Refusing to Be Silent

Excellent:

                

Forget the Republican Party, whose members- aside from Representatives Massie, Mace, and Boebert, and Greene- were set to vote against the release of the Epstein files until the latter resisted pressure from President Trump. This is the real Republican Party:

This is sickening. Democrats started by encouraging attacks on law enforcement. Now they’re urging officers to violate the chain of command and ignore the law—a direct attack on our constitutional republic. pic.twitter.com/X2YCof82BT

— Senator Ashley Moody (@SenAshleyMoody) November 20, 2025

"They" must be a chapter name in the GOP playbook. As was the case with many conservatives, such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah, it was "they" who killed Charlie Kirk. Now, Florida's Senator Moody says, in the video below, "They were hinting at it when they were encouraging people to attack our officers in the middle of cities." Seen in the context of the Senator's response to the question, the "they" clearly does not refer to the six Senators. It refers to, well, "them." 

Nonetheless, nothing says "Republican" more these days than "lie." Moody claims Democrats are urging officers to "ignore the law." 

But the ad speaks only of illegal orders. Senators Slotkin and Kelly assert "you can refuse illegal orders." Representative Crow- legally correctly notes "you must refuse illegal orders." 

It's ironic that presidential press secretary Karoline Leavitt would weigh in as she did on the same day as the funeral service for former Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney was (still is) the public official most associated with the unitary executive theory, in which the President commands total and personal control over the entire executive branch.

And so it was that Lying Leavitt, asked about President Trump's threat against the Democratic congress members, would maintain at the news conference on Thursday

Why aren't you talking about what these members of Congress are doing, to encourage and incite violence? They are literally saying to 1.3 million active duty servicemembers to defy the chain of command, not to follow lawful orders.... Every single order that is given to the United States military by this Commander in Chief and through this chain of command, through the Secretary of War, is lawful. And the courts have proven that.

BREAKING: Karoline Leavitt got brutally fact checked in real time, accusing Democrats of telling the military not to follow lawful orders. Reporter: Actually they said illegal orders.

More live fact-checks, please.pic.twitter.com/s38g4qwNvY

— Really American 🇺🇸 (@ReallyAmerican1) November 20, 2025

Nevertheless, the lies keep coming because that's the way the President wants it and the assorted enablers and sycophants pay no price.  Yet, if Donald Trump is to accomplish his goal of complete despotic control, he'll eventually need the support of the military. That would require officers and enlisted men and women to comply with one or more illegal orders and there are at least six Democratic Senators and Representatives who are sounding the alarm.

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The Peter Strzok Irony

Elizabeth "Liz" Cheney, daughter of the man whotwisted and distorted intelligence to persuade President Bush to invade Iraq, on Sunday told Martha Raddatz of ABC News

I think what is really crucially important to remember here is that you had Strzok and Paige who were in charge of launching this investigation and they were saying things like we must stop this president, we need an insurance policy against this president. That in my view when you have people that are in the highest echelons of the law enforcement of this nation saying things like that, that sounds an awful lot like a coup and it could well be treason.

I know what you're saying: the investigation was launched because in May, 2016 George Papadopoulos popped off in a London bar to an Australian diplomat about dirt which Russians had on Hillary Clinton (which turned out to be accurate); Strzok was removed early from the Mueller investigation; there is no indication Strzok ever allowed his political beliefs to interfere with his work; treason is providing "aid and comfort" to an "enemy" and Russia is not an official enemy; the investigation was conducted of a political candidate and not the President; and

They must have been pretty bad at coup-ing, since Comey & the FBI never revealed to the public that there was investigation into the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia ahead of the election. https://t.co/BfYAjn4IIo

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) May 27, 2019

The outcry expressed by Cheney (and other Republicans) over Strzok's involvement is the most disingenuous outrage since (choose wisely) a) then-NJ governor Christine Todd Whitman compared NJTV to "Pravda;" or b) President Trump two years ago claimed he fired the FBI director because James Comey had mistreated Hillary Clinton.

New Jersey public television was fairly subservient to Whitman; and Donald Trump probably would not have been elected had James Comey not broken tradition by labeling Hillary Clinton "extremely careless" and announcing nine days before the election an examination of suspect emails which already had been examined. And if FBI agent Peter Strzok had not been overly generous to candidate Trump, it is unlikely Trump would have been elected, even with Comey's effort to bend over backwards for the Republican. The Washington Post's Philip Bump wrote twenty-twp months ago

In a written statement offered before he testified before the House Oversight Committee on Thursday, Strzok pointedly noted that there was no effort on his part to keep Trump from winning the White House — and, further, that he was one of only a few people who could have potentially leaked details from the investigation in an effort to block Trump’s victory.

“In the summer of 2016,” Strzok wrote, “I was one of a handful of people who knew the details of Russian election interference and its possible connections with members of the Trump campaign. This information had the potential to derail, and quite possibly, defeat Mr. Trump. But the thought of exposing that information never crossed my mind.”

Of course it didn't, because Peter Strzok was a professional. Republican criticism of Strzok neatly fits the classic example of "chutzpah"- a man on trial for killing his parents pleads demands lenience because he's an orphan.

Liz Cheney, who knows the investigation into the Trump campaign was not a coup and was 180 degrees from treason, is the apple that did not fall far from the venomous tree.

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Consistently Accommodating

To be fair, perhaps to bend over backwards, Joe Biden may be merely an accommodationist.

As nominee for re-election as vice-president, Biden maintained "Dick Cheney has been the most dangerous Vice President probably in American History." In 2015, explaining that he and his wife were hosted by Vice President Cheney and his wife at the official residence after the 2008 presidential election, Biden stated "first of all, I like Dick Cheney for real. I get on with him. I think he is a decent man."

In the 1995 Senate debate over the Republican Balanced Budget Amendment after its passage in the House, the Delawarean maintained "When I argued that we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well. I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans' benefits. I meant every single solitary thing in the government."

Then Biden joined 13 other Democrats (out of 47) and all but one of the chamber's 53 Republicans in voting for this monstrosity, which fell one vote short of passage.

Biden never has acknowledged this serious error in judgement and as recently as last December (as he was seriously contemplating becoming a presidential candidate) he contended that Social Security "still needs adjustments"- shorthand for reduction in benefits.

Perhaps Biden simply has always wanted to align his views with President Obama- who was thwarted by Tea Party Republicans in his effort to cut the program as part of the Grand Bargain- centrists, hedge fund managers, and Beltway pundits who have advocated curbing benefits in a misleading effort to reduce the budget deficit.

