1 Boring Old Man

This article is worth reading in toto, even though it’s 8 pages long and mentions a gaggle of economists that you’ve never heard of. It’s about the abject failure of academic and government economists to understand, regulate, or predict our economy: I’ve reprinted Krugman’s conclusions:

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
New York Times
By PAUL KRUGMAN
September 2, 2009

…

VIII. RE-EMBRACING KEYNES

So here’s what I think economists have to do. First, they have to face up to the inconvenient reality that financial markets fall far short of perfection, that they are subject to extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds. Second, they have to admit — and this will be very hard for the people who giggled and whispered over Keynes — that Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions. Third, they’ll have to do their best to incorporate the realities of finance into macroeconomics.

Many economists will find these changes deeply disturbing. It will be a long time, if ever, before the new, more realistic approaches to finance and macroeconomics offer the same kind of clarity, completeness and sheer beauty that characterizes the full neoclassical approach. To some economists that will be a reason to cling to neoclassicism, despite its utter failure to make sense of the greatest economic crisis in three generations. This seems, however, like a good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.”

When it comes to the all-too-human problem of recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly. The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won’t be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of being at least partly right.

I’m reminded of Chaos Theory, that elegant bit of mathematics that throws a monkey wrench in our wished for orderly understanding of mathematical processes. It started with weather scientists who were trying to use all the weather stations left over from World War II to make long term weather predictions. Their mainframe computer models  didn’t work. One day, while crunching the numbers, the machine shut down. After it was fixed, they typed in the values from where they left off. That radically changed the output. What they learned was that it was due to rounding off. But more importantly, they realized that in the real world, tiny events could make alterations. The usual example [the butterfly effect] is that a butterfly flapping its wings on the west coast can markedly influence the path of a storm on the east coast.

As Krugman goes through the various economic models, he notes that they are all based on rational behavior of the markets, pricing, and investors – an obvious fallacy. He also talks about the economists’ personal investment in their pet theories – Greenspan takes a huge [well-deserved] hit. Robert Shiller [the bubbles guy] looks like a hero. Krugman remains enamored with John Maynard Keynes, the theorist who recommended big government spending as a response to Recession/Depression.

Whitehouse and the Corpus Delicti Leading to Cheney
By: emptywheel
September 2, 2009 6:00 pm

^{A number of you have pointed to this article, where Sheldon Whitehouse speaks of the corpus delicti that justifies an investigation.}

^{The prosecutor is often first presented with a case as a "corpus delicti" — a bullet-riddled body in the street, for instance. That ordinarily is enough to justify investigation. Through investigation, the evidence may prove that there was not in fact a crime [it was a suicide or an accident] or that the fatal acts were privileged or enjoy a legal defense [self-defense or justifiable shooting by an officer of the law]. But one begins by investigation.}

^{Here he is on KO tying the dead bodies of torture right to Dick Cheney. As he says,} 

If you don’t have anything to hide, you don’t often spend a great deal of time trying to hide it.

^{Senator Sheldon Whitehouse being sworn in by a Sith Lord}

Dick Cheney’s Version
New York Times Editorial
September 2, 2009

^{After the C.I.A. inspector general’s report on prisoner interrogation was released last week, former Vice President Dick Cheney settled into his usual seat on Fox News to express his outrage — not at the illegal and immoral behavior laid out in the report, of course, but at the idea that anyone would object to torturing prisoners. He was especially vexed that the Obama administration was beginning an investigation.}

^{In Mr. Cheney’s view, it is not just those who followed orders and stuck to the interrogation rules set down by President George Bush’s Justice Department who should be sheltered from accountability. He said he also had no problem with those who disobeyed their orders and exceeded the guidelines.}

