Wilkerson's Scathing Cheney Review on Democracy Now

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Colin Powell, was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now about Dick Cheney's new memoir (video to follow). Wilkerson proceeds to give a scathing review not so much of Cheney's book, but Cheney himself. He calls the release of Cheney's book in the wake of Hurricane Irene, the devastation in Vermont from the storm, and the most recent soldier deaths in Afghanistan "singularly insignificant," described Cheney's 'exploding heads all over Washington' line as akin to "grocery store tabloid" and says "I simply don't recognize Dick Cheney anymore" not as a descriptive measure of how he's changed, but that he doesn't recognize him as a person (my take).

Wilkerson: "...The Vice-President seems to find fault with... Condi Rice, ...with Powell, with [Richard] Armitige, with the president himself. The only person Cheney does not seem to find fault with is Cheney. I think we have a word for that kind of person; I won't use it here on television, but I think Mr. Cheney's view is totally, utterly, completely Mr. Cheney's view. I doubt there are very many people in America, other than the cheerleading squad for people like Cheney, who like torture and the like, who'll even read his book, or if they do read it, they'll read it in order to increase their revulsion of him rather than their respect for him. And that's a pity because he is a former vice-president...

...This is a book written out of fear; fear that one day someone will 'Pinochet' Dick Cheney."

After a quick call from Glenn Greenwald charaterizing some of Cheney's actions during his administration as criminal, Wilkerson agreed wholeheartedly, said that he would be willing to testify against Cheney should it ever come to trial, and would also take any punishment he is due as part of that administration.

More Krautlogic

Another week, and another example of Charles Krauthammer defecating on perfectly good paper. What a waste.

Earlier this week, Krauthammer wasted our time with his twisted logic on why the House should pass the John Boehner plan - mind you this was the original plan that Boehner couldn't garner support for from his own party, long before it actually passed on it's third incarnation which included a balanced budget amendment necessary for getting the votes needed, only to die a quick and merciful death in the Senate a short two hours later. All totaled, Boehner spent the entire week trying to pass a bill that he knew would be rejected in the Senate, while the clock is ticking down to D-Day. ("D" for "Default.")

The basis for Krauthammer's column:

...The distinctive visions of the two parties — social-democratic vs. limited-government — have underlain every debate on every issue since Barack Obama’s inauguration: the stimulus, the auto bailouts, health-care reform, financial regulation, deficit spending. Everything. The debt ceiling is but the latest focus of this fundamental divide.

Sigh... must I go over each of the supposed examples in that last paragraph? I must, I must.

Well, we can't really start off with a "limited government" lie posed as a fact so I'll refer you to a chart broken down by presidential terms showing federal spending and national debt. You'll immediately notice something when comparing the numbers:

Economist Mike Kimel notes that the last five Democratic Presidents (Clinton, Carter, LBJ, JFK, and Truman) all reduced public debt as a share of GDP, while the last four Republican Presidents (GW Bush, GHW Bush, Reagan, and Ford) all oversaw an increase in the country’s indebtedness.

So you can take that limited government bullshit and shove it. Reagan tripled the national debt. George W. Bush doubled it. So the next time some conservative starts with the myth that we somehow were completely fine until that no good Obama got his hands on the credit card, punch him in the neck.

The stimulus that Krauthammer wets his pants on wasn't some kind of socialist spending spree. It was necessitated by a nosediving GDP to shore up the continual loss of jobs (700,000+ per month by the time Bush left office), and not because of some imaginary European style socialist agenda.

Had President Obama not bailed out the auto industry, a bailout that began under Bush, but Obama honed into a reorganization to make the American auto industry profitable again, we would have been more than another million jobs in the hole.

Had President Obama truly wanted a European model of health care in the United States, he would have shot for a single payer system at the beginning of negotiations. And let's not forget that practically every president since Teddy Roosevelt has tried to pass some kind of health care legislation. Don't begrudge Obama for getting it done.

And Krauthammer's complaint about financial regulation is laughable considering the 2007 financial collapse brought on by the deregulatory decisions of both Presidents Clinton and GW Bush. Should we just forget all that's happened and assume the banks and markets can police themselves after a lesson learned?

And finally, deficit spending. I didn't know our country operated in the black until January 20th, 2009. Oh, wait. It didn't.

"The lesson we should have learned [from the Reagan years] is that deficits have little or no short-term economic impacts," said William A. Niskanen, a member of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers.

