| Okay, in all the hubub of the election and Obama's transition and Rick Warren's honored position in the inauguratiobn is forgotten the Bush administration. The reason - let's face it - for the Democratic sweep of Congress and the presidency.
It was bad. In fact, it was just as bad as many of us had feared.
Take Dick Cheney. Last week on the talk show circuit, he defended the belief that the presidency has absolute powers and admitted he authorized the use of torture, in response to which Dahlia Lithwick appropriately quoted John MacKenzie:
MacKenzie shows how a scholarly constitutional claim about the right of executive branch officials to interpret the Constitution morphed into the aggressively ahistorical interpretation of executive power that Cheney parrots with such perfect confidence. As MacKenzie writes: "The unitary executive has come a long way for a theory that has a hole in its heart and no basis in history or coherent thought. It simply is devoid of content, not expressed or even strongly implied in foundational documents such as The Federalist, not to mention the Constitution."
And today Murray Waas reports:
Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.
The Bush administration: just as bad as we said it was.
You know...how many of these stories were shrugged off by traditional media for so long, and are now openly admitted to by the vice president? And what consequences will there be?
I'm betting none.
Honesly, everybody should be enraged by this - conservatives and DC insiders, too. But conservatives are busy coming up with intellectual justifications for the Bushies' actions and the media is busy coming up with reasons why it's a bad idea to punish any of these *sshats, the real reason being that they identify with the Cheneys of the world more than the dirty hippies...ie, the rest of us.
Merry friggin' Christmas.
Speaking of which, I'll be posting lightly for the next few days, because I'm on vacation! |
