With three punches, including a disabling jab to Bush-Cheney's imaginary epaulets, the New York Times wipes out our imperial presidency, veep included.
The lead editorial addresses White House secrecy in general terms.
We often wonder whether there is a limit to the Bush administration’s obsession with secrecy, its assault on the rule of law, its disdain for the powers of Congress, its willingness to con the public and its refusal to heed expert advice or recognize facts on the ground. Events of the past week suggest the answer is no.
The main event was, of course, Tuesday evening's State of the Imperium.
By Wednesday evening, Vice President Dick Cheney was on CNN contradicting most of what Mr. Bush had said. We were left asking, once again, Who exactly is running this White House?
Then Garry Wills, in an op-ed piece, gets to the heart of the matter -- Our Glorious Leaders' confusion about their mandate, their constitutional job descriptions.
We hear constantly now about “our commander in chief.” The word has become a synonym for “president.” It is said that we “elect a commander in chief.” It is asked whether this or that candidate is “worthy to be our commander in chief.”
But the president is not our commander in chief. He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army.
Both Bush and Cheney would like to think we are their minions, their loyal subjects, their cannon-fodder-as-required.
We are reminded, for instance, of the expanded commander in chief status every time a modern president gets off the White House helicopter and returns the salute of marines. That is an innovation that was begun by Ronald Reagan. Dwight Eisenhower, a real general, knew that the salute is for the uniform, and as president he was not wearing one. An exchange of salutes was out of order.
The military fakery has its purposes.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prescient last book, “Secrecy,” traced the ever-faster-growing secrecy of our government and said that it strikes at the very essence of democracy — accountability of representatives to the people. How can the people hold their representatives to account if they are denied knowledge of what they are doing? Wartime and war analogies are embraced because these justify the secrecy.
Maureen Dowd hauls out the strait jacket.
Dick Durbin went to the floor of the Senate on Thursday night to denounce the vice president as “delusional.” It was shocking, and Senator Durbin should be ashamed of himself. Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney.
Delusional doesn’t begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of the man. Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he’s right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary? It requires an exquisite kind of lunacy to spend hundreds of billions destroying America’s reputation in the world...
The title of today's column by Dowd is, by the way, "Daffy Does Doom."
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