Sunday, January 04, 2009

Cheney Again Hides Behind Presidential Power

CHENEY LOOKS SICKLY ON MORNING TALK SHOW

Dick Cheney sounded a bit too much like President Nixon this morning with Bob Schieffer. If you have been watching television lately you might have noticed ads for the movie "Frost/Nixon" featuring actor Frank Langhella impersonating Nixon saying, "It's legal if the president does it."

On Face the Nation, a gaunt and raspy-voiced Cheney said something similar in an exchange where the veep referenced Abraham Lincoln's controversial suspension of habeus corpus during the Civil War. (Click here to watch the clip from rawstory.com.)

"It certainly was in the sense he wasn't impeached," said Cheney, "And it was a wartime measure that he took that I think history says today, yeah, that was probably a good thing to do."

Cheney's response is an awkward version of "it's only illegal, if you get caught," and further illustrates the Bush-Cheney chutzpah of the last eight years will continue. Shortly after the Abu Ghraib disaster and massive flubbing of Katrina, the administration has, in a sense, thrown in the towel in regards to convincing the public their policies are beneficial in the short term. Instead, both the president and Cheney resort to using rhetoric from the future--history will vindicate us!--it possibly could, but likely will not, but it's all they have.

At a few points in this interview, Cheney is downright unapologetic about some of the policies he and the president have supported. One could almost see such sanguine answers as evidence used in the court of law. Hopefully lunatics on the left save their energy and focus it on taking advantage of the monumental opportunity afforded by the last eight years and remake the nation in a progressive image of equality and domestic tranquility.

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