Doug Thompson gives us that confirmation from his inside track ... Al
Franken does a collection of comic quotes and tells us why thats
powerful ... Paul Krugman tells us Uncle Dick is NOT a mensch ... and
last, Bob Woodward [who occasionally has his own mensch-challenges]
talks about the secrecy problems in the administration and -- Once
Again -- suggests that they will run Cheney in '08.  He also comments on
the possibility of a  police state ... it's an interesting read.

Since Uncle Dick's approval numbers -- 32% last time I checked, even
lower than Congress -- are so dismal, and his reputation so tarnished, I
can't imagine they'd do that.  But then again -- I couldn't imagine
they'd have done any of the crap they've pulled.  I guess you have to
have the "post-9/11 UnReality" mentality to figure out their next
improbable move.

Jude

Secret Service agents say Cheney was drunk when he shot lawyer
DOUG THOMPSON
Feb 22, 2006
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_8184.shtml

A written report from Secret Service agents guarding Vice President Dick
Cheney when he shot Texas lawyer Harry Whittington on a hunting outing
two weeks ago says Cheney was "clearly inebriated" at the time of the
shooting.

Agents observed several members of the hunting party, including the Vice
President, consuming alcohol before and during the hunting expedition,
the report notes, and Cheney exhibited "visible signs" of impairment,
including slurred speech and erratic actions, the report said.

According to those who have read the report and talked with others
present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend
and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials
on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting
party time to sober up.

We talked with a number of administration officials who are privy to
inside information on the Vice President's shooting "accident" and all
admit Secret Service agents and others saw Cheney consume far more than
the "one beer' he claimed he drank at lunch earlier that day.

"This was a South Texas hunt," says one White House aide. "Of course
there was drinking. There's always drinking. Lots of it."

Cheney has a long history of alcohol abuse, including two convictions of
driving under the influence when he was younger. Doctors tell me that
someone like Cheney, who is taking blood thinners because of his history
of heart attacks, could get legally drunk now after consuming just one
drink.

If Cheney was legally drunk at the time of the shooting, he could be
guilty of a felony under Texas law and the shooting, ruled an accident
by a compliant Kenedy County Sheriff, would be a prosecutable offense.

But we will never know for sure because the owners of the Armstrong
Ranch, where the shooting occurred, barred the sheriff's department from
the property on the day of the shooting and Kenedy County Sheriff Ramon
Salinas III agreed to wait until the next day to send deputies in to
talk to those involved.

Sheriff's Captain Charles Kirk says he went to the Armstrong Ranch
immediately after the shooting was reported on Saturday, February 11 but
both he and a game warden were not allowed on the 50,000-acre property.
He called Salinas who told him to forget about it and return to the
station.

"I told him don't worry about it. I'll make a call," Salinas said. The
sheriff claims he called another deputy who moonlights at the Armstrong
ranch, said he was told it was "just an accident" and made the decision
to wait until Sunday to investigate.

"We've known these people for years. They are honest and wouldn't call
us, telling us a lie," Salinas said.

Like all elected officials in Kenedy County, Salinas owes his job to the
backing and financial support of Katherine Armstrong, owner of the ranch
and the county's largest employer.

"The Armstrongs rule Kenedy County like a fiefdom," says a former
employee.

Secret Service officials also took possession of all tests on
Whittington's blood at the hospitals where he was treated for his
wounds. When asked if a blood alcohol test had been performed on
Whittington, the doctors who treated him at Christus Spohn Hospital
Memorial in Corpus Christi or the hospital in Kingsville refused to
answer. One admits privately he was ordered by the Secret Service to
"never discuss the case with the press."

It's a sure bet that if a private doctor who treated the victim of
Cheney's reckless and drunken actions can't talk to the public then the
memo that shows the Vice President was drunk as a skunk will never see
the light of day. ++

Cheney and the Late Night Comics
Al Franken
02.21.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-franken/cheney-and-the-late-night_b_...

When the Lettermans and the Lenos and the Jon Stewarts start going after
you, you know you're in trouble. Of course, the late night comics had a
field day last week about Cheney.

But the jokes this week might be even more disturbing for the Vice
President. Because when the late night comics define you, it's how the
whole country sees you.

Just look at the jokes from Monday night.

This from Jay Leno: "I don't want to say Cheney was pickled last night
... but he tried to play a pizza on the stereo."

Harsh.

Now this one from Conan. "Cheney's doctor told him to stay away from
alcohol, so he got a twelve-foot straw."

