"A Heartbeat Away"

I don't have a problem with Dick Cheney telling Pat Leahy off on the Senate floor. Anything short of a Sumner-Brooks incident is preferable to the cloying bipartisanship that folks like David Broder advocate. And I think the phrasing with which the Washington Post chose to report it is odd:

The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.

"Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.

Wow, that is sobering, isn't it? George W. Bush is all that stands between us and a man who uses the kind of salty expressions that are utterly common among mechanics, bike messengers, lawyers, politicians, doctors, Washington Post reporters, and most other adults.

If I worry about Dick Cheney being a heartbeat away from the presidency, it's not because he curses. It's because he's an enemy of the Constitution with a predeliction for lying us into war.

If the Constitution means anything, it means that the president can't summarily declare American citizens outlaws to the Constitution, strip them of all rights to due process, and lock them up forever. But if Cheney has his way, that's exactly what will happen to anyone accused of plotting terrorism in this country. As Newsweek has reported, Cheney has pushed for much broader use of the"enemy combatant" designation:

"They are the enemy, and they're right here in the country," Cheney argued, according to a participant. But others were hesitant to take the extraordinary step of stripping the men of their rights, especially because there was no evidence that they had actually carried out any terrorist acts. Instead, John Ashcroft insisted he could bring a tough criminal case against them for providing"material support" to Al Qaeda....

In the months after 9/11 there were fierce debates—and even shouting matches—inside the White House over the treatment of Americans with suspected Qaeda ties.On one side, Ashcroft, perhaps in part protecting his turf, argued in favor of letting the criminal-justice system work, and warned that the White House had to be mindful of public opinion and a potentially wary Supreme Court. On the other, Cheney and Rumsfeld argued that in time of war there are few limits on what a president can do to protect the country.

It's really something when an executive branch official takes a position so far out there that it makes John Ashcroft into a defender of the Constitution. I wonder if Cheney told him to go fuck himself.

As for"lying us into war," we can debate whether many of Cheney's misstatements in the run-up to the Iraq War were outright lies or Clintonian half-truths. But on Gulf War One, the Christian Science Monitor and the St. Peterburg Times have him dead to rights.

Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated in mid–September that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key US oil supplier.

But when the St. Petersburg Times in Florida acquired two commercial Soviet satellite images of the same area, taken at the same time, no Iraqi troops were visible near the Saudi border – just empty desert....

Shortly before US strikes began in the Gulf War, for example, the St. Petersburg Times asked two experts to examine the satellite images of the Kuwait and Saudi Arabia border area taken in mid-September 1990, a month and a half after the Iraqi invasion. The experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare, pointed out the US build-up – jet fighters standing wing-tip to wing-tip at Saudi bases – but were surprised to see almost no sign of the Iraqis.

"That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn't exist," Ms. Heller says. Three times Heller contacted the office of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (now vice president) for evidence refuting the Times photos or analysis – offering to hold the story if proven wrong.

The official response:"Trust us." To this day, the Pentagon's photographs of the Iraqi troop buildup remain classified.

As SecDef in that war, Cheney added to his long record of contempt for constitutional limits by trying to convince George H.W. not to go to Congress for authorization before invading Iraq. And we're supposed to be appalled because he throws the F-bomb around?