Deadeye seems to believe it, or at least he acts like he does.

For the last four years, Vice President Dick Cheney has made the controversial claim that his office is not fully part of the Bush administration in order to exempt it from a presidential order regulating federal agencies' handling of classified national security information, officials said Thursday.

Cheney has held that his office is not fully part of the executive branch of government despite the continued objections of the National Archives, which says his office's failure to demonstrate that it has proper security safeguards in place could jeopardize the government's top secrets.

Well, it'll certainly give Obama a lot more leeway than he would have had, say, four-and-a-half years ago, assuming he doesn't take the high road and renounce it.  I'm hoping for a "low-road" performance on this one; if the Democrats treat being in government with half of the self-serving disdain for history and the public-at-large that this administration has, the coastal regions will be flooded with unprecedented levels of Republican bluster about how eeeeevil they are.

I really, honestly want to know how people who have supported this administration from the start feel about this kind of stuff.  Because I believe it all matters, and I get the impression that I'm in the minority around here on things like this, so I'd be interested to hear some explanations about where my thought process went wrong... 

I gotta tell you, Jamie, that your post was a little clunky with arcana making it difficult for me to sort through. At first I thought "Deadeye" was that new late night Fox show. Then I remembered that's "Redeye."

I still don't know what you mean about Obama though I read that part three times???

And as far as the "big news bulletin" du jour (as we say in Quebecois), I haven't really been following it at all. Why? Because after 7 years of the press reviling the Bush administration with increasing vitriol, I understand the arc of the story. Words like molehills, mountains, tempests and teapots come to mind. Seven years after, you see only tempests and mountains while mostly, I see teapots and molehills.

So if there is something huge and sinister about Cheney "hiding" "classified" material in regards to godknowswhat this time, I would expect the Democrats to inflate it. I would expect the Republicans to downplay it. Myself, I'm sick of the game. The proportionality (a popular word last summer...) has been lost and it will require several decades for cooler minds to prevail in sorting out this era. I'm leery of the superlatives. I am not interested enough to deeply delve into this one. It's a distraction from matters I rank higher on my personal Things to Worry About scale.

Notice how I don't bring up Clinton's National Security Advisor, Sandy Berger's having concealed and then stolen documents (originals not duplicated) from the National Archives? Notice that I don't do so because I'm not big on tit for tat, being that each politically motivated event is likely fraught with multiple layers of intentional mis- and dis-information that. It isn't even worthy of an "I know you are but what am I" retort. I still believe with the intense level of public scrutiny on any American in higher office, the misdeeds so often alleged are generally of a lesser degree than each side's enemies would have us believe. Both sides.

If any of your question has to do with Valerie Plame or Scooter Libby, I will direct you to this excellent Salon article with comments following. Maybe it will fill in some blanks. If it doesn't, well, the article is worth a read anyway.

It's just awfully hard to see through the thickets, isn't it? And the more so today than ever. Thank you, Google.

Susan

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin

My point was that I expect Obama to be the next vice-president of the United States, and that therefore every special privilege that Cheney manufactures for himself will have a precedent in a Clinton/Obama White House. My concern is that the Democrats will reject such an argument when it comes to their own mandate, to show how allegedly responsible and forthright they are.

And I'm in favor of any bargain that would calculate a ratio between the number of documents Berger shoved down his pants and the number of documents that would be affected by Cheney's end-run around the accountability of his office, and dealing out the punishment according to the same ratio...

I'm also in favor of applying the same argument to Cheney as has been applied to every American since the government decided that they're allowed to wiretap anyone they want, without oversight -- what's the worry, if there's nothing to hide?

     
“Half a truth is often a great lie.”

Ben Franklin