You see where they're going? I guess the comedy consensus is that Cheney
must have shot Whittington because he was loaded and that's why he
didn't
let any authorities see him for 14 hours.
Just listen to Jon Stewart. "I don't want to say Cheney drinks a lot...
but he once got an alcohol rub and broke his neck trying to lick it
off..."

Cheney's gotta hate these.

Take this one from Letterman. "I don't want to say Cheney drinks a lot
of martinis... but he's got the only reported case of liver with
 onions."

Yow! That's rough.

And this is Jimmy Kimmel: "I don't want to say Cheney is a lush... but
his idea of frozen food is Scotch on the rocks."

Just brutal! And Letterman really piled on. Here's his top ten list:

Top Ten Reasons Not to Go Hunting with Dick Cheney:
10. Jack Daniels
9. Makers Mark
8. Old Crow
7. Old Grandad
6. Old Forester
5. Jim Beam
4. Rebel Yell
3. Canadian Club
2. Southern Comfort

And the Number One Reason not to go hunting with Dick Cheney: Wild
Turkey.

This bodes ill for the remainder of the Vice President's term. Word has
it through the joke writer grapevine that Bush has already started
asking for "Dick was so drunk" jokes for the White House Correspondents
Dinner.

It turns out that not coming out right away with a statement on camera
might have been a bigger mistake than we all thought. That is, unless he
was sauced. I guess we'll never know.

(Thanks to Michael Barrie, Jim Mulhulland, and Milton Berle for the
jokes. And my wife for the Top Ten list.)  ++

The Mensch Gap
PAUL KRUGMAN, New York Times
February 20, 2006
http://www.topplebush.com/oped2549.shtml

"Be a mensch," my parents told me. Literally, a mensch is a
person. But by implication, a mensch is an upstanding person who takes
responsibility for his actions.

The people now running America aren't mensches.

Dick Cheney isn't a mensch. There have been many attempts to turn
the shooting of Harry Whittington into a political metaphor, but the
most characteristic moment was the final act -- the Moscow show-trial
moment in which the victim of Mr. Cheney's recklessness apologized for
getting shot. Remember, Mr. Cheney, more than anyone else, misled us
into the Iraq war. Then, when neither links to Al Qaeda nor W.M.D.
materialized, he shifted the blame to the very intelligence agencies he
bullied into inflating the threat.

Donald Rumsfeld isn't a mensch. Before the Iraq war Mr. Rumsfeld
muzzled commanders who warned that we were going in with too few troops,
and sidelined State Department experts who warned that we needed a plan
for the invasion's aftermath. But when the war went wrong, he began
talking about "unknown unknowns" and going to war with "the army you
have," ducking responsibility for the failures of leadership that have
turned the war into a stunning victory -- for Iran.

Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, isn't a
mensch. Remember his excuse for failing to respond to the drowning of
New Orleans? "I remember on Tuesday morning," he said on "Meet the
Press," "picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged
the Bullet.' " We now know that by Tuesday morning, he had received --
and ignored -- many warnings about the unfolding disaster.

Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, isn't
a mensch. He insists that the prescription drug plan's catastrophic
start doesn't reflect poorly on his department, that "no logical person"
would have expected "a transition happening that is so large without
some problems." In fact, Medicare's 1966 startup went very smoothly.
That didn't happen this time because his department ignored outside
experts who warned, months in advance, about exactly the disaster that
has taken place.

I could go on. Officials in this administration never take
responsibility for their actions. When something goes wrong, it's always
someone else's fault.

Was it always like this? I don't want to romanticize our political
history, but I don't think so. Think of Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote a
letter before D-Day accepting the blame if the landings failed. His
modern equivalent would probably insist that the landings were a
"catastrophic success," then try to lay the blame for their failure on
the editorial page of The New York Times.

Where have all the mensches gone? The character of the
administration reflects the character of the man at its head. President
Bush is definitely not a mensch; his inability to admit mistakes or take
responsibility for failure approaches the pathological. He surrounds
himself with subordinates who share his aversion to facing unpleasant
realities. And as long as his appointees remain personally loyal, he
defends their performance, no matter how incompetent. After all, to do
otherwise would be to admit that he made a mistake in choosing them.
Last week he declared that Mr. Leavitt is doing, yes, "a heck of a job."

But how did such people attain power in the first place? Maybe
it's the result of our infantilized media culture, in which politicians,
like celebrities, are judged by the way they look, not the reality of
their achievements. Mr. Bush isn't an effective leader, but he plays one
on TV, and that's all that matters.

