Is Dick Cheney the King of America?

As the Democratic-led Congress digs deeper into this administration's wrong doings, we continue to find Cheney showing up as a force that had huge impact and yet desired zero accountability, believing he was beyond it both legally and conceptually.

Chairman of the Oversight Committee, Henry Waxman, has written a letter to Cheney stating, "Your office may have the worst record in the executive branch for safeguarding classified information...Given this record, serious questions can be raised about both the legality and the advisability of exempting your office from the rules that apply to all other executive branch officials."

Cheney argues that the VP office is not part of the executive branch of government and therefore does not have to comply with numerous laws and orders. Last time I looked, his office was listed under "Executive Branch" of government. Also, isn't it quite interesting that Cheney's office was complying in 2001 and 2002 but decided to stop doing so in 2003. Smells like he didn't like doing it in those first two years, had David Addington et al working overtime to come up with some interpretation voiding this need to be accountable, and lo and behold in 2003 they apparently came up with some deranged view that they hoisted and have been hoisting ever since -- until we finally got a congress that would fight back.

In addition, King Cheney looked to abolish the agency that was giving him such headaches.

As if the above wasn't bad enough, we also learn from Rolling Stone magazine:

It is no secret that industry-connected appointees within the White House have worked actively to distort the findings of federal climate scientists, playing down the threat of climate change. But a new investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and enforced by none other than Karl Rove. An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act - as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration scientists and climate-policy officials - confirms that the White House has implemented an industry-formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the American public on global warming and to forestall limits on climate polluters.
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"It's a charade," says Jeremy Symons, who represented the EPA on Cheney's energy task force, the industry-studded group that met in secret to craft the administration's energy policy. "They have a single-minded determination to do nothing - while making it look like they are doing something."

A must-read article. Bush/Cheney/Rove basically organized and carried out a mafia-like hit on facts and science.

But deniers of climate change, who buy into all the orchestrated disinformation, will simply deny this investigation. After all, it's by the leftist, pinko Rolling Stone! Always easier to deny, deny, deny rather than get angry and demand accountability and retribution.

But one thing is certain: Cheney is one scary, scary entity (in his case, saying "person" just doesn't seem to fit).