Random thought of the day

March 20, 2007

Here’s an odd thought I’ve been mulling over: Dick Cheney’s name hasn’t come up at all throughout the entire prosecutor purge scandal. No one has suggested he orchestrated the firings; there haven’t been any obvious references to the Office of the Vice President in any of the emails or related documents; and there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that Cheney was even consulted on who would get fired.

Isn’t that odd?

By that I mean, have we seen a single White House scandal since 2001 that didn’t directly involve Dick Cheney? Iraq, Plame leak, NSA warrantless searches, pre-9/11 intelligence, the energy task force, Halliburton’s no-bid contracts, Abu Ghraib … Dick Cheney has been at the center of practically every White House catastrophe to date.

And yet, the Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office seem to have purged federal prosecutors for political reasons without any direction from the Vice President at all.

I’m not sure how to interpret this. Is Cheney losing his grip over White House decisions? Was Cheney directly involved in the firings, but we just haven’t heard about it yet?

It just doesn’t seem right that the Vice President isn’t connected in some way….

Its just like the movie “Dave’!
Except there are no good guys in the White House

  • Now that the Senate has voted overwhelmingly to strip the Patriot Act of the provision that gives the attorney general of the ability to permanently fill U.S. attorney vacancies without approval, I still want to know why, with all the back-and-forth that went on over reauthorizing the Patriot Act no lawmaker seems to have noticed that part of it unless, as they did the first time, the bastards didn’t EVEN BOTHER TO READ THE LEGISLATION THEY WERE PASSING. In a way, that’s an even bigger scandal to me than all the other shenanigans. It’s one thing in the wake of 9/11 to act that way but at the time they were reauthorizing it, there was no excuse except laziness.

  • Dick Cheney has been at the center of practically every White House catastrophe to date.

    No one blamed him for botching Katrina. Well, not ’til Halliburton and Bechtel got a bunch of no-bid contracts for the re-building work.

  • Cheney is right smack in the middle of one the more high profile firings, that of Carol Lam. Check out TPM. During the course of the Cunningham investigation, she had identified a $140,000 no-bid contract that went to a company for the provision of office furnitute and electronics for the VP’s office. Conicidentally, this same company also was lobbying with Cunningham for some of his sweetheart defense contracts. a week or two after the VP paid the company $140,000, that same company bought a yacht (the infamous “duke-stir”) for Cunningham, whereupon he took residence. The price of the yacht? $140,000. Given her investigation into these matters, Mrs. Lam was obviously a “problem” for the WH.

    So your instincts are correct, CB. Cheney’s there, he’s just lurking in the shadows right now.

  • It makes sense because it a purely domestic story with no national security component. Most of the Cheney scandals that come to mind all have something to do with national security.

  • (Doesn’t look like my previous comment was successfully posted. I’ll try again…)

    I suspect it’s because Bush depends upon Rove to manage his domestic scandal initiatives, and he depends upon Cheney to handle his international scandal initiatives. Do Rove and Cheney even talk to each other, I wonder?

    I can’t think of any situation where Cheney was involved in a domestic scandal, unless it impacted one of his foreign policy initiatives (e.g. the Plame leak) — well, other than not reporting his hunting accident. Can anyone think of any examples where Cheney was involved in any domestic scandal?

  • It seems to me the thread running through each of the scandals that Cheney played a part in is that foreign policy was involved, and/or entities with commercial interests dear to Cheney’s black heart were bound to profit. It is not readily apparent that the USA purge scandal involves either. On the other hand, this has all the earmarks of a classic Rove maneuver.

  • Think Progress drew an interesting connection just yesterday between Cheney and the indictments that U.S. Attorney Carol Lam bought against Duke Cunningham and Mitchell Wade.

    http://thinkprogress.org/2007/03/19/carol-lam-white-house/

    Here’s what was posted:

    “– Washington D.C. defense contractor Mitchell Wade pled guilty last February to paying then-California Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham more than $1 million in bribes.

    – Wade’s company MZM Inc. received its first federal contract from the White House. The contract, which ran from July 15 to August 15, 2002, stipulated that Wade be paid $140,000 to “provide office furniture and computers for Vice President Dick Cheney.”

    – Two weeks later, on August 30, 2002, Wade purchased a yacht for $140,000 for Duke Cunningham. The boat’s name was later changed to the “Duke-Stir.” Said one party to the sale: “I knew then that somebody was going to go to jail for that…Duke looked at the boat, and Wade bought it — all in one day. Then they got on the boat and floated away.”

    – According to Cunningham’s sentencing memorandum, the purchase price of the boat had been negotiated through a third-party earlier that summer, around the same time the White House contract was signed.

    To recap, the White House awarded a one-month, $140,000 contract to an individual who never held a federal contract. Two weeks after he got paid, that same contractor used a cashier’s check for exactly that amount to buy a boat for a now-imprisoned congressman at a price that the congressman had pre-negotiated.”

    Nice having the U.S. Treasury as your personal ATM.

  • In one of the e-mails analyzed over at Muckraker (who, BTW, should win some award for the work they’re doing on this issue — are they eligible for a Pulitzer?), someone noted an e-mail to and from Harriet Miers and I think Sampson.

    In it, the e-mail reads something to the effect of, “It’ll have to be ran through Karl’s shop.”

    So I think this may be the one issue where Darth isn’t involved … although all 2,000 pages haven’t been completely vetted yet, so …

  • Maybe he was more cautious after Libby was indicted.
    BUT…. there was not one bit of struggle to get the emails which were damning to some individuals. Wonder if they are holding anything back???

  • Rick got to it before me. No one saw any connection between Cheney and how horribly the response to Katrina has been run.

    I don’t know, I don’t think Cheney is the single cancer at the heart of this administration and the source of every abusive act. There is an imperial ideology in the White House that deigns to put the White House above the law, and that seems to be ingrained in just about everyone there, from Bush on down. Cheney may have been influential in forming that theory about themselves, but it also stands to reason that they would fill the administration with like-minded people. Woo, remember, wrote the infamous Justice Department memo. Bush, Gonzales, and Rove all believe they are empowered commit crimes and to lie to Congress and the American people without consequences. When you are president and you have a theory that presidential power should be unlimited, you are going to surround yourself with people who agree with you.

  • What passes for policy (almost all of it foreign, they have no domestic policies other than sabotaging executive branch agencies and even that runs through Addington) in this administration always goes through Cheney, whereas anything election-related always goes through Rove. The DOJ scandals were part of a very broad attempt to fix US elections, so Karl was in charge and Cheney probably didn’t have any interest since there is no immediate profit in it. Not surprised at all, that seems to be the way they divide power.

  • Let’s not count the Dickster out yet. As many above have mentioned, it looks like he bought Duke Cunningham a boat with our money – how nice of him.

    You have to admit, that’s much nicer than getting shot in the face.

    • Comments are closed.