Ranting on Cheney..

Yeah...there's big news about to break down in Madison about a new Democratic Senate sponsored Health Plan but while we're waiting for those details I thought I'd take the opportunity to pile on with the rest of the denizens of Left Blogsylvania on the Cheney revelations.

He's worse than we ever thought...well, some of us who were claiming to be more "moderate" anyway thought he just COULDN'T be as bad as our collegues were making him out to be.

About the interogation techniques.... it seems Cheney was behind that too...here's from the MSNBC link

"...From that moment, well before previous accounts have suggested, Cheney turned his attention to the practical business of crushing a captive's will to resist. The vice president's office played a central role in shattering limits on coercion in U.S. custody, commissioning and defending legal opinions that the Bush administration has since portrayed as the initiatives, months later, of lower-ranking officials."

And that's not all he was instrumental in....apparently he cut agencies out of the loop, kept documents secret from key individuals (like the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor) and even spyed on White House Officials.....nice guy huh?

From Powerline (retch)

According to the report, before the end of the very day on which we were attacked, Cheney had put together a legal team consisting of David Addington (Cheney's counsel), Alberto Gonzales, Tim Flanagan (Deputy White Counsel), and John Yoo of the Justice Department. Cheney's team promptly came up with the "authorization for the use of military of force" that Congress approved on Sept. 18. Soon thereafter, it put into place, with the president's approval, the program under which the NSA intercepted communications by al Qaeda into the U.S. without a warrant.In doing so, Cheney kept various bureaucracies out of the loop. For example, he excluded John Bellinger, the ranking national security legal advisor in the White House, as well as the State Department's legal team. Cheney and his team also out-maneuvered Bellinger and others when they persuaded President Bush to treat captured al Qaeda fighters as unlawful combatants with no rights under the Geneva Conventions

But even so, Powerline bloggers think this is admirable...

The Post points out that Cheney's efforts to bypass large chunks of the bureaucracy were inconsistent with his own philosophy for White House decision-making, as he had articulated it on various occasions in the past. Under the extraordinary circumstances created by 9/11, I find it commendable that Cheney did not feel wedded to his prior, hyper-cautious approach -- let's call it "growing in office."

Tbogg has the right take on it:

"I've said before that these are the kind of people who start pondering cannibalism when the motor on the boat conks out ten feet from shore."

Cheney is the most disgusting individual ever to hold public office in the United States. This man deserves to be impeached even more so than Bush, who comes off in the Post article...well, let TBogg describe it again.

"War criminal isn't strong enough term for Dick Cheney. One thing that comes through loud and clear is how gutless people in the Bush Administration were, and are, as Dick Cheney and David Addington continually rat-fucked them. George Bush, on the other hand, comes across a mindless non-entity within his own administration. That's not exactly news. "


I think I'm beginning to like Kucinich and his impeachment ideas...