If so, though, it's a disturbing tendency, arguably character trait, which has continued even to this past Wednesday, when the former vice-president

dismissed the notion that the United States should be worried about China as a geopolitical competitor, prompting criticism from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) as well as some Republicans who argued that Biden is underestimating the world’s second-largest economy.

The argument is one Biden has frequently made in speeches throughout the years, but it is drawing increased attention due to his status as the apparent front-runner among Democrats running for president.

At a campaign stop in Iowa City, Biden pointed to his years serving as vice president and as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, telling the crowd that there’s not a “single solitary” world leader who would trade the problems the United States faces for those confronting China.

“China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man,” said Biden, who last week announced his bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

He argued that Beijing has its hands full dealing with its own domestic and regional problems, such as tensions in the South China Sea — which Biden called the “China Sea” — and the “mountains ... in the west.” It was not clear to what mountains or issue Biden was referring.

“They can’t figure out how they’re going to deal with the corruption that exists within the system,” Biden said of China. “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.”

"They're not competition for us" is so inaccurate that it could count as a lie.  Oppression of the Turkic-speaking, ethnic Ulghurs in Xinjiang province has been going on for decades.  Moreover

In the past few years, China has conducted a sweeping campaign to suppress Uighur identity and restrict the practice of Islam. As many as 1 million Uighurs and members of other minority groups — mostly Muslim ones — are being held without charges in brutal internment camps, according to the United Nations. It is just the latest episode in a decades-long history of tension between Uighurs and the staunchly secular, Han Chinese-dominated government in Beijing....

After months of denying the camps existed, China switched last year to justifying them. Beijing insists it is merely providing job training and “de-extremism education” in a region that is poor and steeped in fundamentalism. “As a result of the vocational education and training, the social environment of Xinjiang has seen notable changes, with a healthy atmosphere on the rise and improper practices declining,” said Shohrat Zakir, the de facto No. 2 official in Xinjiang, in October.

Surely we can believe that official because, as former vice president Biden assures us, "they're not bad folks, folks." However, the BBC has reported "Former prisoners told us of physical as well as psychological torture in the camps. Entire families had disappeared, and we were told detainees were tortured physically and mentally. We also saw evidence of almost a complete surveillance state in Xinjiang."

The former Vice President characterizes this gang in Beijing as "not bad" and admittedly, neither the West nor theIslamic world has shown much interest, the latter bunch demonstrating that it's not only Jews it wants to see disappeared.

It's not only the now-infamous ambivalence about school desegregation in the mid-1970s;, the notorious (among Democrats) 1994 crime bill; caving to GOP senators by paving the way to make Clarence Thomas an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court; authorization in 2002 of the Iraq War for President GW Bush, and unapologetically siding with credit card companies against consumers in the 2005 bankruptcy bill. Biden praised Dick Cheney in 2015; diplomatically suggested slicing Social Security in 2018; defended "500 billionaires" last month; whitewashed the mainland Chinese on May 1, 2018.  Whether of accommodation or otherwise, there is a pattern here, and as Joe Biden himself would put it, "it's not pretty, folks."

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The Man Who Won't Go Away

The Playboy interview of Dick Cheney begins

Dick Cheney likes lattes. Seated in his favorite brown-leather chair in the sunlit study of his home in McLean, Virginia, the former vice president of the United States can toss back two of the warm java blasts in an hour. They come from a stainless-steel machine in the kitchen and a slender, mustachioed housekeeper named Gus, who serves them in custom-ordered white Starbucks cups outfitted with cardboard Starbucks sleeves.

Digby comments "Why would anyone want to pretend they're drinking Starbucks when they're drinking a latte made in their own kitchen?"  Personally, I wonder why Dick needs a pool boy to serve the lattes. In either case, Digby is right to conclude "should be fun."

And the fun begins almost immediately, when the former vice-president contends

I think with respect to the situation in Iraq, his precipitous withdrawal and refusal to leave any stay-behind forces, to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqis, was a huge mistake; we are paying a price for it now.... 

I don’t think he ever bought into the notion that we’re at war, in terms of a war on terrorism; I think he always wanted to treat it as a law-enforcement problem. 

Those drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia must be the President's version of the Miranda warning.  Admittedly, President Obama did not sign a Status of Forces Agreement with Baghdad. But George W. Bush did- and it required all USA soldiers to be out of Iraq by December 31, 2011. In the press conference announcing the pact, President Bush maintained it

provides American troops and Defense Department officials with authorizations and protections to continue supporting Iraq's democracy once the U.N. mandate expires at the end of this year. This agreement respects the sovereignty and the authority of Iraq's democracy. The agreement lays out a framework for the withdrawal of American forces in Iraq -- a withdrawal that is possible because of the success of the surge.

Bush imagined that in the withdrawal it would lead to, "we are leaving the next President with a stable foundation for the future, and an approach that can enjoy broad bipartisan support at home."

Declaring victory in a war- or success of a surge- does not make it so.  The Obama Administration balked at signing its own agreement because American soldiers were specifically denied legal immunity by the Iraqi government.

Cheney follows the Iraq myth with another myth, referring to Obama's "apology tour, when he went to Cairo in the summer of 2009."  When Mitt Romney attacked Obama during campaign '08, it wasn't true, as CNN's Fact Check, factcheck.org, and Politifact all concluded. It is no more true now, and restating a myth doesn't make it any more accurate.

During this imagined apology tour, President Obama- according to Cheney- "said the U.S. overreacted to the events of 9/11."  Bush's V.P., Charles Krauthammer, and others believe the USA did not overreact to the events of 9/11. But that does not make it so, and we don't have to consider the debacle of the Iraq War and the upsurge in terrorist activity it spurred to know we overreacted.

Cheney himself should know best. After the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, he camped out for weeks a few miles north of Camp David at what has become known in American lore as the "undisclosed location." It is nothing of the sort, but rather in a complex of buildings ("Site R") inside Raven Rock Mountain Complex at Raven Rock Military Reservation in Liberty Township, Adams County (near Blue Ridge Summit in Franklin County, Pa.) in south-central Pennsylvania, a few miles north of Camp David, Maryland (location below).  Yet, the Vice-President's location was strictly confidential at the time because... well, because we surely did not overreact to the events of 9/11.