• ^{It’s easy to understand Mr. Cheney’s aversion to the investigation that Attorney General Eric Holder ordered last week. On Fox, Mr. Cheney said it was hard to imagine it stopping with the interrogators. He’s right.The government owes Americans a full investigation into the orders to approve torture, abuse and illegal, secret detention, as well as the twisted legal briefs that justified those policies. Congress and the White House also need to look into illegal wiretapping and the practice of sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured. Mr. Cheney was at the center of each of these insults to this country’s Constitution, its judicial system and its bedrock democratic values. To defend himself, he offers a twisted version of history.}
• ^{He says Mr. Bush’s Justice Department determined that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” ordered by the president were legal under American law and international treaties like the Geneva Conventions. In reality, those opinions were based on a corrupt and widely discredited legal analysis cooked up after the White House had already decided to use long-banned practices like waterboarding…}
• ^{He insists the inspector general’s findings were “completely reviewed” by the Justice Department and that any follow-up investigation would be improper and unnecessary. In reality, Mr. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, did not appoint an independent investigator after receiving the inspector general’s report, which was completed in 2004. The Justice Department decided there was only one narrow case worth pursuing, involving a civilian contractor — hardly a surprise from a thoroughly politicized department whose top officials set the very rules they were supposed to be judging….}
• ^{Mr. Cheney claims that waterboarding and other practices widely considered to be torture or abuse “were absolutely essential” in stopping another terrorist attack on the United States after Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Cheney is right when he says detainees who were subject to torture and abuse gave up valuable information. But the men who did the questioning flatly dispute that it was duress that moved them to do so…}

^{Deuce Martinez, the C.I.A. officer who interrogated Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, engineer of the 9/11 mass murders, said he used traditional interrogation methods, and not the infliction of pain and panic. And, in an article on the Times Op-Ed page, Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent who oversaw the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, another high-ranking terrorist, denounced “the false claims” about harsh interrogations. Mr. Soufan said Mr. Zubaydah talked before he was subjected to waterboarding and other abuse…}

^{Every week, it seems, new disclosures about this sordid history dribble out. This week, Physicians for Human Rights analyzed what the inspector general’s report said about the involvement of C.I.A. physicians and psychiatrists in the abuse of prisoners. It said they not only monitored torture, like waterboarding, but also kept data on the prisoners’ reaction in ways that “may amount to human experimentation.”}

^{Getting at the truth is not going to be easy. The C.I.A. destroyed evidence — videotapes of interrogations — and is now refusing to release its records of the questioning of its prisoners. It also is asking the courts to keep secret the orders Mr. Bush gave authorizing the interrogations, and the original Justice Department memos concluding that they were legal. Americans need much more than glimpses of the truth. They should not have to decide whether to believe former interrogators, whom they do not know, or Mr. Cheney, who did not hesitate while in office to mislead them when it suited his political aims.}

Back in November, I was planning to stop my incessant blogging. There wouldn’t be anything to blog about, I thought. Bush would evaporate into the Texas brush and Cheney would ride off into the Wyoming sunset. Well, I was half right. Now, I find myself tracking Cheney like he was a terrorist [okay, is a terrorist]. These posts are why he failed to ride off into the sunset. He’s in big trouble. Now he’s good with managing big trouble, but what he’s doing right now isn’t how you do that [managing big trouble]. So Why is he talking all the time? It reminds me of the outing of Valerie Plame in response to Joe Wilson’s op-ed back in 2003, some three months into the Iraq Invasion. Had the Bush Administration done what they usually do, sit it out with a few terse denials, it probably would’ve passed. Cheney’s provocations now may be stirring his base, but they’re stirring us too.

So, why? It is a regular feature of people with Narcissistic Personality Disorders, which he has in spades. They seem impervious to criticism. They say they are impervious to criticism. But, in truth, they are exquisitely sensitive to personal slights, criticism, being disdained. In the case of Wilson, his op-ed said that his trip to Niger was in response to a request from Cheney’s office [true]. With Torture, every article has his name in it – we could call it Cheney’s Torture Program accurately. And an unscrupulous psychiatrist might say the way to flush out a Narcissist would be to keep the insults coming.

Living in a Culture of Cruelty: Democracy as Spectacle
t r u t h o u t
by: Henry A. Giroux
02 September 2009

^{Under the Bush administration, a seeping, sometimes galloping, authoritarianism began to reach into every vestige of the culture, giving free rein to those anti-democratic forces in which religious, market, military and political fundamentalism thrived, casting an ominous shadow over the fate of United States democracy. During the Bush-Cheney regime, power became an instrument of retribution and punishment was connected to and fueled by a repressive state. A bullying rhetoric of war, a ruthless consolidation of economic forces, and an all-embracing free-market apparatus and media driven pedagogy of fear supported and sustained a distinct culture of cruelty and inequality in the United States. In pointing to a culture of cruelty, I am not employing a form of left moralism that collapses matters of power and politics into the discourse of character. On the contrary, I think the notion of a culture of cruelty is useful in thinking through the convergence of everyday life and politics, of considering material relations of power – the disciplining of the body as an object of control – on the one hand, and the production of cultural meaning, especially the co-optation of popular culture to sanction official violence, on the other. The culture of cruelty is important for thinking through how life and death now converge in ways that fundamentally transform how we understand and imagine politics in the current historical moment – a moment when the most vital of safety nets, health care reform, is being undermined by right-wing ideologues. What is it about a culture of cruelty that provides the conditions for many Americans to believe that government is the enemy of health care reform and health care reform should be turned over to corporate and market-driven interests, further depriving millions of an essential right?}

