Disabled Veterans’ Group Tells Cheney To Shove It

Created: July 28th, 2008 | Written By: Kathy

A disabled veterans’ group has cancelled a visit from Dick Cheney because His Royal Highness demanded security arrangements the vets felt were “Draconian and unreasonable“:

Vice President Cheney’s invitation to address wounded combat veterans next month has been yanked because the group felt his security demands were Draconian and unreasonable.

The veep had planned to speak to the Disabled American Veterans at 8:30 a.m. at its August convention in Las Vegas.

His staff insisted the sick vets be sequestered for two hours before Cheney’s arrival and couldn’t leave until he’d finished talking, officials confirmed.

“Word got back to us … that this would be a prerequisite,” said the veterans executive director, David Gorman, who noted the meeting hall doesn’t have any rest rooms. “We told them it just wasn’t acceptable.”

When Cheney spoke to the group in 2004, his handlers imposed the same stringent security lockdown, upsetting members, officials said.

Many of the vets are elderly and left pieces of themselves on foreign battlefields since World War II, and others were crippled by recent service in Iraq and Afghanistan. For health reasons, many can’t be stuck in a room for hours.

“It was a huge imposition on our delegates,” added David Autry, another Disabled American Veterans official.

Autry said vets would’ve had to get up “at Oh-dark-30 and try to get breakfast and showered and get their prosthetics on.”

Once inside, they “could not leave the meeting room, and the bathrooms are outside,” he said.

Cheney’s office acknowledged the security requests, but insisted he is sensitive to combat veterans’ needs.

Torture and Warrantless Surveillance Are the Same Issue

Created: July 13th, 2008 | Written By: Kathy

Via Glenn, the Washington Post has a write-up on Jane Mayer’s new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on America’s Ideals. Here is what Mayer reveals in that book, which is due out this week:

Read more

“Constraint is Intolerable”

Created: July 12th, 2008 | Written By: matttbastard

Andrew Bacevich, reviewing Jane Mayer’s new book The Dark Side:

That fear should trump concern for due process and indeed justice qualifies as a recurring phenomenon in American history. In 1919, government-stoked paranoia about radicalism produced the Red Scare. After Pearl Harbor, hysteria mixed with racism led to the confinement of some 110,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps. The onset of the Cold War triggered another panic, anxieties about a new communist threat giving rise to McCarthyism. In this sense, the response evoked by 9/11 looks a bit like déjà vu all over again: Frightened Americans, more worried about their own safety than someone else’s civil liberties, allowed senior government officials to exploit a climate of fear.

Although Mayer does not dwell on this historical context, her account suggests implicitly that the present period differs in at least one crucial respect. Whereas the earlier departures from the rule of law represented momentary if egregious lapses in democratic practice, the abuses orchestrated from within the Bush administration suggest that democracy itself is fast becoming something of a sham. From Mayer, we learn that in George W. Bush’s Washington, the decisions that matter are made in secret by a handful of presidential appointees committed to the proposition that nothing should inhibit the exercise of executive power. The Congress, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the “interagency process” — all of these constitute impediments that threaten to constrain the president. In a national security crisis, constraint is intolerable. Much the same applies to the media and, by extension, to the American people: The public’s right to know extends no further than whatever the White House wishes to make known.

h/t Laura Rozen

Cheney Disses West Virginia

Created: June 2nd, 2008 | Written By: Kathy

Dick Cheney’s West Virginia incest joke elicits this response from John Cole, a West Virginia native:

I got about eight instant messages from people linking to this, and I would have posted something earlier but I was in bed with my sister. Just kidding, just kidding- that was a joke. Everyone who knows me is aware she isn’t my type, besides, she is dating my brother.

In all seriousness, that gets to the heart of the matter- anyone who has lived in WV for more than, say, an hour, has heard and probably made (as a matter of a defense mechanism) every incest joke you can think of already. While it was a a stupid thing to say and I expect every WV politician to denounce it, I am betting most of us don’t care what that corrupt old bastard has to say about us.

At least he didn’t shoot someone in the face this time.

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