Liz and Dick

I don't mean Taylor and Burton.

Former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney and her farther, former Vice President Dick Cheney, recently announced that they will be both be voting for Kamala Harris for President.  And to top that, Liz Cheney also said she is supporting Democratic U.S. Representative Colin Allred's campaign for the Senate against incumbent Ted Cruz in Texas. 

Having both represented all of Wyoming in the U.S. House, the Cheneys are among the most conservative politicians in recent history - some would call them reactionary - but one thing they agree with the Democrats on is that Donald Trump is a danger to a free, democratic representative government and that he must be stopped.  They're essentially giving Republicans a permission slip to vote for Harris.

I don't think that's going to be very successful.  Most Republicans have already left the party because of Trump. and those few remaining registered Republicans who oppose him are outnumbered by the new MAGA voters Trump brought in in 2016 and continues to bring in to this day.  As for Republican officeholders, they're too scared to speak out against Trump.  Half of them are afraid of losing their offices to the MAGA voters and the other half are afraid of losing their lives - to those same MAGA voters, who are likely uncowed by anti-lynching laws.  (They wanted to hang Mike Pence on January 6, 2021, remember.)   

In order to convince the few anti-Trump Republicans that remain to support Harris, the Cheneys have their work cut out for them.

CIA News

Nancy Pelosi came under fire earlier this year for accusing the CIA for failing to reveal in 2002 that it waterboarded a terrorism suspect, a charge that current CIA director Leon Panetta has rejected and Republicans such as former Vice President Dick Cheney had angrily declared was without merit.

Now it has been reported that Cheney told the CIA to withhold information about a secret counter-terrorism program that was begun after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that Panetta ended the program upon learning about it.

Panetta, as CIA director, has vowed to end the torture and coercive interrogation of terror suspects that happened during the Bush years. With regards to this secret program, the details remain, well, secret. But the New York Times was told the program had never been put into operation and it did not involve CIA interrogation programs or activities concerned with domestic intelligence.

Well, that's good to know.

Nancy Pelosi has brought up an unpleasant truth about the CIA, and that is that the agency is at least too secretive and at worst misleading. Panetta deserves credit for trying to undo the damage of the Bush years but the agency remains far less forthcoming then even it deserves to be.

Loathing and Marriage

Dick Cheney has been appearing so much on television talk shows these days, people think he's considering a presidential run in 2012.

What would he run for, the excitement? With his heart? Why would he run, because of his excellent chances of winning? With a nineteen percent popularity rating?

And why would her suddenly endorse gay marriage, given the opposition to gay marriage among the Republican base? Since his daughter Mary is a lesbian, what stopped him from endorsing it in 2004? Oh, wait - Karl Rove.

Then again, the first caucus is in Iowa, and the first primary is in New Hampshire, both states as of today having legalized gay marriage. New Hampshire Governor John Lynch signed the bill making it legal in the Granite State today.

Nonetheless, we may have a pretty hard time accepting Cheney as an avuncular figure of trust, like Walter Cronkite.

Incidentally, this leaves Rhode Island - the place once described in the seventeenth century as a moral sewer by Massachusetts Puritans - as the only New England state not to allow gay marriage. Several attempts to change that have failed.

Meanwhile, putative presidential possibility Newt Gingrich says that maybe he was too strong in calling Judge Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Oh - now he tells us!

Will Dick Cheney Ever Shut Up?

For weeks, Dick Cheney, the former - underline former - Vice President, has been criticizing and sometimes just blasting President Obama for his policies toward terror suspects, saying that Obama's misguided policies (respect for the Constitution, understanding of the law, valuing human rights) have made us less safe and more prone to a terrorist attack. Today President Obama reiterated his position on his plan to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, insisting that no detainees will be released in the continental U.S. and that all of them would be jailed in maximum security prisons where the number of escapees can be counted on zero fingers. As for how to proceed with prosecuting and handling these detainees, Obama said that George Walker Bush left a mess by setting up this detainment system in the first place and not thinking it out properly.

That didn't stop Cheney from bringing up all of the red-herring arguments that the Bush White House never tortured anyone, that the previous administration got information on terror plots that were foiled (none of which were realistic or plausible), and that Bush saved American lives (except for the five thousand service personnel or so killed in Iraq). Cheney even suggested anew that Saddam Hussein had connections to "Mideast terrorists," letting people assume he meant there was a connection the Iraqi dictator had with Osama bin Laden (there was none) and that bin Laden's organization has been deterred from planning another terrorist attack (though we've been deterred from capturing bin Laden after letting him go at Tora Bora in Afghanistan).

However, the advantage has been to Cheney and the Republicans, who got the Senate to reject funds for closing the Guantanamo Bay prison while Obama tries to work out a plan for handling the detainees. Obama hasn't gotten support from his base, either, as he has chosen to revive military tribunals for some terror suspects (although he is revamping how they would work), oppose a truth commission to investigate past treatment of the Gitmo prisoners, and has even used the previous administration's "state secrets" doctrine that claims unchecked presidential power to prevent information disclosure in court.

Obama, in a word, won no friends. He tried to stay in the middle, but there is no middle ground on this issue.

The Gitmo issue won't go away any time soon. Alas, neither will Cheney.