^{Increasingly, many individuals and groups now find themselves living in a society that measures the worth of human life in terms of cost-benefit analyzes. The central issue of life and politics is no longer about working to get ahead, but struggling simply to survive. And many groups, who are considered marginal because they are poor, unemployed, people of color, elderly or young, have not just been excluded from "the American dream," but have become utterly redundant and disposable, waste products of a society that not longer considers them of any value. How else to explain the zealousness in which social safety nets have been dismantled, the transition from welfare to workfare (offering little job training programs and no child care), and recent acrimony over health care reform’s public option? What accounts for the passage of laws that criminalize the behavior of the 1.2 million homeless in the United States, often defining sleeping, sitting, soliciting, lying down or loitering in public places as a criminal offence rather than a behavior in need of compassionate good will and public assistance? Or, for that matter, the expulsions, suspensions, segregation, class discrimination and racism in the public schools as well as the more severe beatings, broken bones and damaged lives endured by young people in the juvenile justice system? Within these politics, largely fueled by market fundamentalism – one that substitutes the power of the social state with the power of the corporate state and only values wealth, money and consumers – there is a ruthless and hidden dimension of cruelty, one in which the powers of life and death are increasingly determined by punishing apparatuses, such as the criminal justice system for poor people of color and/or market forces that increasingly decide who may live and who may die.}

^{The growing dominance of a right-wing media forged in a pedagogy of hate has become a crucial element providing numerous platforms for a culture of cruelty and is fundamental to how we understand the role of education in a range of sites outside of traditional forms of schooling. This educational apparatus and mode of public pedagogy is central to analyzing not just how power is exercised, rewarded and contested in a growing culture of cruelty, but also how particular identities, desires and needs are mobilized in support of an overt racism, hostility towards immigrants and utter disdain, coupled with the threat of mob violence toward any political figure supportive of the social contract and the welfare state. Citizens are increasingly constructed through a language of contempt for all noncommercial public spheres and a chilling indifference to the plight of others that is increasingly expressed in vicious tirades against big government and health care reform. There is a growing element of scorn on the part of the American public for those human beings caught in the web of misfortune, human suffering, dependency and deprivation. As Barbara Ehrenreich observes, "The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks"…}

I agree with every word written here – every single one – although I think it antedates the Bush Administration. It feels to me like I lived long enough to see America crash and burn, another Rome collapsing under the greed of the elite and the disillusionment of the poor – crime and hatred at the top of the economic ladder and crime and hatred at its bottom, growing to meet in the middle. The zone between the gated communities and the ghetto is shrinking…

Sanford, invoking Palin, vows to fight on
Washington Times
September 02, 2009

^{Embattled South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford acknowledged Tuesday that he has been shaken by the failure of a single fellow Republican to back him in his fight to save his job, but vowed to fight on for conservative causes and for "what God wanted me to do with my life." The governor, trying to survive a scandal involving a widely publicized extramarital affair, also compared a new ethics probe over his travel and personal expenses to what he called the baseless complaints brought against former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin…}

^{Mr. Sanford vowed not to quit despite growing pressure from South Carolina lawmakers and Republican Party officials to resign or face impeachment. He said he intends to complete his term, not to hold on to power but to fight for conservative principles of governance. "I feel absolutely committed to the cause, to what God wanted me to do with my life," he said in an interview. "I have got this blessing of being engaged in a fight for liberty, which is constantly being threatened"…}

^{Republican members of the South Carolina House, at a private retreat over the weekend in Myrtle Beach, agreed to ask Mr. Sanford to step down. Days earlier, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, also a Republican, called on the governor to quit. "The consensus was for the governor to resign, and nobody in the room said the governor should not resign," House Speaker Pro Tem Harry Cato, a Republican, told The Times on Saturday…}

