In two posts Josh Marshall touches on one of my favorite hobby horses regarding motivations and behavior – absent a compelling rationale for secrecy, people usually demand it to hide incompetence. Josh points out that Cheney may be a supernaturally gifted bureaucratic infighter, but his office has a real problem keeping actual secrets under wraps. …
Archives for June 2007
The Nanny State
In which the nannies hate the First Amendment: The Supreme Court ruled against a former high school student Monday in the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner case — a split decision that limits students’ free speech rights. Joseph Frederick was 18 when he unveiled the 14-foot paper sign on a public sidewalk outside his Juneau, …
Police State Republicans
If you doubt my Cheney-centric view of Bush scandals, read this account from today’s WaPo article that I referenced below. For months, Olson and his Justice Department colleagues had pleaded for modest shifts that would shore up the government’s position. Hamdi, the American, had languished in a Navy brig without a hearing or a lawyer …
Cheney Part 2
Part 2 of Gellman and Becker’s Cheney series strongly supports my Grand Unified Theory of Bush scandals, which posits that the worst, most counterproductive and dumbest decisions of the Bush presidency all seem to start in Cheney’s office. As Steve Benen noted on reading part 1, even torture memos that everybody assumed “abu” Gonzales wrote …
Cheney On Cheney
While reporters Gellman and Becker have raised blogosphere hell over their four-part Cheneyfest that starts in today’s Washington Post, I posit that everybody else has missed the real meat of Sunday’s story. We already knew that Cheney hides his appointment schedule, his staff list and his own middle name in some impenetrable secrets chest. The …
Approvingly Linking Reynolds
Sue me. I think that his view on the Cheney Autonomy Doctrine almost sounds like work product from a law professor, and it adds another data point to the rightwing lunacy spectrum. The rightwing lunacy spectrum, of course, objectively measures exactly how fucking insane this administration has to get before a supporter stops pretending not …
Bush to America- I Signed What?
It seems like Bush doesn’t even know what the hell he is signing: The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, President Bush’s office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information. An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 — amending …