The Playboy interview is worthwhile if only to get a glimpse of the humor exhibited by the former Vice-President when he claims

I came to town in 1968, and I have never seen people I have known in some cases for a quarter of a century—foreign leaders, especially in the Middle East—who are so terribly frustrated, angry, frightened. “Whatever happened to the United States?” There’s a conviction they can’t count on us, that our word doesn’t mean anything.

So says the man who asserted Sadaam Hussein has "reconstituted nuclear weapons;" that, though we knew otherwise, 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi spy in Prague; and that American forces "will be greeted as liberators" by Iraqis.

On a positive note, Dick Cheney has remained consistent, weaving the same old fabrications into a narrative that long ago was proven false.






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"I Understand"

There were many ludicrous assertions made on Sunday's Meet The Press by Dick Cheney. For Politifact, it was the assertion, which it rated "false," by the former President (video below)- uh, er, Vice President

We got to the point where we were very concerned about the possible linkage between terrorists on the one hand and weapons of mass destruction on the other.  Saddam Hussein had previously had twice nuclear programs going. He produced and used weapons of mass destruction. And he had a 10-year relationship with al-Qaida.








Taking a global view, Digby is outraged the former Vice-President stated

I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective. And our objective is to get the guys who did 9/11 and it is to avoid another attack against the United States. I was prepared and we did. We got authorizing from the president and authorization from the Justice Department to go forward with the program. It worked. It worked now for 13 years.

We’ve avoided another mass casualty attack against the United States. And we did capture Bin Laden. We did capture an awful lot of the senior guys at Al Qaeda who were responsible for that attack on 9/11. I’d do it again in a minute.

"Basically," she observes,"he put the whole world on notice that the world’s only superpower would use any means it chooses without limit or restriction to obtain its objectives."

That is a problem, a major one. But a major electoral problem is highlighted by this exchange occurring a few moments later:



CHUCK TODD:

When you say waterboarding is not torture, then why did we prosecute Japanese soldiers in World War II for waterboarding?

(OVERTALK)

DICK CHENEY:

For a lot of stuff. Not for waterboarding. They did an awful lot of other stuff to draw some kind of moral equivalent between waterboarding judged by our Justice Department not to be torture and what the Japanese did with the Bataan Death March and the slaughter of thousands of Americans, with the rape of Nanking and all of the other crimes they committed, that's an outrage. It's a really cheap shot, Chuck, to even try to draw a parallel between the Japanese who were prosecuted for war crimes after World War II and what we did with waterboarding three individuals--



Todd was not drawing a parallel between "what the Japanese did with the Bataan Death March and the slaughter of thousands of Americans." In one case, the armed forces of a nation (Japan) brutalized American and Filipino prisoners of war, and also practiced waterboarding. In the other, terrorists committed a monumental act of murder (primarily in NYC); in response (allegedly, anyway), they (and others) were waterboarded.

Far from comparing (WWII) Japanese brutality with (anti-terrorist) American brutality, Todd was asking Cheney to consider USA prosecution of Japanese for committing torture in light of torture committed by the USA in the last decade.    As Dick probably realizes, his is not a tortured analogy (pun intended); it is a completely wrongheaded analogy.

Recognizing that saying "what we did with three of the individuals we waterboarded" would be giving away the store, Cheney substituted "what we did with waterboarding three individuals...." Except that, as McClatchy reports

evidence cited in a Senate report released this week that suggests waterboarding was more widespread than the CIA has admitted.

CIA officials have acknowledged using waterboarding on three people: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who allegedly masterminded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; a senior al Qaida operative from Saudi Arabia named Zayn al Abidin Muhammed Hussein – also known as Abu Zubaydah; and Abd al-Rahim al Nashiri, who was accused of planning the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

The Senate report describes a “water dousing” technique tantamount to waterboarding allegedly being used in Afghanistan on at least five other CIA detainees, identified as Mustafa al Hawsawi, Abu Hazim, Mohammad Shoroeiya, Abu Hudhaifa and Majid Khan.

But Cheney's response itself wasn't the most disturbing aspect of the transaction, nor that with the greatest implication.  Rather, it was how the journalist responded when Cheney made a remarkably false analogy and charged Todd with taking "a really cheap shot."

While opinions may vary, most individuals would find being accused of taking a cheap shot (a really cheap shot) an insult.

Not our Meet The Press host, though. Confronted by a nasty charge, Todd responded "I understand." Not "I understand, but" or "I understand why you're so sensitive to this," nor "I understand but what you're saying is literally incredible," but "I understand."  Confronted by Cheney,Todd folded like a cheap suit- or, rather, like Joe Lieberman at a debate. ("Lieberman: "... I'm pleased to see, Dick, from the newspapers that you're better off than you were eight years ago." Cheney: "I can tell you, Joe,the government had absolutely nothing to do with it."  No mention of Halliburton's lucrative contracts with said government).

This is a problem for Democrats that goes far beyond torture.  Republicans typically- Cheney and Newt Gingrich especially- have developed over the years a penchant for attacking the media generally and their inquisitors specifically. It is part of the reason many Americans have grown to accept the myth of the "liberal media." That in turn causes these voters to view something positive reported about liberals/Democrats skeptically and to accept uncritically anything positive reported about conservatives/Republicans.

This is not a winning proposition for Democrats. While they act as if journalists are their friends, Repubs frequently confront them- and, as the Cheney /Todd instance demonstrates- gain an advantage.  The American people have a great distrust for "the media," with which liberals appear to be allies. Together, they come to be viewed as an establishment which represents only itself and sometimes looks down on ordinary people.

John McCain once viewed the media as "my base."  And when a supporter of his at a town hall meeting during campaign 2000 accused Barack Obama of being an Arab (video below), McCain courageously corrected her, stating "no, ma'am, he's a decent family man, a citizen."  The media, understandably, swooned. Later, McCain lost the election, decisively. Take heed.











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Look Who Now Doesn't Like Iran

Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz Cheney, penned (old term) a column recently in the friendly pages of The Wall Street Journal in which they concluded

American freedom will not be secured by empty threats, meaningless red lines, leading from behind, appeasing our enemies, abandoning our allies, or apologizing for our great nation—all hallmarks to date of the Obama doctrine. Our security, and the security of our friends around the world, can only be guaranteed with a fundamental reversal of the policies of the past six years...

 President Obama is on track to securing his legacy as the man who betrayed our past and squandered our freedom.

Oddly- given those baseless charges of the Cheneys, Dick and Liz were right about one thing.

It's not about the remainder of their conclusion,in which they maintained "In 1983, President Ronald Reagan said, 'If history teaches anything, it teaches that simple-minded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.'"