...The fiscal shift in the Reagan years was staggering. In January 1981, when Reagan declared the federal budget to be "out of control," the deficit had reached almost $74 billion, the federal debt $930 billion. Within two years, the deficit was $208 billion. The debt by 1988 totaled $2.6 trillion. In those eight years, the United States moved from being the world's largest international creditor to the largest debtor nation.

So is Charles Krauthammer at risk of being shot in the face by disagreeing with Dick Cheney's now famous, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter" line?

And Suck It Again, Obama Haters

POSTED BY JHW22

As Broadway Carl eloquently stated in his previous post, "Suck it!" And I want to join in.

After hearing all day how the getting of Bin Laden is because of Bush, I just wanted to state, ignorant as I may seem, that I didn't know Bush invented interrogation. Funny, I thought that asking someone questions to solve a mystery had been around since at least Columbo or even Murder, She Wrote. But listening to all those who can't give credit where credit is due (to Obama), you'd think questions weren't invented until the era of Bush.

Oh, but more specifically, the torture-style of interrogation is what they mean when they say Bush policies single-handedly led to the catching of the guy THEY couldn't get until "that one" was in office. Oh, so again, I learned something today. I didn't realize Bush invented torture. Funny, I thought trying hurt something out of someone had been around since at least The Princess Bride or something.

But nope. Bush is the mastermind behind capturing the mastermind all with the ask of a question followed by a beating. All those TV shows and movies made long before Bush was President, that showed people with toothpicks in their eyelids and stuff, weren't real. Well, duh, Jen, they were movies! Duh.

So what was that the North Vietnamese did to John McCain if that wasn't torture or interrogation? Because if Bush created those techniques of intelligence-gathering, then it certainly wasn't what we thought it was.

I guess I should agree with Sarah Palin and give thanks to President BUSH. Because if he hadn't created the genius idea to ask people questions in order to get answers, where would we be today? See! I JUST asked a question. Holy shit. I should thank Bush for the ability to do that. I never could have done that without him.

But now I am perplexed. If Bush was the one who set up this way of getting information, how did the Clinton Administration get all that information on Bin Laden that the Bush Administration ignored? Oh, wait, because the premise of interrogation or that of torture didn't exist, then I guess all intelligence was moot, thus ignorable.

THAT must be why it was easy to blame Clinton for not having a stragery to get, or help Bush get, Bin Laden before 9/11. And since Dana Perino informed us that 9/11 didn't happen on Bush's watch -- but the invention of interrogation did, THAT is why we must now bow to Bush for Bin Laden being found 10 years after 9/11 and about that many years after the invention of interrogation.

So, next question (I love this invention of asking questions thing) is: what could Bush have done better to see to it that the magical act of interrogation yielded results BEFORE a long, drawn-out, expensive war -- scratch that -- BEFORE TWO long, drawn-out, expensive warS? I am so curious to find out. Maybe when Obama completely ends the wars Bush started, we'll know what Bush invented to allow Obama to do that. Because, as I have learned today -- the black man ain't accomplished shit until the white man takes credit for it in contortionist revisionist bullshit.

Fractured GOP Indeed

No one is safe, not even at CPAC.



I don't know what's worse, the jingoism displayed by those in the room, the fact that they were awarding Donald Rumsfeld an award called "Defenders of The Constitiution" or the screams of approval for former VP Dick "Five Deferments, Face Shooter, Undisclosed Location" Cheney.

Luckily, some kept their heads and protested the guests standing in front of them, shouting "war criminal" "Where's Bin Laden?" "murdering scum," and "draft dodger." Ron Paul supporters walked out... and yet they still think going to CPAC every year is worth their time and money.

So... Uh... Wha'd I Miss?

Looks like it's been a very interesting week since my baby was born. Between the initial shell shock of fatherhood and setting up the house we just bought and moved into just 2½ weeks ago (including the nursery finished late last night), I haven't had much time to blog or read or watch the talking heads much. So let's take a gander at what's happened just this past week or so in no particular order.

