “assassination ring” despite having read about it earlier. I just assumed it couldn’t possibly be what the headline said. Sigh.
Hersh replied, “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.”
Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”
“It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on,” Hersh stated. “Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.”
Possibly the most horrifying aspect of the Bush Administration could be that no matter how many abhorrent things we learn about what was going on, we don’t know the half of it yet. Think about that.
By Hanlon, on February 4th, 2009 at 01:25 PM
 I’m glad I didn’t stumble across this story until now because I’m pretty sure if I’d seen it immediately upon waking I’d have suffered an aneurysm. We all know Dick Cheney seems hell-bent on personifying his first name with every word he utters, but even by his standards this is amazingly low.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a “high probability” that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration’s policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed.
In an interview Tuesday with Politico, Cheney unyieldingly defended the Bush administration’s support for the Guantanamo Bay prison and coercive interrogation of terrorism suspects.
And he asserted that President Obama will either backtrack on his stated intentions to end those policies or put the country at risk in ways more severe than most Americans — and, he charged, many members of Obama’s own team — understand.
Cheney’s statements are practically a greatest hits album of Bush-era fearmongering, polarization, demonizing, and oversimplification. He takes entire credit for a lack of attacks on the United States in the last half of his term but shrugs off any notion that the economic crisis was in any way thanks to his policies (he even, gasp, claims there was no way to predict it!). The stimulus package is a “wish list” of Democrats.
And then the son of a bitch brings up the same old thing:
But he said he worried that “instead of sitting down and carefully evaluating the policies,” Obama officials are unwisely following “campaign rhetoric” and preparing to release terrorism suspects or afford them legal protections granted to more conventional defendants in crime cases.
…
“Is that really a good idea to take hardened Al Qaeda terrorists who’ve already killed thousands of Americans and put ’em in San Quentin or some other prison facility where they can spread their venom even more widely than it already is?”
Someone needs to tell me, right now, what is inherently worse about a guy who was a member of Al Qaeda that kills Americans, and a guy who was a member of a street gang in LA that kills Americans? Republicans are always on and on about how hate crime is no different than normal crime, so let’s apply that here. Murder is murder, no matter what, right? Now, of course, I do see terrorism as a different animal, but the point remains that there is nothing so massively dangerous about some Al Qaeda maniac that can’t also be applied to the gangbangers, serial killers, rapists, and cannibals already in our hardest prisons.
Also, what’s up with this idea that they’re going to “spread their venom”? Are these guys highly trained salesmen who can sell an icebox to an eskimo and recruit Al Qaeda members at a NASCAR event? I’m somewhat skeptical of the notion that if we put these guys into our prisons, within a week or so they’ll have “reinforcements”. They can’t be that bright if part of the plan involves wearing a dynamite-laced backpack, and I somehow doubt that no one in our current prisons is massively “burn down America”, so what exactly is going to happen?
Or maybe Cheney knows all this, but he needs a nice big sledgehammer to hit Democrats over the head with.
By Hanlon, on December 18th, 2008 at 11:36 AM
 I was going to call this just a standard “quote of the day” post, but it’s just too much to relegate it to such a quick blurb. Instead, we’ll play a game of “guess who said that”. First up, read the following:
“The best thing you can do is keep your VP under control,” [blank] told [blank], according to three sources familiar with the White House meeting that had previously not been disclosed publicly.
Any ideas? You might be thinking Clinton (either one), or perhaps someone in the media who had frank access to Obama? Maybe Obama himself said it to an aid behind closed doors, indicating his plans for the upcoming administration.
If any of those are your guess, you’re wrong. It was actually… Dick Cheney!
Vice President Dick Cheney had some blunt — and humorous — advice for incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel at a private breakfast earlier this month, CNN has learned.
Humorous, you say? And the room “broke up in laughter” after he said that? Okay, so maybe that one was a joke. Like, “ha ha it’s funny because my office was typified by a horrifying explosion in the VP’s authority.” Hilarious. So let’s move onto something that isn’t a joke. Try and place this one:
Less obvious is how to create a White House where forceful debate can take place. Plain speaking, straight talk, and dissent must be encouraged, with participants thoroughly prepared, ideas offered with deference for opposing views, and colleagues not subjected to self-serving leaks. The power of the Oval Office can cower critics and silence disagreement; the Chief Executive must labor hard to make it a place of debate and vigorous debate.
