DETROIT -- The vile symbiosis of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney poisons our nation, and their mutual madness infests and endangers the world. Never in the history of our republic has a vice president wielded so much power and the president permitted his subordinate to have such free rein in missions of malice.
Those twin felons, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, seem warm and benign by comparison. Their crimes and greed did far less harm to the country than the dirty duo we now have in the White House.
Bush and Cheney lie and deceive with such ease and arrogance that members of the truth-based community don't believe a word that passes from their pursed and smirking lips.
"I want to know the truth," Bush declared when the Justice Department began the investigation into who leaked the identity of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.
"If there is a leak in my administration, I want to know who it is," Bush said in July 2003, adding sanctimoniously, "Leaks of classified information are a bad thing." And then he looked into our eyes and proclaimed he didn't know "of anybody in my administration who leaked classified information." Lie. Lie. Lie. Lie. Bush's pants should have burst into flames.
Among his many other crimes, Bush deserves impeachment for that naked string of lies to the American people and his coverup of the leak scandal we now know he initiated. His co-conspirator was, of course, Dick Cheney.
Murray Waas of the "National Journal" reports that the outing of the CIA officer came as a consequence of a Bush-Cheney production to discredit her husband.
"President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war in Iraq, according to people familiar with the president's statement," Waas wrote.
I believe Cheney brought the issue to Bush, who then OK'd the smear campaign. We know from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's court filings that Cheney took a keen interest in Wilson's op-ed piece in The New York Times from the get-go. Wilson challenged the administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had been shopping for yellow cake uranium to fuel a nuclear weapons program.
Cheney clipped the article and wrote stinging criticism on it. He and Libby then had several discussions about what to do about Wilson's bold and courageous words of truth.
The fragile lies used to bring the nation to pre-emptive war easily crumbled under even the slightest weight of truth. Wilson had to be punished, and anyone else like him had to get the message -- tell the truth and you'll pay the price.
Waas also reports Bush told prosecutors he never told anyone to disclose Wilson's wife's identity and he had no information that "Cheney had disclosed Plame's identity or directed anyone else to do so."
But Cheney's slimy fingerprints are all over the scheme, and no one knows this better than Joe Wilson. I met him recently when he visited Michigan to campaign with Jim Marcinkowski, a Democratic candidate for Congress. He is a former CIA operations officer and old friend and colleague of Valerie Plame.
Marcinkowski was outraged over the White House role in outing her and the former prosecutor wants those responsible brought to justice. So far, it looks like only Scooter Libby will take the fall. Even if convicted for lying to prosecutors about his role in the plot to blow Plame's cover, he knows Bush will fully pardon him.
Marcinkowski is tough, straight-spoken and honest. If the Democrats could clone a couple dozen of him, they'd regain control of the House of Representatives. The drift of the nation into the Bushevik trap of trampling on the Bill of Rights in the name of national security deeply disturbs him.
"It is so serious and critical to tell the people this country needs to learn how to chew gum and walk at the same time -- meaning we have to be able to protect ourselves and protect the Constitution. If you can't do those, you don't belong in government. Period," he said.
Bush and Cheney are manifest failures at protecting the nation and the Constitution. They prefer to mold a monarchy and govern by fiat. Shared powers, restraint and responsibility have no place in their neo-fascist, dark vision of America's future.
Wilson said he's unsure about Cheney's "legal vulnerability," but added, "I must say I was taken aback when I saw the vice president had actually annotated my article." Wilson knows very well how such "suggestions" work.
"When you annotate articles for your staff at that level, and I know from having worked at that level, those are not idle questions being posed by a curious person. Those are, in effect, instructions to his staff," he said.
Libby's subsequent behavior bears that out. Cheney characterized Wilson's fact-finding trip to Niger on behalf of the CIA as a "junket" and said Wilson's wife had maneuvered the mission for him.
Forget the fact that Wilson had served as ambassador to Gabon and was intimately familiar with the political profile of the region -- the very reasons the CIA asked him to go to Africa to answer questions the vice president's office had raised.
Cheney was hell-bent on selling the "junket" lie. "The smear campaign against me and against Valerie in the aftermath used that exact language," Wilson said.
The loathsome Sen. Pat Roberts, part-time chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and full-time White House whore, often claimed Valerie Plame was not undercover, since she went to work every day at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Perhaps the dimwitted Roberts doesn't know thousands of undercover officers go to work at Langley every day.
"The idea that she was not covert, for them to continue to say that, that is just the perpetration of a disinformation campaign that's been ongoing from the very beginning. Mr. Fitzgerald made it very clear. She was a classified officer and she was classified in the interest of the United States of America, not her interest, in the interests of my country," said Wilson.
I asked Wilson, "Is there anything this administration would not do to deceive in the runup to this war?"
"It's not so much as we were duped, it's that we were actively acting on information we knew to be untrue in making the case to the American public -- that was what this administration was doing," he said.
That's why Bush and Cheney wanted to punish Joe Wilson. He speaks the truth about their lies. Compromising his wife's position and national security meant nothing to these ruthless renegades.
Valerie Plame is writing a book about her ordeal. "She has quite a story to tell," her husband said. I'll say. It's sure to be another exposure of the cynical synergy that drives our wounded nation -- the Siamese twin slime of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 11 2006 |