The initial steps of repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell have begun. Gary Coleman died. The BP top kill theory failed while they drank more milkshake. American Idol completed another season with another undeserving winner. BP CEO Tony Hayward wants his "life back." Dennis Hopper died. Israel attacked an aid flotilla headed to Gaza and the US once again remained silent. (Imagine if it were any other country who committed this act?) BP's Hayward thinks the sickened workers cleaning up the mess are more likely the victims of food poisoning rather than the toxic slurry BP is pumping in to the Gulf to disperse the oil. Attorney General Eric Holder launched criminal and civil investigations into the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Former Dick Cheney press secretary Ann Kolton has been hired by BP for damage control purposes after realizing that Tony Hayward can't get his oil soaked boot out of his mouth.

I can only imagine what the next week will bring.

For Once Dick Cheney Is RIght

Huffington Post: While the current vice president is showing contrition over dropping an F-bomb, the last one seems proud of his own famous off-color moment [in telling Senator Patrick Leahy to "go fuck himself" on the Senate floor].

...Cheney, who has never regretted the incident, appeared on Thursday's "Dennis Miller Show" and took a compliment about it from the host.

"I love that move," Miller said while thanking Cheney for going after Leahy. "One of my favorite stories -- muttering that."

Cheney responded that a lot of people liked the comment. "That's sort of the best thing I ever did."

And he's right. Can you think of anything else Dick Cheney did in his eight years as Vice President that was less damaging? I can't. Therefore, he's right when he says it's "the best thing I ever did" because anything he did before (Halliburton, Liz Cheney) or after (not having the decency to die after multiple heart attacks) was infinitely worse.

Quote of the Day

"I have always been on the record, in fact, since 2003, with the concept of living our values. And I think that whenever we've perhaps taken expedient measures, they've turned around and bitten us in the backside. We decided early on, in the 101st airborne division, we just said, we decided to obey the Geneva Conventions...

...we have found that the use of interrogation methods in the army field manual that was given the force of law by Congress, that that works."

~ General David Petraeus explaining his disagreement with the Dick Cheney doctrine of enhanced interrogation, AKA torture.

Suck On It, Cheney

NY Times: The Taliban’s top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials.

The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mullah Baradar has been in Pakistani custody for several days, with American and Pakistani intelligence officials both taking part in interrogations, according to the officials.

It's stories like these that make Dick Cheney look even more foolish than he already does when criticizing the current administration in the "war on terrorISM" on the Sunday show circuit. In one year, the Obama administration has done more to root out anti-American extremists in Afghanistan than the Bush administration had done in the previous seven.

Whether you agree with the increase of troops and our presence in Afghanistan is another issue entirely, but Cheney misinforming the public and never letting go of his fear mongering ways on a seemingly endless basis, makes him look stupid, petty and out of touch with what's actually happening. All to stay in the public eye until his memoirs get published in the next year.

Rachel Maddow Dissects GOPs Hypocrisy on Underwear Bomber

Rachel was ON FIRE last night!

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ADDING... Ed Schultz does a good job as well, including Rep. Eric Massa challenging Cheney to a debate anywhere, anytime.

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Quote of the Week

...the former Vice President makes the clearly untrue claim that the President – who is this nation’s Commander-in-Chief – needs to realize we are at War. I don’t think anyone realizes this very hard reality more than President Obama.

...The difference is this: President Obama doesn’t need to beat his chest to prove it, and – unlike the last Administration – we are not at war with a tactic (“terrorism”), we at war with something that is tangible: al Qaeda and its violent extremist allies. And we will prosecute that war as long as the American people are endangered.

~ White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer in response to Dick Cheney assertion that President Obama wants to "pretend we're not at war."

Dithering? McChrystal Doesn't Think So

In what I would categorize as an ultimate 'fuck you' to Dick "Five Deferments" Cheney and the bang up job the Bush administration did in Afghanistan while playing that new board game Build A Democacy™ in Iraq, McChrystal had a different take on the time President Obama is taking to make his decision.

Via GottaLaff:

Gen. Stanley McChrystal told lawmakers that President Obama had engaged in a "thoughtful process" on Afghanistan and refused to criticize the president for delaying his decision to send more troops.

Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.):

Some of the lawmakers pressed McChrystal on Obama's lengthy decision-making, but the general described it as a "thoughtful process and wouldn't go any further," Price said. "I was a little surprised he didn't voice frustration with the delay."

More like disappointed, right Tom?

Doofus Quote of the Day

"I actually have to agree with Vice President Cheney, that the president is dithering. And I actually had to look up 'dithering,' and it means 'indecisive,' and that's exactly what he's being."