^{Adding to Mr. Sanford’s woes, a poll released Friday found that 49.5 percent of South Carolina voters now want Mr. Sanford to go, compared with 36.6 percent who say he should remain in office. The result stands in sharp contrast to a similar poll shortly after the affair was revealed, when a majority of state voters said he should stay.}

^{Mr. Sanford said his lack of support stems in part from the resentment arising from his efforts to challenge the status quo, including tort reform and a battle all the way to the state Supreme Court to kill a spending measure loaded with political pork for special interests. "We have really changed the way things have been done in this state for a long time, and that produced bruised feelings" among legislators in both parties, Mr. Sanford said.}

^{Mr. Sanford acknowledged being jarred by the total lack of support from fellow Republicans in recent days, but said his isolation had only increased his focus on the fight to save his job. "What happened is that you take your eye off the ball and have the moral failing that I did," Mr. Sanford said, "and suddenly you are off the playing field. Then you realize how blessed you were to have been on that playing field"… After the affair was revealed, his wife moved out of the Statehouse with the couple’s four sons. "Never again," he said in the interview. "In many cases in life, you never fully appreciate your blessings until you lose them."}

First, in case you’re not from the South, South Carolina is one of the most conservative places on this planet. The notion that Sanford is being opposed because of his conservative values is ludicrous. Nor are people thinking he took his eye off the ball. His marital duplicity was done under the nose of his very credible wife who was trying to help him stay in the ball park. And his notion that God called him to be Governor is fanciful. The people of South Carolina called him to be Governor by voting for him – and they’re not calling anymore. So as for his being one of the "Chosen People," everyone around him is questioning that – they want to "unchoose" him.

One thing is clear. Mark Sanford thinks he’s "special." He thinks he ought to be able to do whatever he wants to do. If he messes up, he feels entitled to be forgiven. He reminds me of Ted Haggard, who also feels like he’s an injured party. They both complain that they "slipped" and ought to be forgiven. They both evoke job pressures as causative factors. They both want to avoid acknowledging their lies. In my humble opinion, the operative principle is simple – don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. People want Mark Sanford to go away because he’s an embarassing, self righteous, lightweight who looks sillier and sillier every time he opens his mouth. The operative scripture for Mark Sanford is Job 1:21.

The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away…

from democrats.com: We join with FoxNewsBoycott, ColorOfChange, and other groups in this boycott.

Cancellations [Beck/FOX]

Our targets [9/2/09]

Allergan Ally Bank (GMAC) Ancestry.com Applebees AT&T Bank of America Bell & Howell Best Buy Binder & Binder [Beck] Blaine Labs Brez (Airware) Broadview Security Campbell’s Soup Clorox Closing.com [Beck] CVS Dannon [Beck] DirecTV DITECH.com Farmers Insurance FreeCreditReport.com Geico General Mills Healthy Choice (Conagra) Johnson & Johnson Kraft Foods Lawyers.com Lowe’s Mens Wearhouse Nutrisystem Proctor & Gamble Progressive Insurance Radio Shack Re-Bath Regions Roche S.C. Johnson SAM (Store and Move) Sanof-Aventis SpendOnLife.com [FOX] Sprint State Farm Sargento Cheese TheElationsCo Travelers Insurance Travelocity Tylenol UPS Verizon Wireless Vonage Walmart

Accu-Chek (Roche) Bosley.com BuyWaterJet.com CancerCenter.com Carbonite.com Cash4Gold.com Consumer Debt Cooney & Conway Discover EasyWater.com EmpireToday.com EncoreDental.com ExploreHumana.com GoToMeeting.com Johnson Law Group LearCapital.com LibertyMedical.com Merit Financial NecklineSlimmer.com OxiClean Pearle Vision PulaskiLawFirm.com Rosland Capital ServPro.com SmartBalance TDAmeritrade The Villages VeteranMeso.com Video Professor ZeroWater.com

Well, I, for one, have had it. My entire retirement account is invested with TDAmeritrade. We initiated moving the whole account to someone else today. Our financial adviser thought we were kidding. We aren’t. And I was about to sign up to have my computers backed up on Carbonite.com, but instead sent them an email explaining why I’m not going to do it. The show put on by our Republican Congressmen, by Fox News, by Talk Radio, and by the Wall Street Journal has been absolutely shameful. I can’t make it stop, but I can sure stop supporting the forces that have financed their misbehaving so badly. In the scope of things, I can’t do much personal damage, but at least I can do something. I hope you and every right-thinking American joins the boycott. Fox News is a cancer on our land…

emptywheel in response to WilliamOckham

Hey, where’s the rest of the documents? In the remand order, the judge refers to 319 documents (including the IG report). The CIA released eight documents. That Vaughn index covers about 150 documents. Am I missing something or does this not add up?

