Hi Dick Cheney!

Is that how you spell the current VP-USA's name? For some reason, I don't remember and I can't be bothered to look it up.



Anyhow, ... just a quick word on his latest gambit for rationalizing his secretive ways.



Cheney is arguing that the agency that oversees the executive branch can't oversee him because his limited legislative duties have removed him from the executive branch. Earlier, and this was caught on "The Daily Show," Cheney had decreed that the Congressional overseers couldn't look into his discussions on energy policy with private sector energy executives, because he is part of the executive branch.

Numerous US constitutional scholars have pronounced this argument as absurd. It's hard to disagree. To take Cheney at his word, he's positing that the US "founding fathers" intended for the office of the Vice President of the United States to be beyond the reach of any of their system of checks and balances that applied to the President, the Senate, or any other such institution. No. According to this argument, the Vice President was intended to exist in some sort of constitutional netherworld, doing secretive, unstoppable work, crucial for any 18th century liberal conception of democratic government.

What's really going on here, of course, is that Cheney is once again revealing himself to be a not-so-bright, crude thug. This is yet another "fuck you" to the system of checks and balances that American government is based upon. Cheney has gotten away with everything else so far, and he's going to get away with this as well.

It's not a very clever ruse. But it didn't have to be. Cheney's not smart enough to come up with anything better, but it doesn't matter, does it?