Dick Cheney's Farewell Snarls

Bush's Scrooge is making some final appearances and, true to his nature, giving us "Bah, humbug" to the very end.

Almost six years, 4210 American lives and trillions of dollars after the Iraq invasion, the Vice President tells us "the world is better off with Saddam gone...This was a bad actor."

Torture? "Did it produce the desired results? I think it did...it's been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves."

William Kristol, in his fond farewell, assures Cheney "Popularity Isn't Everything" as a new poll shows 23 percent of Americans ranking him as the worst vice president ever. But the VP, who picked himself for the job, doesn't require solace. "I'm very comfortable," he says. "with where we are and what we achieved substantively. And frankly, I would not want to be one of those guys who spends all his time reading the polls."

Kristol's compatriots on the New York Times editorial page have a slightly different view, pointing out that "it must be exhausting to rewrite history as much as Mr. Cheney has done in a series of exit interviews."

Not for someone who personifies the old saying, "often wrong but never in doubt." Asked about "second thoughts" over publicly telling Sen. Pat Leahy to copulate with himself, Cheney says, "No, I thought he merited it at the time."

Judging from his curtain calls this week, Dick Cheney has felt that way about the rest of us for eight years.

Styles of Stealing: Bush and Maliki

The news today is about contrasts in corruption. In Baghdad, they do it the old-fashioned way, with Prime Minister Maliki’s friends and family taking $18 billion and then muscling or murdering those who try to expose them.

In Washington, the Bush Administration has been taking away our national morality to the point that headlines are all about crimes of character. Torturing and lying about torture is only the latest in a long list leading conservatives such as Andrew Sullivan to call his President a “war criminal” and David Brooks to accuse him of destroying the “social cohesion” that true conservatism values.

Testifying before a House panel yesterday, a former Iraqi investigator described scenes right out of our Roaring Twenties.

"They are so corrupt that they will attack their accusers and their families with guns and meat hooks, as well as countercharges of corruption," Judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi testified. He recounted how one of his staff was gunned down with his seven-month-pregnant wife, his security chief's father found dead on a meat hook and another investigator’s father riddled with holes from a power drill.

Bush and Cheney have been more subtle. Senate Committees are still trying to get hold of documents that apparently condone torture while the White House was, and still is, insisting that it doesn’t.

Democrats on Capitol Hill were demanding classified memos, disclosed by the New York Times, giving the C.I.A. approval in 2005 for “harsh interrogation techniques.”

Sen. Pat Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the 2005 opinions had “reinstated a secret regime by, in essence, reinterpreting the law in secret” and his panel had been asking for those opinions on interrogation for two years without success.

Chris Matthews summed it all up succinctly yesterday: "They've finally been caught in their criminality.” But the MSNBC anchor, who will co-host a Republican candidates debate next week, may be too optimistic. Unlike the new Baghdad government, Bush and Cheney have an almost seven-year backlog of illegality waiting to be uncovered.

An Ambivalent Goodbye to Gonzales

For Democrats, the long-awaited resignation of Alberto Gonzales may turn out to be one of those answered prayers that cause more tears than the unanswered.

With the departure of the A.G. and Karl Rove, the Senate Judiciary Committee will keep trying to get to the bottom of the Justice Department firings, but inevitably a plug has been pulled draining some of the urgency that Pat Leahy, Chuck Schumer et al can bring to their quest. As they persist, charges of vindictiveness and evading serious Senate business will gain ground.

In the words of a wise old pol, the punching bag has been taken out of the gym.

Perhaps even worse is the dilemma of confirming Gonzales’ successor, who will certainly not be a lover of civil liberties. But the hazards are similar to those that frustrated Democrats in the case of Bush’s Supreme Court appointments. Reject a plausible candidate and seem obstructionist, confirm one and the Justice Department is free again to carry on, albeit more discreetly, than it did before the Gonzales cloud.

Good as it is to say goodbye to Gonzales, there can be no cause for rejoicing until Bush and Cheney pack their bags to join him a year and a half from now.

