Cheney emerges from the shadows

It's refreshing to see Dick Cheney flushed out of his hole for a little while so we can see him in full daylight. The attention he is receiving from CIA Covert Agent Identity Revelation & Coverup-gate is a good thing for the country.

Columnist James Carroll offered a stinging review in today's Boston Globe of Cheney's entire public career. Some excerpts:

James Carroll
Boston Globe, Nov 7, 2005

When Rumsfeld became Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff, he again tapped Cheney as his deputy. Now they set out to destroy detente, the fragile new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union....

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Cheney forged America's response -- which was, little over a month later, to wage an illegal war against Panama....

When the justification for the huge military machine over which Cheney presided disappeared, he leapt on the next casus belli -- Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Hussein, a former ally, was now Hitler....

The unsentimental Cheney, eschewing human rights rhetoric, was explicit in defining America's Gulf War interest as all about oil. (The oil industry having made Cheney rich.) Cheney's initiatives, more than any other's, defined the insult to the Arab world that spawned Al Qaeda....

When the World Trade Center towers were hit in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee....The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, Cheney warned the president that a ''specific threat" had targeted Air Force One...There was no specific threat....In Bush's absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis.

I know that with a Republican Congress he'll never get impeached like he deserves, but this stuff--especially the last item--ought to be investigated. Even a staunch conservative should be offended by Cheney's coup.

Last week I came up with an absurd theory (let me state that this is pure satire in case it's not obvious). The theory is this: after screwing up the Supreme Court nomination, Bush either has a fatal "accident" or is killed in the next "al Qaeda" attack. Cheney takes over, a national crisis spawns, bye-bye scandal. It hasn't happened, so I guess he figures Bush is still useful somehow. (End of absurd, satirical, hypothetical speculation.)