{"id":11233,"date":"2007-06-24T13:45:04","date_gmt":"2007-06-24T17:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/11233.html"},"modified":"2007-06-24T13:45:04","modified_gmt":"2007-06-24T17:45:04","slug":"kristols-defense-of-cheney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/kristols-defense-of-cheney\/","title":{"rendered":"Kristol’s defense of Cheney"},"content":{"rendered":"

William Kristol bills himself as a serious, credible person, and is routinely rewarded by the DC establishment. As Kevin Drum recently put it<\/a>, “The Bill Kristol phenomenon is a stellar example of what a nice suit and a sober tone of voice can do for you.”<\/p>\n

But one need not look too far below the surface to find the shameless partisan hack<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

This morning on Fox News Sunday, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol defended Vice President Cheney’s decision to exempt himself from an executive order designed to safeguard classified national security information.<\/p>\n

Kristol said the exemptions for the president and vice president were “reasonable enough.” He called it “a pain in the neck” to have “some bureaucrat” from the National Archives “come and inspect your safe to see whether you’re locking it up properly each night.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He did not appear to be kidding.<\/p>\n

Let’s review: Dick Cheney was bound by a presidential executive order to safeguard classified materials. Cheney ignored the E.O., exempted himself from its instructions, and mishandled secret information. The federal agency responsible for oversight had a few questions about all of this, which Cheney ignored, insisting that he’s not part of the executive branch of government. The Vice President then decided he’d like to resolve the questions by eliminating the oversight agency asking them.<\/p>\n

Kristol believes this is “reasonable enough”? If Vice President Al Gore had conducted himself the same way, would Kristol come to the same conclusion?
\n
\nAs for some “bureaucrat” checking to see if the OVP properly locked up its safe, we’re not just talking about oversight; this deals with the willful mishandling of classified secrets in a time of war. That Kristol takes a rather blase attitude about the whole thing speaks poorly to the right’s credibility on national security.<\/p>\n

I’ve been curious about how the right’s leading voices might respond to Cheney’s bizarre and rather dangerous arguments. So far, we haven’t heard much, except Kristol’s ham-fisted nonsense this morning.<\/p>\n

The White House’s allies will have to do better than this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William Kristol bills himself as a serious, credible person, and is routinely rewarded by the DC establishment. As Kevin Drum recently put it, “The Bill Kristol phenomenon is a stellar example of what a nice suit and a sober tone of voice can do for you.” But one need not look too far below the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}