That's Republican Rep. Joe "YOU LIE!" Wilson (R-NoBookistan) agreeing with former VP Dick Cheney's assessment... after some lowly, eye-rolling staffer had to look up the word "dither" for him. Seriously, these are the idiots who oppose health care reform most likely because they don't understand it. These are the morons who complain when a piece of legislation is 1,000 pages long because they can't get through it with their third grade reading level.

Nope, we don't need no fancy book learnin' in Congress.

O'Donnell Rips Liz Cheney on Dover Lie

Compulsive lying must run in the genes of the Cheney family. Playing Renfield to Dick Cheney's Dracula, daughter and pseudo-pundit Liz Cheney was one of the first to criticize President Obama's presence at Dover Air Force Base to meet and honor the latest fallen coming from the Middle East, something the previous president failed to do. But that didn't stop her from opening her cakehole and lying about it. Lawrence O'Donnell does an excellent job at a little reality check while ripping Liz a new one.

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For the last few months, we've seen Liz Cheney parade around on the talking heads circuit (only on networks that wouldn't seriously challenge her, of course) backing up daddy's atrocious White House years and authoritarian policies. Is this a precursor for a possible run at political office? If so, she may be the only person to possibly have a lower approval rating that her father before announcing her candidacy in her continuation of the soulessness and classlessness of the Cheney family name.

Zero Attacks!

Another Republican strategist/Cheney apologist on Hardball expounding on the favorite Bush administration myth. Terry Jeffrey from CNSNews.com (I won't link it, but visit if you dare) trying some more revisionist history and boy, we should thank our lucky stars that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were in the White House to keep us safe! The proof is in the pudding because we've had "zero attacks" since 9/11. It really is a shame that these imbeciles either A) don't know that the Bush administration lasted a full eight years, and not the seven years and four months that they'd like us to remember, B) always dismiss the anthrax attacks or C) think that we're stupid enough to have forgetten that we were attacked on their watch.

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Check out the full segment in which Jeffrey also infers that Afghanistan is Barack Obama's war, and since he won't appease either political side with the proper troop levels, history will remember that it will be his failed policy. An astute Matthews make a comparison to Nixon's Vietnam, another inherited war which was a slow bleed, but Jeffrey suggests that it might have turned out differently had the Democratic congress not "turned and ran out on the whole country" after Nixon left office in disgrace. So, you can't blame Nixon because he inherited a war, but you can blame Obama. And you can't blame Nixon for not sending enough troops to Vietnam, but you can blame Obama if he falls into the same situation in Afghanistan.

Brilliant!

Can We Please Give Him A Show?

Lawrence O'Donnell shows once again why he needs a show. He is beholden to no one as he spars with Joe "Cheney Apologist" Scarborough over Cheney's comment that President Obama is "dithering" in Afghanistan, as if his administration didn't dither for the last eight fucking years.

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ADDING... Scarborough: "Okay, Lawrence... go sell your appliances." WHAT A FUCKING DOUCHE!

Cheney Thinks He Kept Us Safe

Dick Cheney on Fox "News" Sunday: I guess the other thing that offends the hell out of me, frankly, Chris, is we had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaida.

The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, "How did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time?"

I could care less whether you're offended, DICK. Actually, stike that. I prefer you be offended on a regular basis. And even if the Obama administration did "come to those people who were involved in that policy" for advice, that wouldn't be you, DICK. If they wanted advice from your administration, it would be to check your notes for a "How NOT To Run The Government" strategy.

If you'll notice, the crazy Cheney rhetoric has morphed from "keeping the country safe since 9/11" to "keeping the country safe the for the last eight years." Hey, asshole, don't you mean a little over SEVEN years? Or are you thinking, "Well, except for that one time, we kept you safe. Oh, and the antrax thing... uh, that's twice. But other than those two times... uh, we kept you safe."

Uh... no, douchebag. We were hit under your watch. No other administration can make that dubious claim. Why on earth would Obama want advice from the only administration in the nation's history that fell asleep at the switch while vacationing for a fucking month in Crawford, Texas of all places?

Also read Andrew Sullivan ripping Chris Wallace a new asshole.

(H/T Cesca for the quote.)

Posse Comitatus, Schmosse Comitatus

John Yoo does it again.

