Spotlight on Dick Cheney

The Vice President has always been a shadowy, Wizard of Oz-like figure presumed to be pulling levers behind the scenes in the Bush White House. Of late, he's garnered attention for his involvement in the unfolding Valerie Plame/CIA leak scandal. Indeed, it appears Cheney may have even started the entire mess. But as Karl Rove and the VP's pal, Scooter Libby, practice their perp walks, the roguish Cheney continues to walk freely while doing his best to shame the United States and earn the scorn of the entire world.

His latest misguided project is ensuring that CIA interrogators retain the right to practice torture on detainees. This is an interesting move by Cheney considering he doesn't even think the CIA should be charged with its primary functions, gathering and analyzing intelligence. As he demonstrated in the lead-up to the Iraq War, Cheney doesn't trust the CIA, so he and SecDef Donald Rumsfeld set up the Office of Special Plans within the Defense Department to build the case for war (Newsweek lays the entire story out here.). According to the British newspaper the Guardian,

"The ideologically driven network functioned like a shadow government, much of it off the official payroll and beyond congressional oversight. But it proved powerful enough to prevail in a struggle with the State Department and the CIA by establishing a justification for war. "

In another time and with a less compliant news media, Dick Cheney would be a ridiculed figure. His public statements would be laughed at by reporters much like the words of the infamous Iraqi information minister. To wit,

"The level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint, I think, will clearly decline. I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency." -Cheney, June 20, 2005.

"Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators." -Cheney, March 16, 2003.

Meanwhile, his current, er, former employer, Halliburton, continues to win huge contracts from the U.S. government despite innumerable shady dealings. Cheney continues to receive a deferred salary from the company and owns stock options worth as much as $8 million.

Now, the Vice President is battling with a torture survivor, Sen. John McCain, to protect the right of our government to commit torture. This is coming from a guy who received five deferments from serving in Vietnam.

The man is truly shameless.

A glimpse at Corporate America

After a brief foray into corporate responsibility following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, is back at its usual ways of gutting employee benefits and freeloading off the government to care for its employees. In a memo obtained by the New York Times, Wal-Mart has revealed its true colors- it wants to cut employee benefits without looking too awful in the eyes of the public.

The proposals laid out in the memo include:

• discouraging unhealthy employees from accepting work at Wal-Mart by requiring that "all jobs include some physical activity,"
• hiring more part-time workers, and
• attracting more young workers at lower pay since older workers are no more productive.

The memo acknowledged that in cutting benefits Wal-Mart must walk softly because 46 percent of the children of its 1.33 million U.S. employees lack health insurance or receive Medicaid. I guess times are tight for the Walton family since the company only earned $10.5 billion last year.

Meanwhile, another industry with questionable business practices is reporting jaw-dropping earnings this week. ExxonMobil is expected to announce today that it has earned the largest quarterly profit of any company ever!

I wonder what proposals for corporate welfare Congress has in store for the oil companies now?

Op-ed: Standard Operating Procedure

The Weekly Standard has revealed what I’ve suspected for years. Unethical, amoral, and probably criminal behavior is the hallmark of conservative governing. Jeffrey Bell and William Kristol unite to search low but not high for an explanation to the unfortunate fact that the entire Republican leadership seems to be under investigation. Bell and Kristol might find the answer to their probing question if they were to look within; of course, conservatives are incapable of introspection, reflection, or any other form of self-critical analysis.

Still I must query the authors: if conservatives control the executive and legislative branches of government (not to mention that a majority of the Supreme Court has been appointed by Republican presidents), how could a conspiracy of criminalization exist – let alone thrive – in the first place? Democrats, both liberal and moderate, are on the outside looking in and the so-called “moderate Republican” is such a rare species that it couldn’t possibly exert a significant influence. No, it seems to me that other forces must be at work.

I suggest two alternatives. First, conservatives are cannibals. This seems far-fetched and, as Bell and Kristol note, so many conservative leaders are under investigation for so many transgressions that the cannibalistic explanation seems incomplete as well. For this explanation to hold, conservatives would have to be cannibals on the order of gerbils and I for one have a hard time believing – given their limited appetite for thought – that they could devour much above the order of a lost expedition. My point is that they wouldn’t choose to eat their own. Rather they would only attempt to stomach themselves if driven to it by some force majeure.

The second alternative is that DeLay, Libby, Rove, Frist, and Co. may be miscreants whose bad acts have run afoul of the system of laws that we as a nation cherish. Admittedly this is a less sexy explanation but it’s where I’ll put my money. Under this premise there is no vast any-wing conspiracy presently at work – only wrongdoers and conscientious enforcers of the law. In short, the dilemma for Bell and Kristol is not that there is a conspiracy that is out to criminalize conservative governance; rather, it’s that there isn’t one in place to shield them from their criminal acts. I guess that will give them something to work for in 2006.

