Like CD, I have run across an item which says what I've been trying to get across (and failing) every time the "We Can't Impeach Bush Until We Get Rid of Cheney First" argument comes up to conveniently deflate the obvious fact that they both have to go.
Josh Marshall's weekend guy David Kurtz slams the whole package together in this terrific piece. This started when the TPM crew set out to find out a seemingly basic, easy question: how many people work for the Office of the Vice President (OVP)? Turns out you are not allowed to know this. Never mind who they are, what they do, or who comes to visit them during working, taxpayer-funded hours, you aren't allowed to know how many of them exist, again paid for with your tax dollars. How can this be, you ask?
Well, answering that part leads DK to a slam-dunk, you should pardon the expression, conclusion:
By custom and tradition, the Vice President's role had been circumscribed by how little express power and authority the Constitution granted the position. Hence, all the jokes over the years about the vice presidency. But in a move that is decidedly anti-conservative, in the conventional sense, Cheney moved to fill the void. I fear that what we will eventually find are structural flaws that were deliberately exploited by the OVP, which in turn further undermined constitutional and statutory structures.
With or without impeachment of the figurehead who has about as much actual power as the Queen of England, Cheney must be dragged out into the light. The Libby
trial is a good starting point but only if people will see the obvious...oh screw that, they know it already but everybody's too chickenshit to talk about it. For fear of "bringing on" the Constitutional crisis, which everybody similarly knows has been well underway for years now.
It won't be a crisis until we start to fight back, in the open and out loud. The words nobody seems to want to say is that if we declare it and fight it we might lose. Well goddam it all to hell, it's de facto lost now thanks to our policy of continual retreat from confrontation. We can't surrender our way out of this one folks. The scorched earth policy may have worked against Napoleon, but the gates of Moscow are at our backs. It's now or never.
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If they ever do drag this zombie into the light...
chances are that most of the people working for him aren't really conventional government employees at all.
Let me speculate: most of the people working for Cheney probably fall under the category of private security contractors, and I'll bet their funded in a black budget process loosely tied to Homeland Security or the funding for the War on Terror in Iraq.
No Hell below us
Above us, only sky
one suggestion about terminology
instead of 'black budget,' which will scare away those who don't want to be associated with the thought and discourse of the "conspiracy theory" crowd, say instead: "crony budget."
cheney and his peons shame the narrative of Black Ops people the world over. they're stupid, they're clumsy, they're obvious, they're uncouth- everything the legend says deep intel people seek not to be. in the end, the criminals in question are many things- arrogant, willfully ignorant, unable to make it in the real world without kickbacks and handouts, and are best summed up by the dukester model: hookers and limos- so gauche.
i never thought i would say this, but i almost miss the days of the Great WASP intel oligarchy and their behind the scenes gentility and elan. bush and cheney's people are bug exterminators and 20something nepotism appointed hacks and horse breeders cum disaster contract swindlers. i wish they were more intelligent and interesting, but just as bush is so much less than poppy, so too are those he surrounds himself with. banality of evil, etc.
CD, how about "cooked-books budget"?
I agree on your point about "black budget"; that's had the meaning for decades of Mystery and Things So Secret That If I Told You About Them I'd Have To Kill You and shit like that. And people like the thought that We have mystery stuff, and accept that the Little People (us) should not know about it because then the Enemy will know and figure out something worse, etc.
Too many years of conditioning by movies, imho. But the point is that the term is associated with Good Evil Things which are pointed always outwards against the foe.
Fraud, being cheated, getting screwed over by Da Man, this on the other hand is something everybody whose boss has ever made them work overtime then not paid them for it, is familiar with and hates. We need to associate Cheney & Pals in the public mind with that sort of petty, cheap, chiseling, racketeering, till-robbing, tip-stealing, time-card-tampering fraud. Not James Bondian romantic secrecy.