Jun
26
Cheney: Oh, How I Wish He’d Go Away!
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by Michael Winship
Maybe you remember this bit of childhood doggerel, written by the American educator Hughes Mearns:
“Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today
Oh how I wish he’d go away.”
The Bush White House man who wasn’t there isn’t the President. It’s Vice President Cheney, who, if you believe in karma, may be returning in the next life as an especially pernicious mildew. Or, if the gods are feeling larky, decorative kale.
Cheney is the archetypal man who wasn’t there (but is), not only because of his legendary secrecy but his insistence that he can keep the lid closed on anything he wants because the office of the vice presidency is unique — not part of the executive or the legislative branches of government. It is both and/or one. Or the other. Neither fish but mostly foul, as it were.
In other words, l’etat, c’est Dick. Or, employing the infuriating reasoning style of so many parents, “Why? Because I said so!”
Last week, the House Oversight Committee demanded an explanation of this breathtaking show of arrogance and Alice in Wonderland logic; specifically, the office of the vice president’s insistence that it’s exempt from President Bush’s Executive Order 12958, which requires government agencies, including offices within the executive branch, to report annually on how they handle classified information.
It was explained that because one of his duties is to serve as president of the United States Senate, Mr. Cheney is part of the legislative branch and not the executive. Except when he is. As when he claims “executive privilege” to be the reason he doesn’t have to tell us who visits his office and why, or even the names of the people who work on his staff.
There now will be a short pause as you collectively say, “Huh?”
Cheney’s office followed the classified info rules in 2001. They followed the rules in 2002. But suddenly, in 2003, the vice president decided he didn’t have to anymore and hasn’t since.
It gets worse. The House committee reported, “The National Archives protested the vice president’s position in letters written in June 2006 and August 2006. When these letters were ignored, the National Archives wrote to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in January 2007 to seek a resolution of the impasse. The Vice President’s staff responded by seeking to abolish the agency within the Archives that is responsible for implementing the President’s executive order.”
And worse. In Friday’s Los Angeles Times (as noted by Dan Froomkin’s Washington Post White House Briefing blog), Josh Meyer reported, “Cheney’s staff has blocked efforts by the National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office to enforce a key component of the presidential order: a mandatory on-site inspection of the vice president’s office. At least one of those inspections would have come at a particularly delicate time — when Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, and other aides were under criminal investigation for their suspected roles in leaking the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.”
Meyer quoted UC Berkeley constitutional scholar Gordon Silverstein: “Here’s a guy who raises ‘executive privilege’ to historic levels to exempt himself from all rules and oversight, and now he says he’s not part of the executive branch? Here we have a subordinate part of the executive branch asserting independent constitutional authority even against its own superior. It is flabbergasting.”
All in all, this just hasn’t been a good week for Cheney and his precious privacy. In addition to all the news around his convoluted claim of official nonpareil status, there’s an article in the current Rolling Stone chronicling in new detail with fresh documents Cheney’s dominant role in what the magazine calls the Bush administration’s “Secret Campaign to Deny Global Warming.”
The petroleum-based vice president turned the White House Council on Environmental Quality into a “shadow EPA, with industry calling the shots.” According to former Bush EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman, “The consequences of climate change are very real and very negative, but Cheney is not convinced of that. He believes… that the Earth has been changing since it was formed and to say that climate change is cause by humans is incorrect.”
Biggest of all, the Washington Post is publishing an extensive four-part series called “Angler.” That’s the vice president’s Secret Service code name. Apparently, “Quick Draw” and “Sure Shot” already were taken.
While the Post series doesn’t portray the vice president as the Darth Vader-like power behind the emperor’s throne so many suspect, it does depict a man of unprecedented influence willing to run roughshod over policy and personnel — including two attorneys general — to achieve his objectives. “On critical decisions for more than six years,” reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker write, “Cheney has often controlled the pivot points — tipping the outcome when he could, engineering stalemate when he could not and reopening debates that rivals thought were resolved.”
Read more
Jun
19
by Michael Winship
There’s a famous, possibly apocryphal story about Lyndon Johnson visiting Vietnam during his presidency. On a carrier flight deck, he started striding toward a helicopter when a Navy officer said to him, “No, Mr. President, your helicopter is this way.”
LBJ looked him in the eye and said, “Son, they’re ALL my helicopters.”
A similar story on a slightly smaller scale made the rounds of Washington during the early days of the current presidency. It was in April 2001, after China seized and then released a US Navy EP-3 surveillance aircraft. During a medical appointment the doctor asked George W. Bush what had been the most difficult part of his presidency so far. He replied, “When the Chinese took my airplane.”
Fast forward more than six long years, post-9/11 years of disasters at home and abroad, incompetence, abuses of power, stonewalling, obstruction of justice, etc. I could make a longer list but it would paralyze you like the monologue of that guy in “Forrest Gump” who goes on about all the ways you can cook shrimp.
You’d think that with such a shambles in his wake and his popularity at an all-time low, George Bush would at least partially have relinquished his pride of ownership. Not so.
Jun
12
by Michael Winship
If you haven’t a yen to feel older than the slabs at Stonehenge, don’t do what I did last week: attend a rock music and film conference where the median age was around, say, seventeen.
I was in Toronto at the North by Northeast Music and Film Festival, helping my friends Pat and Emily promote their work-in-progress documentary about the New York punk scene in the seventies. We stood out amongst the younger folk like freeze-dried produce in a freshly picked fruit cup.
It was suggested we looked more like parents searching the event for their runaway child than actual participants, but we held our graying heads high amidst stares of strained incredulity. The stares were polite. This was, after all, Canada.
The festival itself was anything but polite, a somewhat disorganized explosion of musical energy and creativity, with performances day and night in some 40 clubs and other venues — more than 450 bands with names like Ceremonial Snips, Les Breastfeeders, Wordburglar, Horton the Irrelevant & August the Creep.
Jun
5
Poor Little Rich Boys (and Girl)
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by Michael Winship
When John F. Kennedy was running for president and asked how he became a war hero, he had the wit and grace to reply, “It was entirely involuntary. They sank my boat.”
Rudy Giuliani, on the other hand, would have you believe that God and Fate had somehow aligned the spheres to place him — and only him — at the helm of New York City on 9/11. He bestrode the metropolis to save it from certain doom, even though he had less than four months to go in his second, up-until-then undistinguished term as mayor.
After the September 11 catastrophe, despite term limits, he made a last ditch attempt to change the rules so we could continue to have him as our fearless leader for — oh, how about forever? — but cooler heads prevailed.
Instead, Giuliani decided to parlay his new reputation for in extremis leadership into megabucks. When he left City Hall, his gross assets were listed at between $1.16 million and $1.83 million, most of it in retirement funds and two Manhattan apartments. Since then, his company, Giuliani Partners, has pulled in more than $100 million in consulting, security, management and financial service fees, and has quadrupled in size.