There’s another Vaughn covering OLC documents coming:

There are also outstanding OLC docs [we’ve gotten about 43 out of 181] included in the 319 number. I think we will get a separate Vaughn declaration/index for those.

The thought of Dick Cheney as President is intolerable to me if that is even a remote possibility. It would be the end of the America as we know it. Simply read the text of his interview with Chris Wallace on Sunday – bombing Iran, Torture, contemptuousness, sarcasm…

Cheney’s dark side – and ours
Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson
September 1, 2009

The more Dick Cheney defends torture, the more we Americans must end our tortured ambivalence. Either we are above using the same interrogation practices that police states use, or we are are not. This past weekend, the former vice president said he knew about waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques used by CIA personnel on terror suspects and even defended officers who went beyond authorized methods. He said they were “absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States.’’

Going further, he said it “offends the hell out of me’’ that the Obama administration has decided to investigate prisoner abuse by the CIA. He called it an “outrageous political act’’ that will demoralize the intelligence community to the point where “nobody’s going to sign up for those kinds of missions.’’

It would be easy at this juncture to demonize Cheney, who was so wrong so often in his eight years in office, most notably about the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that he and President Bush used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That war has cost the lives of more than 4,300 American soldiers, with another 31,400 wounded, and about 100,000 documented deaths of Iraqi civilians, according to Iraqbodycount.org.

But Cheney’s role is an old, if still developing story. After all, he warned us five days after Sept. 11 that our government would work on the “dark side.’’ He told the late Tim Russert, “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.’’ A majority of Americans thought Cheney was right. Despite the false pretenses for war and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses that were exposed in the spring of 2004, Bush and Cheney were reelected.

Now, as Cheney continues to defend the dark side – even without conclusive proof that waterboarding coughed up critical intelligence – he is daring Americans to come out of the shadows to demand a bright light on interrogation and prisoner-treatment practices that render us hypocrites on human rights. To some degree, Attorney General Eric Holder is attempting this with his probe. But it appears that the inquiry will be limited to any CIA officers who went beyond legally authorized methods.

That is not enough. President Obama has sought to avoid controversy – and avoid demoralizing the CIA – by saying he wants to look forward, not backward. But these last eight years have revealed too many brutal abuses to write them off as only the actions of a few rogues. We are at the point where nothing less than full congressional hearings, or a full Justice Department investigation, will let us know how high the rot started and how deep it went.

The rot in our national morality is evident in a June poll by the Associated Press, which found that 52 percent of Americans said torture was sometimes or often justified to obtain information from terror suspects. An April CNN poll found that even though 60 percent of Americans thought harsh techniques including waterboarding constituted torture, 50 percent approved of them. A Washington Post/ABC News Poll was almost evenly split between Americans who say we should never use torture (49 percent) and should use torture in some cases (48 percent).

Whether it is because of the politics of fear that defined the Bush-Cheney years, the recession engulfing the Obama administration, or simply an indifference to foreigners languishing in jail, Americans have displayed scant curiosity about the dark side. A May McClatchy poll found Americans to be almost evenly split on having a “bipartisan blue-chip commission’’ on interrogations, and the CNN poll found nearly two-thirds disapproving of either a congressional investigation or independent panel. This is a level of apathy, even civic debasement that makes it no wonder Cheney can spout off despite leaving America in a disgraceful place. He feels empowered to defend the dark side, because we have yet to shine a light.

McCain Whacks Cheney:

Torture Violated Law And Helped The Terrorists
Huffington Post
08/30/2009

In a strong pushback against claims made by former Vice President Dick Cheney, Sen. John McCain insisted on Sunday that the use of torture on terrorism suspects violated international law, didn’t work, and actually helped al Qaeda recruit additional members. "I think the interrogations were in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the convention against torture that we ratified under President Reagan," said the Arizona Republican. "I think these interrogations, once publicized, helped al Qaeda recruit. I got that from an al Qaeda operative in a prison camp in Iraq… I think that the ability of us to work with our allies was harmed. And I believe that information, according go the FBI and others, could have been gained through other members"…

Vets’ group assails Fox, GOP over ‘suicide’ manual claim
Raw Story
by Daniel Tencer
August 31, 2009

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s claim that a Veterans’ Administration handbook urges veterans to "commit suicide" is an "asinine assertion with no basis in fact," says a veterans’ group. The group, Veterans for Common Sense, is demanding an apology from Steele for making the claim, and from Fox News for perpetuating the claim.

