internal war over Cheney story

I wasn't the only one to notice how some paragraphs in that Cheney story don't match up.

Laura Rozen relays some comments from a newspaper editor friend. The gist:

A careful reading of the story of Cheney's coup against a feeble executive reveals that paragraphs 7 through 10 were written and inserted in haste by a powerful editorial hand. The banging of colliding metaphors in an otherwise carefully written piece is evidence of last-minute interpolations by a bad editor whom no one has the power to rewrite....

That in turn suggests that this piece has been ready to run for some time. Insertions like the one about the veep's office not being part of the executive branch and seriatim "softenings" show that jamming it into the paper at the end of June, when only cats and the homeless are around the read the paper, was made at the last minute.

Cheney in Charge

Turns out Cheney's been running the show all along. Big time. Not that the idea is exactly news, but this WaPo series (Chapter 1) has some great details on just how that played out. Nut graf:

Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as no vice president has before. This article begins a four-part series that explores his methods and impact, drawing on interviews with more than 200 men and women who worked for, with or in opposition to Cheney's office. Many of those interviewed recounted events that have not been made public until now, sharing notes,e-mails, personal calendars and other records of their interaction with Cheney and his senior staff. The vice president declined to be interviewed.

Some highlights at Sadly, No! include how Cheney basically wrote executive and military orders himself (with his own secretive staff) and then gave them over to Bush to sign, with nobody else even allowed to see what they were. Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice found out that all captured "terrorists" would be stripped of legal rights -- by seeing the announcement on CNN. Powell's reaction: "What the hell just happened?" When Ashcroft - whose Justice Department was cut out of decisions regarding who got what kind of treatment - tried to meet with Bush to complain, it was Cheney at the conference table instead. Ashcroft was never able to get a meeting with Bush on this subject.

The Post tries to minimize that Cheney is a "shadow president" -- they want the buck to stop with Bush. After all, if Cheney wasn't doing what Bush wanted, Bush would check his power. But we have to understand the limits of Bush's actual decision-making power when, as so well documented in this story, all his information and advice are vetted through Cheney first. As the Post put it:

Before the president casts the only vote that counts, the final words of counsel nearly always come from Cheney.

Additionally, Cheney is far more involved in the daily and detailed workings of Cabinets and other agencies than Bush:

Other recent vice presidents have enjoyed a standing invitation to join the president at "policy time." But Cheney's interventions have also come in the president's absence, at Cabinet and sub-Cabinet levels where his predecessors were seldom seen. He found pressure points and changed the course of events by "reaching down," a phrase that recurs often in interviews with current and former aides.

So Cheney not only overshadows Bush during their joint briefings, he "reaches down" to make sure the sub-levels are operating the way he wants. Like with the creation of the Office of Special Plans -- he wasn't satisfied with how the intelligence agencies were operating so he created his own.

If that's the case, then Bush really has little independence at all.

Interestingly, Cheney himself warned against the type of secrecy and manipulation he now practices. In interviews and speeches before 2000, he cautioned that all decisions had to be made with open information flow, because that protects the President from making ill-considered choices. You don't want policy to be made as 'oh, by the way.' As he said at a 1999 conference of White House historians:

"The process of moving paper in and out of the Oval Office, who gets involved in the meetings, who does the president listen to, who gets a chance to talk to him before he makes a decision, is absolutely critical. It has to be managed in such a way that it has integrity."

He knew this, and once he became VP abused it for his own power.

The final example of the detainee memo (the "Gonzales memo" as it came to be known) illustrates all this in horrifying detail. Cheney used his position not only to secure the result he wanted, but to further estrange from influence people not under his control, specifically Powell and his allies at State. It's a very scary thing to contemplate, how he was able to have so much influence so secretively. We may never find out much of what he did or how, given his thus-far successful resistance to any kind of disclosure. Of course, as everyone (even Instapundit, of all people!) is mocking this week, he considers his office not part of the executive branch. So the rules don't apply. This is a scary and evil man.

more on Machiavellian Mansfield

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has another takedown of Mansfield's pro-fascist piece in the OJ. This one concentrates on his mis-use of Machiavelli as a model for the founders, and pokes many other holes in it as well. Did you know that the founders did not want a king? Astonishing!

Godwin's Law. part 1

First of what will invariably be a series. Republican shill Dan Riehl has his panties in a bunch at Glen Greenwald's dissection of Mansfield's advocacy of an American Fuehrerprinzip in the Opinion Journal.

Standard ad hominem attack and invective for the first part, and then the Godwin's violation:

The tactic of mis-characterizing enlightened argument with which you may disagree is fascistic, at best. Salon should be ashamed.

Um, mis-characterizing an argument is facsist? All intellectually dishonest people do that no matter their political stripe. Dan Riehl YOU FAIL NOW.

sick

The Claremont Review of books - conservo-fascist answer to the NYRB maybe - comes out with one of the more honest defenses of having a Fuehrer on top the American system. Because the law doesn't know how to enforce itself, and we need a Machiavellian Great Leader with "energy" to defend the rule of law. By breaking laws. Or something. Sick sick sick.

Of course, this is the organization that thinks Rumsfeld is Churchill, and has a Jonah Goldberg review of Dinesh D'Sousza's antidemocratic screed. Funny that in the review he denies that the Muslims embrace democracy - because they would rather have the very same executive power that the idiot in the previous story was touting.

[A]s he concedes, groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Hezbollah have only called for more democracy because they know "their group can win." Embracing elections so you can gain power and keep it permanently is not quite the same thing as embracing democracy. Every party, including the Nazis, gushes about democracy when it wins an election, but constitutional government means abiding by the rules when you lose an election. One man, one vote, one time, is not democracy; it's will-to-power masquerading as ritualized lever-pulling.

Imagine that, a valid historical comparison to the Nazis! Too bad Goldberg and D'Sousza don't look in the mirror and see the will-to-power in their own party.

presidential literature

Really interesting blog post on bookblog the Millions - genre review of Nixon literature, others on presidential fiction. Postulates that this current administration will offer no literary possibilities -- they have to know in some small corner that what they are doing is wrong. And they don't seem to.
Closes with a great observation is that this administration has been most effective and most dangerous because they have been able to destroy sources of resistance to its desires. More than any specific goal, what they have done is permanently, or at least significantly, weaken social sources of power that can be used to check any executive. Can see this institutionally within the government, media, scientific community, etc.

As the Millions put it better:

A mark of the current administration's moral failure, and perhaps of its artistic triumph, is that it has sterilized many of the avenues for protest against itself.

Pulitzer Prize for signing statements reporting

Glen Greenwald conducts an interview with newly minted Pulitzer Prizewinner Charlie Savage, for reporting on presidential signing statements.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/26/savage_interview/index.html