Any ideas? it sounds like something a beltway pundit might say, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s from Obama’s radio address, or maybe ol’ Rahm Emmanuel said it in response to one of Cheney’s hilarious quips. Possibly a quote from Olbermann or some loony liberal rag like the Huffington post.
Right? Wrong. It was Karl Rove!
What we’re seeing now is something that’s at once pathetic, hilarious, and incredibly revealing. What’s scaring the Bush Administration more than anything else is that the Obama Administration might do exactly what they’ve been doing for the past eight years, only without all that fantastic conservative sensibility.
By Hanlon, on November 21st, 2008 at 01:04 AM
 At some point, you just start losing the words for these things.
See, I wasn’t talking about Cheney’s indictment because it seemed a classic example of “well that’s not going anywhere.” I figured Cheney would get hit with some papers, find a loophole and no-show, and then in a week we’d all forget. What I wasn’t expecting was for the DA to just up and freaking vanish.
“At the very least I expected the district attorney to be here,” Bañales said, asking Guerra’s office manager, “Do you know where he is?”
The manager, Hilda Ramirez, was subpoenaed by defense attorney J.A. “Tony” Canales when buzz circulated in the courthouse that Guerra was nowhere to be found.
…
She told the judge she had been trying to reach Guerra all day.
When Bañales asked if she were concerned for Guerra’s safety she said she would not know how to answer the question.
Guerra’s cell phone message box was full much of the day, but an assistant who answered the line late Wednesday said he was not ill.
Seriously. What the hell.
By Hanlon, on July 28th, 2008 at 03:37 PM
 You know if it wasn’t for the fact that he constantly says he supports our troops, there’d really be no reason to think Dick Cheney gives a damn about them at all. He was going to deliver a nice big address to wounded vets, but they pulled the invite. Why? His demands:
His staff insisted the sick vets be sequestered for two hours before Cheney’s arrival and couldn’t leave until he’d finished talking, officials confirmed.
“Word got back to us … that this would be a prerequisite,” said the veterans executive director, David Gorman, who noted the meeting hall doesn’t have any rest rooms. “We told them it just wasn’t acceptable.”
When Cheney spoke to the group in 2004, his handlers imposed the same stringent security lockdown, upsetting members, officials said.
According to the article, Bush imposed no such restrictions on vets, who “freely pass back and forth through Secret Service screening portals,” which makes it all the more puzzling that Cheney would be so strict with them.
A good question might be why Cheney doesn’t trust our troops. These are men who put their lives on the line defending the United States, does he honestly expect that if the doors aren’t bolted shut he’s going to be in danger of attack? And if he does, what does that say about him? Is he afraid that they’re going to unshackle their prosthetic limbs and hurl them at him?
By Hanlon, on June 2nd, 2008 at 10:59 PM
Now here’s a politically curious move. John McCain has really been championing this idea of a “gas tax holiday” for a while now, and the current Vice President is shooting it down. Odd that the sitting veep would so publicly go against the candidate from his own party.
“I think it’s a false notion, in the sense that you’re not going to have much of an impact, given the size of the gasoline tax on the total cost of the gallon of gas,” Cheney said when asked about the matter during a luncheon appearance. “You might buy a little bit of relief there, but it’s minimal.”
Now, unlike most, I’m not one of those “wait, if Cheney likes it, maybe it’s BAD” kind of liberal bloggers. Dick Cheney, like any politician, is entirely capable of saying something that is both reasonable and accurate. In this case, I wholeheartedly agree with him. The average gas tax, combining state and federal, is just over $0.40 a gallon. In my area, it’s about $3.95 at the pump and the tax is 50.7 cents, meaning I’d be paying a low low $3.44 per gallon. Hardly anything to jump about. Remembering that about 60% of fuel tax revenue goes to infrastructure, this seems like a poor idea.
What really intrigues me is how Cheney would do this to McCain. It seems like a bizarre decision to me. Combined with Murdoch’s nigh-endorsement of Obama, it’s almost like the right is trying to get Obama elected.