The duo, seriously memory challenged, argued in the Bergdahl deal "we violated basic tenant (sic) first of all, in negotiating with terrorists..."  Paul Rosenberg reminds us that from 8/12/85 through 10/28/86 there were eight arms shipments to Iran in response to 96 individuals (mostly American and western European) taken by the government of Lebanon.  Ultimately, four American hostages were released and four others abducted or murdered, with a net gain of zero hostages released. (President Obama, by contrast, got one released with no direct damage.) Moreover

Not only did Reagan deal with terrorists as president, as revealed in the Iran-Contra scandal, the preponderance of evidence now supports the charge that his campaign negotiated with Iranian hostage-takers while he was running for president in 1980, to delay the release of hostages before the election, which could have helped Carter win reelection — what was known as “The October Surprise.” Given that Reagan wasn’t president then, but was negotiating to thwart a president’s attempt to get hostages released, this is not simply questionable behavior, it is arguably an act of treason. 

The Cheneys snark

Our president doesn't seem to. Iraq is at risk of falling to a radical Islamic terror group and Mr. Obama is talking climate change. Terrorists take control of more territory and resources than ever before in history, and he goes golfing. He seems blithely unaware, or indifferent to the fact, that a resurgent al Qaeda presents a clear and present danger to the United States of America.

It is possible, rumor has it, that an Administration can work on more than one problem at a time, and Obama's attention to global warming with its potential to destroy the planet is more than frivolous, though it does discomfit Dick Cheney's favorite charity, the non-renewable energy industry. And a President too busy to play sports is entitled to golf from time-to-time. Cheney might not be aware that, as Obama was preparing for a vacation last August at Martha's Vineyard, he had taken part or all of 92 days as a vacation, whereas at the same point in his presidency, George W. Bush (whom Cheney served as vice-president) had taken 323 days.

This is not a direct equivalence, given that President Bush sometimes worked during vacations at his ranch in Crawford .  Such was the case when a  CIA briefer on August 6, 2001 handed him the Presidential Daily Brief (photograph of the meeting, below) "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," which suggested Osama Bin Laden- whom the Administration was assiduously ignoring- might hijack commercial airliners inside the USA.  Not the slacker Barack Obama is, Bush reportedly told the courier "You’ve covered your ass now" and then went fishing.

The Cheneys mistake a quick fix for a resolution when they claim "when Mr. Obama and his team came into office in 2009, al Qaeda in Iraq had been largely defeated, thanks primarily to the heroic efforts of U.S. armed forces during the surge." But much of the success attributed to the surge was achieved by the Anbar Awakening months before American soldiers arrived.  The surge functioned as a band-aid (actually, Band Aid; adhesive bandage is the generic term) which staunched the bleeding, but eventually the bandage had to come off. And sometimes, as in the case of Iraq, the bleeding will return because the underlying problem has not been addressed.  The major achievement of the surge probably was the election of a Prime Minister but but

The litany of Maliki’s failures to accommodate Sunni aspirations is well known: his failure to live up to power-sharing promises made in 2010; his extra-constitutional abuses of power; his persecution of Sunni politicians; his failure to sustain ties with Sunni tribes in western Iraq; his refusal to follow through on commitments to integrate “Awakening” fighters into Iraqi security forces; and his heavy-handed response to Sunni political protests in Anbar province last year.

"Now, in a move that defies credulity, he toys with the idea of ushering Iran into Iraq," the Cheneys write of Obama. They add "Only a fool would believe American policy in Iraq should be ceded to Iran, the world's largest state sponsor of terror."   One could hardly imagine, then, that it is members of the Bush-Cheney Administration which have bragged about the surge, which resulted in the ascension to Prime Minister of the staunchly pro-Iranian Maliki.

Dick Cheney (and his daughter) should not be silenced.  But he should be confronted (and not only by Megyn Kelly, as in the video below) because- as with virtually every one  of President Obama's critics- he offers no solution and has been part of the problem. Rand Paul noted "I don't blame President Obama.  Has he really got the solution? Maybe there is no solution. But I do blame those who are for the Iraq War for emboldening Iran. These are the same people now who are petrified of what Iran may become, and I understand some of their worry."

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Condoleezza Rice Is A 23-Year-Old White Male

Writing in Politico magazine (which I praised, apparently prematurely, yesterday), the National Review's Rich Lowry, perhaps still seeing starbursts, is exorcised because Condoleezza "Rice’s speaking gigs on college campuses and her ascension to the board of the Internet company Dropbox have sparked protests calling for her to be disinvited, cashiered and generally isolated and shamed."  Lowry argues that some students and faculty at the University of Minnesota, where she was invited to give a lecture, and at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where she has been invited to give the commencement speech, have been mean to her.

You will remember "Condi," as the mainstream media has affectionately called her for years, as a supporter of the (nationally and internationally) illegal torture regimen carried out by the federal government during the GW Bush administration.   She also was a co-conspirator in ginning up support for the Iraq war, one of convenience conducted, as Rachel Maddow explained in March (partial video of program below), to provide access to Iraqi oil fields to national oil companies.

Thanks to author Ron Suskind, we know that at the first national security meeting held by Bush 43, Secretary of Treasury (not former NY Yankee outfielder) Paul O'Neill and Secretary of State Colin Powell were startled when the President asked Ms. Rice "Well, what do you think the big issue in the region is, Condi?", to which she responded "I think Iraq is the big issue, the destabilizing force and that's going to be our focus."

Soon thereafter, President Bush assigned Vice President Cheney to lead a secret task force, which met privately with energy industry lobbyists and executives of oil companies.   He ordered the National Security Council- headed by "Condi"- to coordinate national security and energy policy with Cheney's task group. Eventually, the task force began to divvy up oil fields among, as Suskind put it, "foreign suitors along with American suitors meaning major oil firms and oil contractors like Halliburton."  As Ronald(6) Wilson(6) Reagan(6) once said, "mistakes were made."  But Rice was not blissfully unaware.

Though her agency was intimately involved with establishment of the economic rationale for going to war against a sovereign nation, National Security Adviser Rice that summer would warn "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."   Four years later, Rice still was making things up, then claiming "There were ties going on between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime," though she later denied ever saying it.

The same foreign policy genius who now criticizes President Obama over Putin policy would at one time summarize her post-Iraq invasion advice as "Punish France, ignore Germany, forgive Russia.”  A good way to energize NATO.