Steele made the comments on Fox Tuesday, during a debate about health care reform. Arguing that public health care would lead to people being forced to their deathbeds, Steele used the VA health system as proof this would come to pass. "Just look at the situation with our veterans, when you have a manual out there telling our veterans stuff like, ‘are you really of value to your community,’ you know, encouraging them to commit suicide," Steele said.

"Let me be absolutely clear, Steele lied. There is no VA manual encouraging veterans to commit suicide," said Paul Sullivan, the executive director of VCS, in a press release.

The controversy began August 18, when an op-ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal, written by the former head of faith-based initiatives for the Bush administration, Jim Towey, claiming that the VA manual for veterans amounts to a "death book." Since then, the talking point has been picked up by opponents of health care reform. Towey, as the White House has pointed out, runs an organization that offers a competing handbook to the one provided by the VA.

Veterans for Common Sense is also seeking redressal from Fox News for what it says was an unfair cropping of quotes from a VA document "to falsely suggest that the Obama administration is pressuring veterans to end their lives prematurely," as Media Matters reported.

• Obama is a Moslem
• Obama is a Communist
• Obama is a Socialist
• Obama is a Fascist
• Obama is a Racist
• Obama is all of the above

We had taped the Kennedy Funeral – the Celebration of Kennedy’s life – and I watched a piece of it last night. The eloquence of the speakers was stirring – Robert Kennedy’s son, Senator Chris Dodd, even Senator Orin Hatch. Their words sounded like an echo in some ancient hall when the world was younger, more hopeful. All of these Republican Talking Points make me feel like I live in a different, nastier world where lies and contempt are the currency of political life.

I remember this feeling from the Clinton years. They hadn’t perfected their attacks quite yet. Fox News didn’t run on so many public tvs then. The former Administration respected the time honored rule of staying off the public stage. But they did go after Bill Clinton with a vengeance, and they finally got him [with his help]. I remember being exhausted by it all and becoming politically apathetic. A lot of us were, and they snuck in George W. Bush under the wire – a legacy Republican who opened the gates to a torrent of unprincipled, evil men who literally deconstructed our government.

Cheney swore off ‘moderate’ campaign promises a month after 2000 election.
ThinkProgress
By Amanda Terkel
April 1, 2008

In his new book, former Rhode Island Republican senator Lincoln Chafee reveals that even before President Bush was sworn into office after the 2000 elections, Cheney had rejected the “moderate course” laid out in their campaign:

The former Senator describes a December 2000 meeting of Republican moderates with Vice President-elect Cheney. Chafee listened as Cheney swore off the moderate course he and Bush had just finished championing in their campaign. Hearing Cheney say “the campaign was over and that our actions in office would not be dictated by what had to be said in the campaign,” Chafee writes, was “the most demoralizing moment of my seven-year tenure in the Senate.”

In his book, Chafee angrily adds about the incident, “Mr. Cheney tore our best campaign promises to shreds and the moderates acquiesced instead of pelting him with outrage.”

Yesterday, Cheney was on tv explaining that Obama was going back on his promises – not to prosecute CIA Agents who followed Yoo’s Memos. Holder has instigated an investigation of whether Agents overstepped the Memos, yet Cheney presents this as a broken promise. And as Chaffee pointed out, Cheney isn’t himself exactly a promise keeper. Just more wet noodles thrown against the wall.

Former Top Interrogators Back Wide-Ranging Criminal Probe Into Torture
By Jason Leopold
The Public Record
Aug 23rd, 2009

… Jack Cloonan, a former FBI security and counterterrorism expert who was assigned to the agency’s elite Bin Laden Unit, Col. Steve Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the Defense Department’s most effective interrogators, and Matthew Alexander,who was the senior interrogator for the task force in Iraq that tracked down al-Qaeda-in-Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in 2006, said ignoring clear-cut evidence of interrogation-related crimes would encourage more law-breaking in the future. Alexander uses a pseudonym for security reasons.