Did You Miss Alberto Gonzales?

The drought is over. With Congress on vacation and the Attorney General in Baghdad, devotees of Justice Department injustices have had a dry August, but the stream of scandal is starting to flow again.

Gonzales has been advising the new Iraq government on how to treat detainees.

“I spoke about the importance,” he explained, “of just making sure...that they're dealt with humanely. That they're treated fairly. These are very, very difficult issues. They're issues that we wrestle with in our own country.”

Sure enough, back home in Washington, lawmakers are wrestling with a number of issues about the Attorney General. In a letter this week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy asked the Justice Department's Inspector General to probe whether Alberto Gonzales has made false or misleading statements.

At the same time, Director of the FBI Robert Mueller has turned over his notes about the bedside meeting with John Ashcroft to the House Judiciary Committee, and they raise new questions about Gonzales’ credibility.

Meanwhile, one Congressman, Rep. David Obey has stopped wrestling, as Congress Daily indicates: “He’s one sneaky, lying S.O.B., to put it bluntly. He’s the most authoritarian attorney general in the history of the republic. He’s the most dangerous. I never thought I’d long for the days of John Ashcroft.”

For the insatiable, TPM Muckraker has winnowed a thick crop to pick the Attorney General’s “Top Six Fibs.”

All at Sea in D.C. and Alaska

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, Karl Rove’s aide, J. Scott Jennings, used a maritime metaphor in declining to answer questions:

"I hope that you can appreciate the difficulty of my situation," he said. "It makes Odysseus' voyage between Scylla and Charybdis seem like a pleasure cruise."

Very literary, but Sen. Pat Leahy, the Committee Chairman, was not charmed. "Mr. Jennings, I am not here to play games," he warned.

Jennings’ reference to a “pleasure cruise” may have been the final straw for Leahy’s frustration over not getting answers from the White House about the firing of the U.S. Attorneys.

But, while he and others in the political mainstream are sweltering in Washington, denizens of the Far Left and Hard Right are on actual pleasure cruises, enjoying temperate weather off the coast of Alaska.

Devotees of the Nation and the National Review are out there this week on separate but equal Holland America luxury ships, attending seminars and demonizing one another in first-class style at a cost topping out at $9489 for NR and $8657 for the Nation’s plebians.

Their schedules have been cunningly arranged to avert a possible Monitor-Merrimac kind of naval engagement, missing each other by a day in ports of calls such as Sitka, Juneau and Ketchikan.

Stars for the left-leaning sailors are Ralph Nader, actor-activist Richard Dreyfuss and former CBS news producer Mary Mapes, who was terminated after a to-do over a segment about George Bush’s National Guard service in 2004. Regaling the right are such charmers as John Bolton, Robert Bork and Dick Morris.

As they bloviate in cool comfort, no wonder that those like Leahy who are laboring in steamy Washington are getting a little testy. Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales and the whole Bush crew are still sailing along, untouched.

Blonde Loyalty to Bush

Is there something in the White House water that deprives young women of free will and at the same time lightens their hair color?

The question is raised by Senate testimony today of Sara Taylor, following on recent public performances by Monica Goodling and Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino.

In answering some and evading other questions by the Judiciary Committee, Ms. Taylor showed a familiar undeviating loyalty to the Bush Administration and its master political chemist Karl Rove while navigating the narrows between perjury and contempt of Congress.

Pressuring the former White House political director, Democrats have a perception problem of their own, the risk of old pols appearing to bully a sincere young woman into betraying her former bosses.

"Having worked most of her adult life for President Bush,” her attorney wrote to the committee beforehand, “she is unquestionably loyal to the president. If there is to be a clash, we urge the Senate to direct its sanction against the White House, not against a former staffer."

It appears that Sen. Leahy et al will get very little help from Ms. Taylor. If they want the truth about the U.S. Attorney firing scandal, it will take a legal battle about executive privilege to get Rove’s testimony under oath.

Meanwhile, watching Ms. Taylor today evokes speculation about how different Paris Hilton’s life might be today if she had applied for a White House internship.