Lowry complains because "The Minnesota professors say that it is 'in the spirit of free expression' that they ask for the reversal of Rice’s invitation. Because nothing says free expression like shutting down someone’s lecture."  To his enduring credit, Lowry has invented a constitutional guarantee: the right to give a speech at a public university.  Perhaps next spring, you too can invoke that right by demanding that your state's public university allow you to speak, for a fee.

Nearing the conclusion of his piece, Lowry contends

If the typical rules applied, the fierce opposition to Rice would be attributed to racism, sexism and any other handy -ism. The stunt by the University of Minnesota Students for a Democratic Society of referring her to the campus police as “dangerous” and including a physical description of her as a “59-year-old African American woman” would prompt a rant by Touré on MSNBC about the dehumanization of a woman of color and a high-flying essay by Jamelle Bouie on The Daily Beast about the hidden racist tropes embedded in japery at the expense of former secretaries of state.

Oh, yes, because the physical description of an individual must exclude age, race, and gender. Perhaps Condi could have been described as a 23-year-old white male, notwithstanding reaction by conservatives who would ridicule liberals as loathe to admit the object of their criticism is young, female, or black. Some conservatives, who accuse liberals of throwing around the charge of "racism," are themselves fond of the tactic.  In the case of Rich Lowry, he has to find something.









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That Moment Of Crisis



Evidently, the 43rd president was not nearly as stupid or dumb as some made him out to be. Say what you will about George W. Bush as president- and most of its deserved- he has had the good sense as ex-president to do as little and say as little as possible.

Dick Cheney, however, is a different sort of fellow.    Hosting a fundraiser in Wyoming for the presumptive presidential nominee of the Gas and Oil Party, the former V.P. remarked

Sooner or later there is going to be a big surprise.   Usually a very unpleasant one. Whether it’s 9-11 or the other kinds of difficulties or crises that arrive, they always do. That’s when you find out what kind of leader your president is.    When I think about the kind of individual I want in the Oval Office in that moment of crisis, who has to make those key decisions, some of them life and death decisions, some of them decisions as the commander-in-chief who has the responsibility of sending our young men and women into harm's way -- that man is Mitt Romney.

Cheney, oddly, wasn't referring to the kind of guy who would make the right decision about Osama bin Laden or Somali pirates.   He was, presumably, talking about the Bush-Cheney administration. Or the Cheney-Bush administration.

You'd almost think the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 took place in the Obama administration, that it ignored the terrorist threat and was replaced by a Bush Administration which ramped up efforts, eventually ordering the elimination of Osama bin Laden.   Instead, as early as October, 2002 the UK Guardian reported

According to today's Time magazine, Mr Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger and Mr Clarke outlined the threat in briefings they provided for Condoleezza Rice, George Bush's national security adviser, in January 2001, a few weeks before she and her team took up their posts.

At the key briefing, Mr Clarke presented proposals to "roll back" al-Qaida which closely resemble the measures taken after September 11. Its financial network would be broken up and its assets frozen. Vulnerable countries like Uzbekistan, Yemen and the Philippines would be given aid to help them stamp out terrorist cells.

Crucially, the US would go after Bin Laden in his Afghan lair. Plans would be drawn up for combined air and special forces operations, while support would be channelled to the Northern Alliance in its fight against the Taliban and its al-Qaida allies.

Mr Clarke, who stayed on in his job as White House counter-terrorism tsar, repeated his briefing for vice president Dick Cheney in February. However, the proposals got lost in the clumsy transition process, turf wars between departments and the separate agendas of senior members of the Bush administration.

It was, the Time article argues, "a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat".

Documents released only last month by the C.I.A. include a Senior Executive Intelligence Brief written on 6/23/01 warned, under the sub-heading "International:  Bin Laden Attacks May be Imminent," "multiple reports indicate that extremists expect Bin Laden to launch lattacks over the coming days, possibly against U.S. or Israeli interests."     And there was one from 6/25/01 with the sub-heading "Terrorism: Bin Laden and Associates Making Near-Term Threats," which warned "Expect Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days."    A document from five days later read "operative linked to Usama Bin Laden's organization expect the near-term attacks they are planning to have dramatic consequences, such as major casualties."

From June through September, there were four additional CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs maintaining attacks were imminent.     But the Administration, whose National Security staff had ignored a CIA proposal to increase drone attacks, did not call a Principals' Meeting (downgraded to a Deputies' Meeting) until just days before the 9/11/01 attack.    

Not all of the documents were revelations, some of the information having been contained in the 9/11 committee's report.     And we learned a lot from publication in 2004 of Ron Suskind's "The One Percent Doctrine," which slammed Vice-President Cheney's fanatical approach to foreign policy.     Most famously, while President Bush was in Crawford, enjoying what was tied with one of Richard Nixon's vacations as the longest vacation ever taken by a U.S. president, he was presented by a CIA briefer with the famous 8/6/01 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike In U.S."     Bush's reply: "All right, you've covered your ass now."

There is little doubt that Dick Cheney is suggesting that Mitt Romney would- well, we don't quite know quite what he could be thinking.    From the evidence, though, it appears that the former Vice President envisions Mitt Romney as his kind of President, one who, when confronted with evidence of an imminent terrorist attack will go jet skiing, water skiing, maybe waterboarding.

   

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Issue Avoidance


Another day and another opportunity to blog about Rick Santorum, before his fifteen minutes are up.

The Daily Beast's Michael Tomasky observed that, at the Meet The Press debate (transcript here) Saturday night, Santorum stated

had a good moment, I thought, with his answer to the question about how he’d react if one of his sons were to announce that he’s gay. Santorum: “I’d love him just as much as I did the second before he told me.” General applause to this. I’m not 100 percent persuaded that this is really and fully and completely true, in either Santorum’s case or the audience’s, but everyone knows it’s what you have to say, and he managed to say it with seeming conviction.

Andy Hiller, political director of a Boston television station, asked Santorum "What if you had a son who came to you and said he was gay?"     Santorum, not quite a political neophyde, shot back

I would love him as much as I did the second before he said it, and I would try to do everything I can to be as good a father to him as possible.

It now is notable that a GOP candidate for president doesn't jump at the chance to say that he would kick his son out of his house because of a sexual orientation he is born with.       Tomasky understands such an answer was unavoidable, given that both the left,  sympathetic to gay rights interests (ditto most members of the mainstream media), and the right  would be offended if Santorum responded "I would tell him to go back into the closet and await God's judgement."

