Impeach the Veep?--Michael Winship--Buzzflash

[Demeter]

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/11/con05458.html


November 29, 2005


A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Michael Winship

...I remember that within minutes of Agnew's stepping down, the kids at the campus newspaper (for various reasons, appropriately named "The Hatchet") had printed and distributed handbills featuring Agnew's mug behind prison bars.

The caption read, "One Down, One to Go."

But Agnew and Cheney's paths diverge radically when it comes to wielding real power. Agnew fell into the more traditional interpretation of the vice presidency, the office that Vice President "Cactus Jack" Garner famously described as worth no more than "a pitcher of warm spit," although I doubt he said "spit." Or, as Woodrow Wilson's more genteel veep, Thomas Riley Marshall, was fond of saying, "A woman had two sons. One ran away and went to sea; the other was elected Vice President of the United States. Neither was ever heard of again."

Not so with Cheney. In the words of former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein, for the first time, "We've had a president and a prime minister." In this week's issue of The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh writes that a former defense official told him the president has "become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney. 'They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,' the former defense official said."

Cheney has controlled the reins more tightly and secretively than any vice president in history, to the extent that, according to a report from the Center for Public Integrity, he and his staff have even "been exempting themselves from long-standing travel disclosure rules followed by the rest of the executive branch... As a result... the public is kept largely unaware of where he and his staff are traveling, with whom they are meeting and how much it costs, even though tax dollars are covering the bill."

Within Cheney's penchant for secrecy are suggestions of abuses of power far beyond the all-too-familiar accusations of finagling billions of dollars' worth of contracts for his old pals at Halliburton.

[cyr330]

1. Put his fat ass in jail

I wouldn't mind seeing some hard ass Mississippi Parchman Penitentiary inmates have their way with his porcine ass with no lube.