http://www.topplebush.com/oped2425.shtml

Vice Axes That 70's Show

by Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

December 28, 2005


WASHINGTON

We start the new year with the same old fear: ***** Cheney.

The vice president, who believes in unwarranted, unlimited snooping,
is so pathologically secretive that if you use Google Earth's database
to see his official residence, the view is scrambled and obscured.

You can view satellite photos of the White House, the Pentagon and the
Capitol - but not of the Lord of the Underworld's lair.

Vice is literally a shadow president.

He's obsessive about privacy - but, unfortunately, only his own.

Google Earth users alerted The Times to this latest bit of Cheney
concealment after a front-page story last week about the international
fears inspired by free Google software that features detailed displays
of things like government and military sites around the world.

"For a brief period," they reported, "photos of the White House and
adjacent buildings that the United States Geological Survey provided
to Google Earth showed up with certain details obscured."

So Google replaced those images with unaltered photographs taken by a
private company.

Even though the story did not mention the Cheney residence - and even
though it's not near the White House - The Times ran a clarifying
correction yesterday that said, "The view of the vice president's
residence in Washington remains obscured."

Fitting, since Vice has turned America into a camera obscura, a dark
chamber with a lens that turns things upside down.

Guys argue that women tend to stew and hold grudges more, sometimes
popping up to blow the whistle on a man's bad behavior years later,
like a missile out of the night, as Alan Simpson said of Anita Hill.

Yet look at Cheney and Rummy.

Their steroid-infused power grabs stem from their years stewing in the
Ford White House, a time when they felt emasculated because they were
stripped of prerogatives.

Rummy, a Ford chief of staff who became defense secretary, and his
protégé, Cheney, who succeeded him as chief of staff, felt diminished
by the post-Watergate laws and reforms that reduced the executive
branch's ability to be secretive and unilateral, tilting power back
toward Congress.

The 70's were also a heady period for the press, which reached the
zenith of its power when it swayed public opinion on Vietnam and
exposed Watergate.

Reporters got greater access to government secrets with a stronger
Freedom of Information Act.

Chenrummy thought the press was running amok, that leaks should be
plugged and that Congress was snatching power that rightfully belonged
to the White House.

So these two crusty pals spent 30 years dreaming of inflating the
deflated presidential muscularity.

Cheney christened himself vice president and brought in Rummy for the
most ridiculously pumped-up presidency ever.

All this was fine with W., whose family motto is: "We know best. Trust
us."

The two regents turned back the clock to the Nixon era, bringing back
presidential excesses like wiretapping along with presidential power.

As attorney general, John Ashcroft clamped down on the Freedom of
Information Act.

For two years, the Pentagon has been sitting on a request from The
Times's Jeff Gerth to cough up a secret 500-page document prepared by
Halliburton on what to do with Iraq's oil industry - a plan it wrote
several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid
contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.).

Very convenient.

Defending warrantless wiretapping last week, the vice president spoke
of his distaste for the erosion of presidential authority in the wake
of Watergate and Vietnam.

"I do believe that, especially in the day and age we live in, the
nature of the threats we face, it was true during the cold war, as
well as I think what is true now, the president of the United States
needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in
terms of the conduct of national security policy," he intoned.

Translation: Back off, Congress and the press.

Checks, balances, warrants, civil liberties - they're all so 20th
century.

Historians must now regard the light transitional tenure of Gerald
Ford as the petri dish of this darkly transformational presidency.

Consider this: when Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, supported by
President Ford, pushed a plan to have the government help develop
alternative sources of energy and reduce our dependence on oil and
Saudi Arabia, guess who helped scotch it?

***** Cheney. Then and now, the man is a menace.

________________________________________________

Tricky Dicky Cheney, a man for all treasons.

Harry