But maybe Santorum was being sincere.     In substance (though not in tone) it differs little with his response in 2003 to a similar question, to which he replied "I would try to point out to them what is the right thing to do. And we have many temptations to do things we shouldn’t. It doesn’t mean you have to submit.”

Or perhaps he believes gay marriage and condoms should be banned everywhere but that it doesn't apply to his family, a kind of reversal of the old adage:     "a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged."      As often,  a liberal is a conservative who unexpectedly has found that life throws some curve balls even into the best, or most privileged, families.

Think Dick Cheney, a right-winger's right-winger who at least twice (more recently, here) has expressed support for gay marriage (video from earlier instance, below).        Just a guess- but that might be related to the situation of his daughter Mary, who is gay, which would make it either hypocritical or mere convenient pragmatism.     Quite common, really.

Adam Serwer of Mother Jones explains that the candidates could have been asked serious questions about gay rights rather than being lobbed softballs:

The questions were sufficiently devoid of any specific matters of gay rights that they allowed both candidates to garner applause lines. Romney said that while he opposes same-sex marriage, "if people are looking for someone who will discriminate against gays, or will in any way try and suggest that people [who] have different sexual orientation don't have full rights in this country, they won't find that in me."

"When was the last time you spoke out for increasing gay rights?" Hiller asked.

"Right now," Romney said to laughter and applause.

Hiller followed up by asking whether Santorum would be a "force for gay rights in his party." Santorum said he was opposed gay couples being able to adopt or get married. "Just because you don't agree with someone's desire to change the law doesn't mean you don't like them, or you hate them, or you want to discriminate against them," Santorum said after declaring his support for laws that discriminate against gay people.

"What if you had a son who came up to you and said he was gay?" Hiller asked.

"I would love him as much as I did the second before he said it. And I would try to do everything I can to be as good of a father to him as possible."

It was perhaps Santorum's finest moment in the debate—he didn't flinch, or wait a moment to reflect. He came across as entirely sincere. And that's part of the problem. In both cases, the Republican candidates were asked questions that were essentially about whether or not they "hated" gays. Those questions are easy to deflect with a measured tone. Instead of asking the candidates about their feelings towards gay people, they could have been asked about any one of the many pending legal issues affecting the rights of gays and lesbians. Do the candidates support ending the military's Don't Ask Don't Tell policy? Would they support extending the same military benefits heterosexual couples have to same-sex families? Do they think gay couples should be able to adopt (Santorum, to his credit, explicitly said no.) Do they think Lawrence v. Texas was rightly decided or do they think states should be allowed to criminalize sexual behavior by consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes? Do they support or oppose the Defense of Marriage Act, which prevents the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages?

Many of the candidates are on record on these issues, and an informed moderator might have asked the candidates to explain their positions, since Republican stances on gay rights issues typically clash with their stated principles on federalism or individual rights. Instead, the Republican candidates got softballs about how they feel about gay people, which allowed them grin and prattle on about tolerance and equality, even while supporting laws that deny gays and lesbians the same rights as everyone else. Grading on this bizarre curve, Santorum gets applause for not casting a hypothetical gay son out of his home as though basic human decency would demand anything else. Santorum wouldn't cast out his gay son: He just wouldn't let him serve in the military, get married, or adopt a child.

It shouldn't matter to the future of the republic how Rick Santorum would react even if any of his children were gay.      A President should not be judged by what his offspring are or even how he responds to their condition.      Sasha and Malia seem like fine young people.       But that really hasn't lowered the unemployment rate, tamed the rampant greed of Wall Street,  convinced Ahmadinejad to give up any pretensions to developing nuclear weapons, or even undermined the conviction of the American people that the nation is on the wrong track generally.








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Dick Cheney Lies About His Undisclosed Location

A little advice to Dick Cheney: if you're going to lie, make sure it's nothing that can be uncovered.

Not so in the memoirs of the former vice-president, who, the Washington Post reports

notes that he was “surprised by the intensity of the media interest” in the “undisclosed location” where he was sometimes reported to be, mentioning a “Saturday Night Live” skit that imagined him in a cave in Afghanistan.

But, he writes, the “undisclosed location” was the more mundane Vice President’s Residence, his home in Wyoming and, most often, Camp David.

But it wasn't Wyoming and it wasn't Camp David, though very close to the latter. From a July 15, 2009 post entitled "Not Quite Undisclosed" on this site:

On December 16, 2001, Dennis Roddy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote

Three hours after Osama bin Laden turned the Pentagon into a broken rectangle, five helicopters touched down a few hundred yards from Hal Neill's house at the base of Raven Rock Mountain along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border.

Within minutes, a convoy of SUVs with black-tinted windows zoomed up Harbaugh Valley Road, turned left, and deposited the weight of the free world inside Site R, the inexplicably named city-in-a-mountain from which the Pentagon has operated and, from all indications Vice President Dick Cheney has directed his office in the days since the Sept. 11 attacks.

But.if you do a google search under "undisclosed location wikepedia," you'll find, as the second entry, "Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." The wikipedia entry on Blue Ridge Summit notes that is the location of Vice President Cheney's "undisclosed location," crediting this article as appearing in the Boston Globe on July 20, 2004. More specifically, the piece was written for Knight-Ridder by Steve Goldstein and appeared in not only the Boston Globe, but also The Philadelphia Inquirer and probably elsewhere. Goldstein visited the site, dubbed "the underground Pentagon" by "government insiders," and explained

The location is a highly secure complex of buildings inside Raven Rock Mountain near Blue Ridge Summit, Pa., close to the Maryland-Pennsylvania state line and about seven miles north of Camp David.

A recent book, "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies," by James Bamford, was credited with spilling the beans about the supposedly supersecret hideaway....

Site R -- also known as Raven Rock or the Alternate Joint Communications Center -- is a 53-year-old facility conceived at the start of the Cold War as an alternate command center in the event of nuclear war or an attack on Washington.

Sloping, round-humped Raven Rock Mountain sprouts a thicket of antennae, satellite dishes, and a microwave tower. From state Route 16, the main road that passes the mountain, two oversize metal doors in the hillside are visible through the heavy foliage giving it that Fortress of Solitude touch.

Bamford, Roddy, Goldstein, and maybe a few others performed their job and disclosed the "undisclosed location." To all others, including the Washington Post, it has been a punchline good for a snicker here and there. But the undisclosed location is in fact disclosed

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GOP Reverses On Medicare, Predictably

Now we know what it really was all about.

