June 21, 2007
Amen to that, brother
Today, we discovered that everything we learned in U.S. government class was wrong. Evidently, the Vice President does not consider himself a part of the executive branch, and therefore believes he can obstruct meaningful oversight and avoid being held accountable. If the Vice President truly believes he is not a part of the executive branch, he should return the salary the American taxpayers have been paying him since January 2001, and move out of the home for which they are footing the bill.
comments
Thanks Deron, this is great. I liked the comments there too, some suggesting that we start calling it “The Dick Branch of Government,” and my favorite– “The Go Fuck Yourself Or I’ll Shoot You In The Face” branch of government. And there are more serious observations too, such as Randy R.’s note that “the Vice President has exempted himself from the rule of law and the Attorney General has let him get away with it. Time to sign on to Kucinich’s impeachment bill.”
I don’t understand it.
My take on it is that the V.P. is playing that game common criminals play all the time: two guys rob a person in the dark, and once caught each instructs his lawyer to say the other one did it. Sounds silly, but you would be surprised at how often it works, given the thin reasoning skills of many jury panels. Cheney is trying to argue an exemption from executive branch rules because he is also the president of the senate. The hard thing to understand is why that wouldn’t mean that his office is more accountable than the rest of the executive branch instead of less. It’s a shell game, and top law enforcement official in the country is nothing but a rubber stamp.
more specifically, I don’t understand why he’s not in jail.
I don’t understand why he’s not under the jail.
soprano style?
Perhaps more Cool Hand Luke style. It’s an expression my mother uses; I assume it’s a Southern thing.
Sorry Deron; I wasn’t underestimating you–I thought you were saying that you didn’t understand (as Henry Waxman questioned) the “wisdom” of Cheney’s decision to claim that his office is not part of the executive branch. It’s all so bizarre that it can only mean they are all scrambling to stave off multiple and well founded threats of prosecution. Next he will dig up a lawyer to argue in some new way that his own position in the national security apparatus exempts him from any accountability–and of course only traitors and enemies of our country would want to argue against his argument….
not at all, Daryl. I didn’t take offense. I simply don’t have the words sometimes to describe how I feel about these guys anymore.
I’ve begun to perceive the differences between the parties in this country and between the religious and the secular as differences not between perspectives and choices made by rational people but as differences between sanity and insanity.
I assume Germany in the twenties was like this, a fierce idiotic godful nationalism.
It is grotesque.
And criminal.