[Mb-civic] Maureen Dowd

[Mike Blaxill]

Chain, Chain, Chain of Cheney Fools
    By Maureen Dowd
    The New York Times | Editorial

    Wednesday 02 November 2005

    Scooter used to be Cheney's Cheney.

    Now we've got Cheney's Cheney's Cheney.

    This is not an improvement.

    Once Scooter left, many people, including a
lot of alarmed conservatives and moderate
Republicans, were hoping that W. and Vice would
throw open some White House windows to let the
air and sun in, and climb out of that incestuous,
secretive, vindictive, hallucinatory dark hole
they've been bunkered in for five years.

    But they like it in their paranoid paradise.
One of the most confounding aspects of W.'s
exceedingly confounding presidency is his
apparent unwillingness to consider that anyone
who ever worked for him - and was in any way
responsible for any of the disasters now
afflicting his administration - should be
jettisoned.

    This is not loyalty. This is myopia. Where is
a meddling, power-intoxicated first lady when we
need one? Maybe the clever Nancy Reagan should
have a little talk with Laura Bush tonight at the
dinner for Prince Charles and Camilla, and
explain to her how to step in and fire
overweening officials who are hurting your man.

    Vice thumbed his nose yesterday at the notion
that he should clean up his creepy laboratory
when he promoted two Renfields who are part of
the gang that got us into this mess.

    Dick Cheney has appointed David Addington as
his new chief of staff, an ideologue who is so
fanatically secretive, so in love with the
shadows, so belligerent and unyielding that he's
known around town as the Keyser Soze of the usual
suspects. At 48, Mr. Addington is a legend: he's
worked his way up the G.O.P. scandal ladder from
Iran-contra to Abu Ghraib.

    Unlike Scooter, this lone-wolf lawyer doesn't
reach out to journalists, even to use them as
conduits or covers; he makes his boss look
gregarious. He routinely declines to be
interviewed or photographed.

    Vice also appointed John Hannah as his
national security adviser, a title also held by
Scooter. Mr. Addington and Mr. Hannah often
battled with the C.I.A. and State as the cabal
pushed the case that Saddam was a direct threat
to America, sabotaging Colin Powell's reputation
when it "helped" with his U.N. speech. Mr. Hannah
was the contact for Ahmad Chalabi, who went
around the C.I.A. to feed Vice's office the
baloney intel and rosy scenarios that suckered
the U.S. into war.

    Mr. Addington has done his best to crown King
Cheney. As Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington
Post, Mr. Addington pushed an obscure philosophy
called the unitary executive theory that "favors
an extraordinarily powerful president." He would
go "through every page of the federal budget in
search of riders that could restrict executive
authority."

    "He was a principal author of the White House
memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects,"
Mr. Milbank wrote. "He was a prime advocate of
arguments supporting the holding of terrorism
suspects without access to courts. Addington also
led the fight with Congress and environmentalists
over access to information about corporations
that advised the White House on energy policy."
And he helped stonewall the 9/11 commission.

    The National Journal pointed out that Scooter
had talked to Mr. Addington and Mr. Hannah about
Joseph Wilson and his C.I.A. wife when he was
seeking more information to discredit them in the
press. Mr. Addington, the story said, "was deeply
immersed" in the White House damage-control
campaign to deflect criticism about warped W.M.D.
intelligence, and attended strategy sessions in
2003 on how to discredit Mr. Wilson.

    "Further," the magazine said, "Addington
played a leading role in 2004 on behalf of the
Bush administration when it refused to give the
Senate Intelligence Committee documents from
Libby's office on the alleged misuse of
intelligence information regarding Iraq."

    Mr. Addington may as well have turned the
documents over for safekeeping to Pat Roberts,
because, as it turned out, the Republican
chairman of the Intelligence Committee didn't
want to investigate anything.

    Angry at the Scooter scandal, the Addington
appointment and the Roberts stonewalling, Senate
Democrats did something remarkable yesterday:
they dimmed the lights, stamped their feet and
shut down the Senate.

    Tired of being in the dark, the Democrats put
the Republicans in the dark. Childish, perhaps,
but effective. Republicans screamed but
grudgingly agreed to take a look at where the
investigation stands. But even if the Senate
starts investigating again, Mr. Addington, now
promoted, will have even more authority not to
cooperate.

    It's the Cheney chain of command. 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/110205B.shtml