It was Mitch McConnell on February 7, 2010, asked about the President's idea to have everyone over at the White House to talk about health care reform, who commented

the White House can start by shelving the current health spending bill, and with it their goal of slashing a half trillion dollars from Medicare and raising a half trillion in new taxes. The American people want lower costs, not Medicare cuts and tax increases.

Three days later, in an opinion piece he co-authored for The Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich would warn

Don't cut Medicare. The reform bills passed by the House and Senate cut Medicare by approximately $500 billion. This is wrong. There is no question that Medicare is on an unsustainable course; the government has promised far more than it can deliver. But this problem will not be solved by cutting Medicare in order to create new unfunded liabilities for young people.

And on February 15, John Maccormack of the reliably conservative The Weekly Standard wrote admiringly of the "Roadmap" proposed by Republican faux wunderkind Paul Ryan of Ohio:

Ryan's plan would not cut Medicare benefits* for anyone 55 or older, while Obamacare would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care for current beneficiaries. “You do not have to take benefits away from current seniors," Ryan told me Friday afternoon. "You have to reform the program for future generations. ... The cost explosion occurs when you go from 40 million to 80 million retirees, so you have to reform the program before it becomes 80 million retirees."

President Barack Obama is asking Republican lawmakers to approve billions of dollars in new spending to avert a scheduled 21 percent cut in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients.

So you can be excused if you were surprised to read today that the Charles Babingon of the Associated Press has found

President Barack Obama is asking Republican lawmakers to approve billions of dollars in new spending to avert a scheduled 21 percent cut in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients.

If GOP senators don’t allow the stalled proposal to pass, some doctors will stop treating Medicare recipients, Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday.

Obama also urged congressional leaders Saturday to approve his proposals to pump more federal money into states where thousands of teachers, firefighters and other public officials face likely layoffs. In a letter, Obama described his plans as “critical and timely ways to further the economic recovery and spur job creation.”

Republicans, only a few months ago decrying cuts to Medicare, now are balking at approving funding to prevent a cut in payments to doctors who treat Medicare patients. Better to encourage as many doctors as possible to turn Medicare patients away, presumably.

Oh, they have their reasons, do the GOP legislators who ony a few months ago contended that "Obamacare" included Medicare cuts and those rhetoricall colorful "death panels." According to Babington, House Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) "said his party wants to avoid reducing physicians’ Medicare fees, but do it without adding to the deficit — meaning spending cuts elsewhere." Nevertheless,

The president noted that since 2003, Congresses led by Democrats and Republicans have blocked similar proposed cuts in doctors' reimbursement rates. But now, he said, Republicans are "willing to walk away from the needs of our doctors and our seniors."

But only if a larger objective can be met. The claim of concern over rising debt would be more credible if these Republicans did not select the increase in defense spending as one of the few areas in which they might agree with the President. Or if they, or at least a few other members of their party, had shown even a small fraction of concern when that debt was being run up by Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush 43.

But those deficits were different. "Deficits don't matter," cried Vice President Cheney as long as they were created by tax cuts for the wealthy. But now that it's being done in (relatively small) part as incentive for doctors to continue taking Medicare patients or to stimulate an economy in recession by creating new jobs, it's time to get exercised by the national debt.

Better the GOP be exorcised, than exercised. Seven-eight months after Bush the Younger was selected president, The New York Times noted he called the dwindling federal surplus ""incredibly positive news' because it would halt the growth of the federal government."

The GOP's tune has changed but the intent has not. With a Democratic Administration, Republicans don't call for cutting services and gutting government but conveniently for "deficit reduction." But "'deficit reduction" doesn't mean deficit reduction. It means welfare state reduction, period. Military spending is sacred --- like the right to pack heat in church and gas guzzling. It is non-negotiable."

And if reducing the deficit means starving a popular program, weakening its value to the American people and boosting cynicism about government, it's all the better. As Ed Kilgore has identified the strategy, "stop government before it can help again."

For the GOP, it's a different sermon, but the same church.

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Hating Government

Check out this video, especially beginning at approximately 35 seconds, featuring this astonishing statement:

If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they’re run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and health care done by the government.



This was not from some right-wing fanatic disrupting a town hall meeting hosted by Senator Arlen Specter (D.-Pa.), Representative Lloyd Doggett (D.-Tx.), or House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D.-Md.). This right-wing fanatic is Arthur Laffer.

Yes, the Arthur Laffer, whose theories arguably are responsible for some of the biggest damage done to the economy of this country the past thirty years, as the Laffer Curve became the intellectual underpinning of supply side economics. In "The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijaacked by Crackpot Economics," Jonathan Chait noted it all started innocuously 35 years ago:

The cult in question generally traces its political origins to a meeting in Washington in late 1974 between Arthur Laffer, an economic consultant, Jude Wanniski, an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal, and Dick Cheney,then chief of staff to President Ford.

Soon afterward, Wanniski introduced Irving Kristol to Jack Kemp, who converted Ronald Reagan to an ideology whose

core principle is that economic performance hinges almost entirely on how much incentive investors and entrepreneurs have to attain more wealth and this incentive in turn hinges almost entirely on their tax rate. Therefore, cutting taxes- especially those of the rich, who carry out the decisive entrepreneurial role in the economy- is always a good idea.

And continuously cutting taxes gave us a war in Iraq paid for by borrowed money, back when Republicns like Dick Cheney argued "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Until recently- when the need for health care reform awakened in the GOP a convenient distaste for deficits- supply siders would argue "either that tax cuts will produce enough growth to wipe out deficits or that deficits simply don't matter."

Arthur Laffer is the man who gave birth to the free lunch- cut taxes and keep spending- which fueled the Reagan and Bush 43 tax cuts, ballooning the deficit and helping exacerbate the gap betweeen rich and poor. Arthur Laffer now implies a) the Post Office (really, the U.S. Postal Service) is undependable; and b) Medicare and Medicaid are not government programs.

Could it be that the Arthur Laffer, a conservative economist, is not aware that the mail does get delivered on time? Or that Medicare and Medicaid are government programs?

Virtually impossible. Thirty-some years ago Arthur Laffer realized his theory made no sense, and he now realizes that the incomparably popular Medicare is a government program- a popular, efficient government health program. So it's necessary that Laffer, and the rest of the denizens of the despicably dishonest right, spread the fiction that Medicare is a private program.

It's possible to argue that Medicare is popular and run by the government and simultaneously to oppose health reform which includes a public option. But that requires some explanation and reasoning, two things that the conservative mob, either bereft of an interest in detail or suffering from a deficit in attention, has now almost entirely relinquished.