Jonathan Turley: The debate continues to rage this week over the push by Vice President Dick Cheney and others to have former President George Bush deploy active military units in a suburb of Buffalo to arrest a small group of men who were suspected of supporting terrorism (here). Nor (sic) surprising, Bush officials went to Berkeley law professor John Yoo to tell them that (surprise!) the President was not bound by the Fourth Amendment or federal law if he unilaterally declared the operation to be a national security matter. Yoo and his former colleague conclude that “the president has the legal and constitutional authority to use military force within the United States to respond to and combat future acts of terrorism, and that the Posse Comitatus Act does not bar deployment.” I discussed the controversy on this segment of Countdown.

It's becoming clearer every day how the Bush administration, or more specifically the Dick Cheney wing of the White House went out of their way to disregard the law in their eight years in office. These stories are coming out only 6 months after they've left. Can you imagine the really heinous skeletons in the closet that we may never know anything about?

Today's News

In my continuing effort to get my apartment ready to put on the market, I've completely neglected the blog today. I managed to get a couple of Tweets in (follow me!) during the installation of a medicine cabinet, bathroom lighting fixture and a pantry door.

So here's my version of today's news:

Judge Sotomayor's hearing in finally underway. And along the way Senators Sessions and Kyl show how bitchy they are to the world. Senator Hatch also gave us his whiny, wimpy side (as if he has any other) during Hardball. It was nice to see Senator Al Franken in his first Committee hearing as was the last to speak being the most junior senator. Speaking of seniority, the penultimate speaker at the hearing? Alren Specter. ...Heh.

Dick Cheney, in his latest impression of Dr. Evil, is exposed for ordering the CIA to withhold information from Congress for eight years! That would be his whole time in office as Vice President. Hmm... would that mean that Nancy Pelosi wasn't entirely incorrect when she was vilified a few weeks ago for claiming that she was lied to by the CIA? Still waiting on one of those creeps, namely John Boehner to apologize to Pelosi.

The future ex son-in-law of Sarah Palin, Levi Johnston continues his media tour and suggests Palin quit because she couldn't hack it. She couldn't take the pressure. Take it with a grain of salt considering the source, but you have to wonder about someone who quits because, according to her, she was tired of the attacks. And yet, the GOP and 7 in 10 Republicans would vote for her in 2012.

Gallows Politics - UPDATED

Boom! goes the dynamite!

"I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. It's almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that's dangerous politics."

-- CIA Director Leon Panetta, in an interview with the New Yorker, on former Vice President Dick Cheney's criticisms of the Obama administration.

UPDATE (6/18/09): Since posting this on Sunday, Ed Schultz has had a run-in with Joe Scarborough regarding this issue. Schultz agrees with the assessment. Scarborough is shocked, shocked I tell you!, that anyone would think Cheney would want "Americans to die" (Scarborough's words, not Panetta's) so he could say he was right.

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Scarborough tries to discredit Schultz by equating the support Schultz says he's receiving to the 9/11 Truthers, but Schultz isn't buying it. And then of course comes the obligatory book plug at the end of the segment.

The Worst Mistake

I know this is well known among rational people, but I'd thought I'd post it anyway, just in case some non-thinkers happened upon my blog.

Richard A. Clarke, Washington Post: The Trauma of 9/11 Is No Excuse

...The first response [the White House] discussed [after 9/11] was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book, "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks -- a request Duelfer refused. (A recent report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president's office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the administration from eventually invading Iraq -- a move many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.

...The Bush administration's response actually undermined the principles and values America has always stood for in the world, values that should have survived this traumatic event. The White House thought that 9/11 changed everything. It may have changed many things, but it did not change the Constitution, which the vice president, the national security adviser and all of us who were in the White House that tragic day had pledged to protect and preserve.

Digby has more.

Despite all of Cheney's attempts at redemption and the ongoing conservative insistence that their policies "kept the country safe" the truth is that they behaved hysterically and irrationally after the attacks and reinforced every bad American stereotype in existence. Because of their blindered conservative worldview, they simply assumed that anything that had been done by someone other than the airbrushed version of Ronald Reagan had to be wrong and that anything other than schoolyard bully tactics were a form of weakness.

It's true that 9/11 did present an opportunity. America could have shown mature and intelligent global leadership. But it didn't. It behaved like a wounded adolescent giant, its leadership carrying on with "bullhorn moments" and talk of wanted posters and playing cards while an irresponsible media entertained the masses with war porn.

It was an embarrassing --- and dangerous --- display. If there was ever a time for the leadership of this country to play it cool it was then. And they failed the test in almost every way. Good for Richard Clark for calling them out on this.