Cloonan and Kleinman, who conducted interrogations of terror suspects after 9/11, disputed claims by former CIA Director Michael Hayden and Republican lawmakers that a criminal investigation would damage intelligence gathering and could lead to another 9/11-type attack on the United States. In an interview, Cloonan and Kleinman said Hayden and the lawmakers were sounding “false alarms” in an effort to keep serious crimes from being exposed. “What this is really about is cover your ass,” Cloonan said. “To suggest [intelligence gathering] will come to a screeching halt if there were an investigation is not accurate”…

… Cloonan and Kleinman said Hayden and the GOP senators were sounding “false alarms” in an effort to keep serious crimes from being exposed and prosecuted. Cloonan, who retired in 2002 after more than 25 years in the FBI, said neither he nor the intelligence community believes that an investigation into torture will result in a threat to national security…

The statement, "Prosecuting criminal behavior will undermine National Security" is absurd in an absolute sense. In my last post, I quoted Cheney accusing Obama of disavowing responsibility for Holder’s decision to investigate the Torture Program. His claim is that the President is the Chief Legal Officer on the land. Well how about Tricky Dick Nixon’s little try at that? As I recall, he gave that idea a spin, and it didn’t fly. And how about the fact that the entire upper echelon of the DoJ resigned when they were caught trying to control the DoJ from the White House [US Attorney firings]?

Cheney’s Sophistry on Torture Investigations
By: emptywheel
August 30, 2009

It will not surprise you to learn that PapaDick parsed wildly about what Obama has said about torture in Cheney’s defense of torture today. Five times today, Cheney claimed that Obama is "going back on his word," "his promise," that "his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel."

• "President Obama made the announcement some weeks ago that this would not happen, that his administration would not go back and look at or try to prosecute CIA personnel"…
• "We had the president of the United States, President Obama, tell us a few months ago there wouldn’t be any investigation like this, that there would not be any look back at CIA personnel who were carrying out the policies of the prior administration. Now they get a little heat from the left wing of the Democratic Party, and they’re reversing course on that"…
• "The president is the chief law enforcement officer in the administration. He’s now saying, well, this isn’t anything that he’s got anything to do with. He’s up on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard and his attorney general is going back and doing something that the president said some months ago he wouldn’t do"…
• "Instead, they’re out there now threatening to disbar the lawyers who gave us the legal opinions, threatening contrary to what the president originally said. They’re going to go out and investigate the CIA personnel who carried out those investigations. I just think it’s an outrageous political act that will do great damage long term to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions, without having to worry about what the next administration is going to say"…
• "I think if you look at the Constitution, the president of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer in the land. The attorney general’s a statutory officer. He’s a member of the cabinet. The president’s the one who bears this responsibility. And for him to say, gee, I didn’t have anything to do with it, especially after he sat in the Oval Office and said this wouldn’t happen, then Holder decides he’s going to do it"…
• "But my concern is that the damage that will be done by the President of the United States going back on his word, his promise about investigations of CIA personnel who have carried those policies, is seriously going to undermine the moral, if you will, of our folks out at the agency"…

Of course, as is Cheney’s sophistic habit, his description of what Obama said changes: from "looking at or trying to prosecute CIA personnel" to "looking at CIA personnel who were carrying out the policy of the prior administration" to "his promise about investigations of CIA personnel who have carried those policies." Here’s what Obama said in his official statement.

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.

That is, Obama assured those who tortured "relying in good faith upon legal advice" from DOJ that they would not be prosecuted.

• Obama said nothing about those who ignored or overstepped that legal advice.
• He said nothing about those who tortured before that legal advice.
• He said nothing about those who gave the legal advice.

I am going to fight the impulse to retort what Cheney says. emptywheel said all that needs to be said. I will remark that Mr. Cheney is one of the nastiest characters we’ve seen for a very long time, and he seems to be getting nastier.  What I do want to say is that after I read this, I thought, Dick Cheney is getting scared. And he should be scared. He bullied us into a war; he outed a CIA Agent; he directed a secret torture program and a secret eavesdropping program by manipulating the DoJ; he consciously lied about all of it the whole time. His reign of intimidation may be coming to a close at last. I doubt that anyone on either side of the Aisle really cares what he thinks anymore, including his fellow Republicans. He’s just a has-been…