Whatever the reason for the woeful content of our leaders'
character, it has horrifying consequences. You can't learn from mistakes
if you won't admit making any mistakes, an observation that explains a
lot about the policy disasters of recent years -- the failed occupation
of Iraq, the failed response to Katrina, the failed drug plan.

Above all, the anti-mensches now ruling America are destroying our
moral standing. A recent National Journal report finds that we're
continuing to hold many prisoners at Guantánamo even though the supposed
evidence against them has been discredited. We're even holding at least
eight prisoners who are no longer designated enemy combatants. Why?
Well, releasing people you've imprisoned by mistake means admitting that
you made a mistake. And that's something the people now running America
never do. ++

Woodward warns of secrecy trend
02/22/2006
Tracy Idell Hamilton, Express-News
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/metro/stories/MYSA022206.01B.woodwar...

The greatest threat to America's democracy is not terrorism but
governmental secrecy, said Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob
Woodward, whose reporting 35 years ago pierced the veil of secrecy
behind Richard Nixon's presidency.

Although a massive, coordinated attack on the country, making 9-11 look
like a "footnote," is still possible, the nation faces a greater threat
from the federal government's current secrecy drive, Woodward told an
audience in San Antonio on Tuesday.

"Democracies die in darkness," Woodward told the 500-person crowd of
mostly business and community leaders as part of Trinity University's
policy maker breakfast series, a 25-year tradition.

The Bush administration, which gave Woodward remarkable access for his
two books on the administration's war on terror, "Bush At War," in 2002
and "Plan of Attack," in 2004, has cloaked its decision-making in "an
immense amount of secrecy," he said, "too much, in my view."

The administration says it needs to work in secret because of the nature
of the Iraqi war and the surprise tactics terrorists rely on.

He also faulted a round-the-clock news cycle that emphasizes speed over
accuracy and demands that journalists not just report but predict the
future.

Having a year to work on his latest book, about Bush's decision to
launch the Iraqi war, he said, allowed him to gather an immense amount
of information from a variety of sources.

He then wrote a 21-page memo to the president, outlining what he had
learned.

Jokes aside about whether the president reads 21-page memos, Woodward
said he was given 31/2 hours to interview the president. He called it
the longest interview a sitting president has ever granted.

The resulting book, "Plan of Attack," tries to offer "understanding and
perspective, not to condemn, or endorse, but to explain" what happened
during the 16 months he said it took Bush to decide to go to war.

"And make no mistake, it was Bush's decision," he said, although he
called Vice President Dick Cheney "a steam rolling force" in the
process.

At the beginning of his talk, Woodward asked for a show of hands from
those who voted for Bush in 2004.

Most in the crowd raised their hands.

But fewer hands were raised when he asked if attendees believed in
Bush's tax cuts, and whether they agreed with Bush's decision to launch
a secret wiretap program to listen in an unknown number of domestic
communications to overseas telephones without court-issued warrants.

When he asked the crowd if it believed, with the benefit of hindsight,
if going to war was "necessary and wise," fewer than half the room's
hands went up.

After noting that the results of the last question of his unscientific
poll could spell trouble for the administration, he told the crowd that
all the questions were really just tricks, to see how many "rich nosy
warmongering Republicans" were in the room.

"A lot, I see," he said, drawing laughs. "And very proud of it, I can
see."

But it is not just governments that keep secrets; Trinity declined to
say how much it paid Woodward.
A report by the Toronto Sun estimated his fee at between $20,000 and
$30,000.

By comparison, Tour de France cyclist Lance Armstrong, golfer Arnold
Palmer and former President George Bush make about $100,000 per
engagement.

Woodward said the possibility of "the Mideast imploding," cannot be
dismissed, and that his darkest fear, shared by some in the intelligence
community, is that terrorists are waiting until "multiple, high-stakes
attacks" can be launched on U.S. cities and targets.

He said, "9-11 will be a footnote, but it could happen, and if it does,
we will become a police state."

Even as he scolded the media's tendency to prophesy the future, Woodward
offered his prediction for the 2008 presidential race.

By all indications, he said, Democrat Hillary Clinton is running.

He noted that Republicans have a long track record of nominating "old
war horses."

Given that, and depending on how things in Iraq proceed, "You're going
to think I'm crazy, but you heard it here first. I think they could
nominate Dick Cheney." ++

It is not enough to be compassionate; you must act.
-- The Dalai Lama