Not Quite Undisclosed

Enough. Enough of the jokes about Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location."

Dick Cheney's "undisclosed location" has been disclosed for at least five years (minus five days) and possibly for as long as seven-and-a-half years. So where is it?

In December, 2001 staff writer Dennis Roddy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (hint) wrote

Three hours after Osama bin Laden turned the Pentagon into a broken rectangle, five helicopters touched down a few hundred yards from Hal Neill's house at the base of Raven Rock Mountain along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border.

Within minutes, a convoy of SUVs with black-tinted windows zoomed up Harbaugh Valley Road, turned left, and deposited the weight of the free world inside Site R, the inexplicably named city-in-a-mountain from which the Pentagon has operated and, from all indications Vice President Dick Cheney has directed his office in the days since the Sept. 11 attacks.

But if you do a google search under "undisclosed location wikepedia," you'll find, as the second entry, "Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." The wikipedia entry on Blue Ridge Summit notes that is the location of Vice President Cheney's "undisclosed location," crediting this article as appearing in the Boston Globe on July 20, 2004. More specifically, the piece was written for Knight-Ridder by Steve Goldstein and appeared in not only the Boston Globe, but also The Philadelphia Inquirer and probably elsewhere. Goldstein visited the site, dubbed "the underground Pentagon" by "government insiders," and explained

The location is a highly secure complex of buildings inside Raven Rock Mountain near Blue Ridge Summit, Pa., close to the Maryland-Pennsylvania state line and about seven miles north of Camp David.

A recent book, "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies," by James Bamford, was credited with spilling the beans about the supposedly supersecret hideaway....

Site R -- also known as Raven Rock or the Alternate Joint Communications Center -- is a 53-year-old facility conceived at the start of the Cold War as an alternate command center in the event of nuclear war or an attack on Washington.

Sloping, round-humped Raven Rock Mountain sprouts a thicket of antennae, satellite dishes, and a microwave tower. From state Route 16, the main road that passes the mountain, two oversize metal doors in the hillside are visible through the heavy foliage giving it that Fortress of Solitude touch.

Serious newscasters, pundits, politicians, and others really should quit grinning about an "undisclosed location" which, with a little curiousity, they would realize is fully "disclosed." Which, presumably, would leave out this silly (and somewhat fickle) Senator.

Families First, Principles Second (Or Not At All)

It's a short post (by a deservedly famous leftist blogger) so herewith is Jane Hamsher's comment of June 3 in its entirety about the conservative impulse to be empathetic when convenient:

Shorter Newt: Now that Robert Gibbs and President Obama have accepted my central premise that Sotomayor's remarks were racist, let's all just agree that "empathy" disqualifies her from the bench.

I was on MSNBC yesterday talking with David Shuster and Matt Lewis about Dick Cheney's newly vocal reverence for gay marriage. I made the point (which I freely admit came from Glenn Greenwald) that conservative principles seem to crumble when they come up against empathy -- Cheney endorses full civil rights because of his experience as the father of a lesbian daughter, Nancy Reagan becomes the spokesperson for stem cell research because of her husband, and Erich "Mancow" Muller renounces his support for waterboarding after he tries it himself.

No wonder conservatives hate empathy.

Leaving aside the issue of what role, if any, "empathy" should play in consideration of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the United States Supreme Court, Hamsher makes an excellent point, although not exactly the one she intended.

Cheney's support for gay rights is not "newly vocal reverence." When asked at a campaign rally in Davenport, Iowa in 2004. Hinting (so strongly that he was promptly critized by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Center) that he opposed President Bush's call for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, Cheney explained (video below)

Lynne and I have a gay daughter, so it’s an issue our family is very familiar with. With the respect to the question of relationships, my general view is freedom means freedom for everyone. ... People ought to be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to.

(And Cheney's recent position seems very similar to that he expressed almost five years ago.)

Although it is true that right-wing iconoclastic talk show host Erich "Mancow" Muller has renounced support for torture now that he has endured it, his case is vastly different. Muller has no familial, or any personal, stake in interrogation techniques. His (current) position on waterboarding- though Hamsher might not agree- is more credible and rationally conceived than that of the others. Muller did not come to his view for any personal or self-interested reason but because he learned about this "enhanced interrogation technique" firsthand. Speaking from knowledge and not self-interest: Muller is, if not unique, unusual among Republicans or conservatives.

A better, third example, would be former McCain campaign advisor Steve Schmidt, who on April 17 told the Log Cabin Republicans

it seems to me that denying two consenting adults of the same sex the right to form a lawful union that is protected and respected by the state denies them two of the most basic natural rights affirmed in the preamble of our Declaration of Independence.

Mr. Schmidt, unsurprisingly, has a sister who is a lesbian. Or as this blogger, citing Cheney, Reagan, and Rush Limbaugh, put it:

...Schmidt's position on same-sex marriage isn't all that groundbreaking when you consider that his family is directly affected by the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples. It's just more proof, as if more were needed, that Republicans are quite capable of tolerance and open-mindedness and empathy—but only when they themselves or members of their own families are touched by an issue that requires a little tolerance, open-mindedness, or empathy.

Liz Cheney, Feigning Ignorance

Crooksandliars.com, with attribution, printed a transcript of the argument between Liz Cheney of the famous Dick Cheney family and Lawrence O'Donnell on the May 22, 2009 episode of ABC's Good Morning America. The most telling remark from the former vice-president's daughter came halfway through when she actually said

Lawrence, are you going to let me answer here? Waterboarding is not torture. And you ought- I would refer to you Attorney General Holder's testimony-

Miss Cheney, meet conservative radio talk show host Eric "Mancow" Muller :



Muller, to his credit, had the courage to test his belief that waterboarding is not torture, and now acknowledges that it is. Not so Sean Hannity, who (to my surprise) never did take up Keith Olbermann's challenge (video below) on Countdown to undergo this "enhanced interrogation technique," even though Olbermann offered to give to charity $1,000-$2,000 for each second Hannity would last. (Olbermann announced last Thursday that he had rescinded the offer and instead would donate $10,000 to charity in recognition of Muller's act.)

O'Donnell is wrong, I think, when he tells the MSNBC host that Dick Cheney and Hannity "think torture works because it works on them." Hannity chose not to accept Olbermann's offer in part because he knows it is torture and that he could not withstand more than a few seconds of it. Cheney & Cheney, similarly, know that waterboarding is torture and usually does not work. It doesn't matter. Truth is irrelevant to some people.