By Hanlon, on November 2nd, 2007 at 02:47 PM
 I know everyone thinks that Kucinich’s dogged campaign to get either Bush or the Veep impeached is an exercise in futility, but I for one applaud him. Every time a poll snakes out talking about impeachment, at the very least a large chunk of the country likes the idea, if not an out and out majority.
“Congress must hold the Vice President accountable. The American people need to let Members of Congress know how they feel about this. The Vice President continues to use his office to advocate for a continued occupation of Iraq and prod our nation into a belligerent stance against Iran. If the Vice President is successful, his actions will ensure decades of disastrous consequences.”
Exactly. If we can impeach a president for lying about sex/notsex, then we can impeach a Vice President for, well, the laundry list of things he’s done and overseen.
The 43rd president has been characterized by, among other things, a complete lack of accountability. It’d be nice if that would finally start to get fixed.
By Hanlon, on September 28th, 2007 at 12:27 PM
In 1992, Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense, was asked why the United States didn’t go into Baghdad and topple Saddam in the first Gulf War. His answer:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT7Ik_X1HU0]
On his list…
- What kind of government to put in Saddam’s place would work?
- How long could that government “survive” without America “to keep it propped up”?
- We’d “still have people there” (in 1992) instead of being able to take them home.
- Would have been fighting in an urban setting, leading to more casualties.
- The cost would have been enormous.
- Disintegration of the Arab coalition who signed on to the US getting Iraq out of Kuwait.
- Disposing Saddam “not [worth] very damn many” American soldier’s lives.
It almost sounds like it’s a joke. He listed off pretty much every single reason we shouldn’t have done it and every one of his predictions has come to pass. The cost, the casualties, the inability to get the Iraqi government and military to stand up on their own, all of it.
Fantastic.
By Hanlon, on August 20th, 2007 at 10:42 PM
 Whenever I’m feeling down, all I need to do is see what Senator Pat Leahy is up to. While Reid occasionally disappoints and Nancy Pelosi has decided to fight off rumors of being a San Francisco liberal by not doing anything useful, Leahy can always be relied upon to fight the good fight.
Today that comes in the form of Leahy really throwing down the gauntlet against Dick Cheney and his “amorphous branch of the government” defense against subpoenas.
Cheney counsel Shannen Coffin wrote to Leahy on Monday that “the issuance of the subpoena to this office was procedurally irregular” because the judiciary panel only authorized Leahy to issue summonses to the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the Justice Department.
Leahy dryly noted that the White House website currently lists the vice president as a part of the EOP, also distributing copies of a 1978 executive order that describes the vice president as part of the EOP.
Telling Coffin to look at the White House website “may seem too glib an answer,” Leahy told reporters. “My answer would be look at the law. But these are people that don’t look at the law very often.”
Once again, Pat Leahy always brightens my day just a little bit.
Sure, I don’t think anything substantial will happen. Likely the White House will just keep fighting and after a while it will have to be dropped in order to address something more important that will befall the same fate and next thing you know they’re out of DC and got off scot-free, but at least someone’s willing to go on the offense.
By Hanlon, on August 15th, 2007 at 12:56 PM
The video of Dick Cheney from 1994 discussing why invading Iraq during Desert Storm would have been a bad idea recently got picked up and has been circulating. It’s not news to anyone who read Al Franken’s latest, The Truth (with jokes), but regardless you get to see an actually quite reasonable Cheney explaining why an invasion of Iraq was a terrible idea. CNN got hold of it, as you can see here.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogbPosUQA9M]
Now I’m sure there’s a lot to take from this video, but for my money it’s the last bit which I will transcribe here. After mentioning that Cheney’s office didn’t return any calls on the issue, the host closes with:
ABBI TATTON: But in February of this year, Vice President Cheney was asked in an interview with ABC News about similar comments he made in 1991. The vice president’s response, “Look what’s happened since then. We had 9/11.“
When I heard that, I just laughed. In 2007, the veep is still pushing the line that Iraq and 9/11 were somehow linked. Someone needs to grab Cheney by the shoulders, shake him like hell, and say “9/11 and Iraq were not connected, get it through your thick skull!” They’re unrelated to the point that we could claim 9/11 had something to do with the Berlin Wall falling or that it was a response to the military action in Kosovo.
It’s really like he thinks we’re all too stupid to pick up on it. Like he can just say “9/11″ and we’ll all hush up and stop asking questions.
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