-This post was written by Brookland Clipmonkey.

Outrage of the week: Screwing the troops, Part II

It continues to amaze DC Clipmonkey how members of the military get routinely screwed by their leaders yet continue to strongly support their government (For Part I, click here). It is particularly stunning how anyone in the military would vote Republican after the disaster that is the war in Iraq.

The fruitlessness and short-sightedness of the Iraq war aside, in recent weeks we've learned:

• Injured soldiers who've returned to the U.S. are continuing to receive combat zone wages, but are later sent huge bills to repay the government for its mistake.
• The Armed Forces earn $120 million from on-base slot machines, forcing many servicemembers into debt (You can't help but wonder if Abramoff is behind this.).
• The Army has tried to cover-up the truth about how football star-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman died in Afghanistan.

These bits of news come on the heels of a Pentagon report that the Bush Administration failed to pay attention to prewar intelligence that "predicted the factional rivalries now threatening to split Iraq." According to USA Today:

"In an ironic twist, the policy community was receptive to technical intelligence (the weapons program), where the analysis was wrong, but apparently paid little attention to intelligence on cultural and political issues (post-Saddam Iraq), where the analysis was right," they write.

U.S. servicemembers, Pat Tillman's family and the American people deserve better than the dishonest, short-sighted, malevolent leadership of the current administration and its civilian cronies at the Pentagon.

Update: For even more military shenanigans, click here.

Virginia 2005 or California 1994?

In 1994, California Gov. Pete Wilson (R) staked his reelection campaign on Proposition 187, a measure to deny public services to illegal immigrants. The strategy was extremely successful, helping Wilson to garner 55% of the vote that year alongside the 59% support won by the anti–illegal immigrant ballot measure.

During the 1994 campaign, Gov. Wilson also eagerly contrasted his strong support for the death penalty with his opponent’s (Kathleen Brown) opposition to it due to her Catholic faith. Nevermind the fact that Wilson had allowed only a handful of executions to proceed during his first term in Sacramento.

Lastly, Wilson trotted out another old reliable – painting his opponent as a tax-and-spend liberal. Again, he did this despite the fact that Wilson himself had raised taxes in his first budget by $7 billion.

When Republicans lack any positive agenda, they trot out wedge issues that terrify suburban moms and inflame angry white men. They bash illegal immigrants. They stoke fear of crime. And they cast their opponents as tax-and-spend liberals. The mind-numbing simplicity and effectiveness of it are a sad commentary on the electorate. Has anything changed in the past decade? In Virginia, probably not.

Jerry Kilgore, the Republican candidate for governor, has ripped his opponent, Lt. Gov. Tim Kaine, for seeking a responsible policy for dealing with illegal immigrants, personally opposing the death penalty, and pursuing reasonable tax increases to address Northern Virginia's horrendous traffic problems. It's the same garbage that has helped Republicans divide and conquer this nation for the past two decades.

Tim Kaine is an honorable man who has worked to advance civil rights, help the poor in America and abroad, and serve the public. Hopefully, Virginians will stand up to this naked attempt to wedge the voting public. You can help, too.

There's some hope for the American people

Bush continues to tumble in the polls. From CBS News:

PRESIDENT BUSH President Bush's job approval rating has fallen to his lowest rating ever. 37 percent now approve of the job he is doing as president, while 58 percent disapprove. Those in his own party are still overwhelmingly positive about his performance (nearly 80 percent approve), but the president receives little support from either Democrats or Independents. And while views of President Bush have lately not changed much among Republicans or Democrats, his approval rating among Independents has dropped 11 points since just last month, from 40 percent to 29 percent now.

Now that he's enraged the right-wing with the nomination of lightweight Harriet Miers, he might be under 30 within the month.

A failure of leadership

Because President Bush wouldn't set standards regarding the appropriate treatment of detainees, the Senate had no other choice. Thank you, senators, for voting 90-9 to restore some dignity to this nation.

In case you are wondering, here is a list of the pro-torture nine:

1. Allard (R-CO)
2. Bond (R-MO)
3. Coburn (R-OK)
4. Cochran (R-MS)
5. Cornyn (R-TX)
6. Inhofe (R-OK)
7. Roberts (R-KS)
8. Sessions (R-AL)
9. Stevens (R-AK)

I guess Oklahoma is now known as "The Torture State."