The Strident Centrist Blog

The conservative jurist Bruce Fein has a piece up at Slate calling for the impeachment of Vice President Cheney.

The Constitution does not expressly forbid the president from abandoning his chief powers to the vice president. But President Bush’s tacit delegation to Cheney and Cheney’s eager acceptance tortures the Constitution’s provision for an acting president. The presidency and vice presidency are discrete constitutional offices. The 12^th Amendment provides for their separate elections. The sole constitutionally enumerated function of the vice president is to serve as president of the Senate without a vote except to break ties.

In contrast, Article II enumerates the powers and responsibilities of the president, including the obligation to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. A special presidential oath is prescribed. Section 3 of the 25^th Amendment provides a method for the president to yield his office to the vice president, when “he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” There is no other constitutional provision for transferring presidential powers to the vice president.

Yet without making a written transmittal to Congress, President Bush has ceded vast domains of his powers to Vice President Cheney by mutual understanding that circumvents the 25^th Amendment. This constitutional provision assures that the public and Congress know who is exercising the powers of the presidency and who should be held responsible for successes or failures. The Bush-Cheney dispensation blurs political accountability by continually hiding the real decision-maker under presidential skirts. The Washington Post has thoroughly documented the vice president’s dominance in a four-part series running this week. It is quite a read.

In the end, President Bush regularly is unable to explain or defend the policies of his own administration, and that is because the heavy intellectual labor has been performed in the office of the vice president. Cheney is impeachable for his overweening power and his sneering contempt of the Constitution and the rule of law.

Brad DeLong has a thoughtful piece up on the possible implications of Rupert Murdoch’s likely purchase of the Wall Street Journal. DeLong suggests three possible motives behind the tycoon’s interest in the paper:

One possibility is that Rupert Murdoch likes to keep what he has and that he has sons: the thirty-something Lachlan and James (and a daughter, Elizabeth). His sons will already be rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice. Giving his sons roles at News Corp. has proven difficult: he still wants to run the show, and people whom he has hired and had long-term relationships with want to go around him if they don’t like what his sons are doing. But there is nobody at the Journal with strong personal ties to Murchoch. If Murdoch buys the Wall Street Journal and spins it off, then at least one of his sons can become an independent global power broker in his own right without Murdoch having to loosen the reins at News Corp. . . .

A second possibility is that Rupert Murdoch thinks that in the age of new-media convergence the Wall Street Journal has the brand and the authority and the staff to make it an excellent launching pad, worth a $2 billion bet. Can Murdoch synergize the Journal’s brand on TV and via new media in a way to further boost his fortune? Perhaps. . . .

A third possibility–by far the most likely, IMHO–is that Rupert Murdoch is one of the boys who just wanna have fun. It would be more fun shaping the opinions of the world through both News Corp.’s current properties and the world’s preeminent global financial newspaper than through just News Corp.’s current properties alone–plus it would be more fun receiving the bowing and scraping that the world’s powerful would engage in to placate the owner of News Corp. plus the Wall Street Journal than just the bowing and scraping that accrues to the owner of News Corp. alone. That is probably what is going on.

Which of these three possibilities is truest has implications for what is likely to happen to a Journal under Murdoch ownership, and whether the Murdoch purchase is a good thing.

Brad finds the contents behind doors #1 and #2 quite palatable, but doesn’t like what’s behind door #3 much at all:

So: as the Murdoch acquisition of the Journal moves forward, watch carefully. If Murdoch’s children wind up being the effective proprietors of an organization run separately from News Corp., be happy. If Murdoch spends his time and energy leveraging the brand in new media space, reshaping things into the editorial pages to please his political contacts, and leaving the news pages alone to run themselves, then be happy.

But if Murdoch starts running the Journal the way he runs his other properties, be alarmed. Be very alarmed.

Our condolences to Lindsey Beyerstein of Majikthise, whose father died suddenly yesterday.

Our friend The Badger, who is our missing link to the Arabic language press, tells us of a speech Hosni Mubarak made yesterday on Egyptian television in which he distanced himself from the pro-Fatah, anti-Hamas theme of the sheet music of the recent Sharm el-Sheikh summit.

Mubarak said Egypt supports all the Palestinians, and that differences between Fatah and Hamas are their own affair, and weren’t any concern of the summit. He stressed the danger of the isolation which Gaza is being subjected to, and of any idea of an Israeli attack on Gaza, or of any idea of separating the Gaza Strip from the West Bank. He said we have to rely on time to calm the situation, and to permit the resumption of discussions between the two movements. To further underline his arms-length relationship with the Israelis, Mubarak said he challenged them to start peace talks with Syria.

The above is how Al-Hayat summarized the TV talk.

The Badger says that the same theme dominated the talks between Mubarak and King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia, who stopped by Sharm el-Sheikh but was not part of the conference. He closes by noting that this has not been covered in the American MSM:

You’d think nice sentiments like preserving national unity would be grist for the corporate media’s mill, and you wouldn’t have to go to a blog called Missing Links to read about it, but there you are. News gets filtered out of the corporate media not because it is shocking–it can be the nicest things in the world. It just has to be against the party line.

For those of you millions of my readers [/irony] who frequently read The New Yorker, if you take in John Updike’s review of Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression in the current issue, make sure you also read Brad DeLong’s critique thereof. The Berkeley econ prof points out some very big holes in Updike’s knowledge of economic history, including basic facts that even I knew about the period in question. Such as the fact that one of the things Roosevelt did early on in his first term was to abandon the gold standard. And the level of my familiarity with the topic is implicit in the fact that I’ve had to create a new category called “Economics” in which to classify this post.

In the latest installment of his On War series, William Lind once again emphasizes the inability of the leaders of states to recognize the threat inherent in 4th generation conflict entities.

Here we see displayed in all its naked glory what may be the main reason the state cannot stem its crisis of legitimacy: it refuses to perceive it. As Martin van Creveld said to me years ago, “Everyone sees it except the people in the capital cities.” By rushing to embrace Abbas and Fatah, with money as well as praise, Bush and Olmert may help them at the physical level of war, but at the moral level, it is the kiss of Judas. The gnostic gospel of Judas suggests that he, too, saw himself as a saint.

David Isenberg passes along the Mayor of London’s opinion of Bush’s appointee as our ambassador to the United Kingdom:

” . . . what it is sickening in this world is people who are venal little crooks like Tuttle, who gets treated with respect just because George Bush has rewarded him with an ambassadorship as a big kickback for contributions to his campaign.”

It seems our scofflaw ambassador has been refusing to pay the congestion charges for the use of autos in the city, and we’re now in arrears to the tune of 1.5 million pounds, beyond even Nigeria and Sudan.

If you’re not yet aware of the four part bombshell series on Vice President Cheney that the Washington Post began running yesterday (Sunday, June 24), then push that rock off of the entry to your hiding place and get with it. This link will take you to the first installment, and from there you can get to both today’s and the rest as they come out.

Perhaps even more interesting than the chapters and verses about Cheney’s power intoxication is the back story that is emerging regarding how the piece negotiated the hazards of the WaPo editorial process to get published at all. First, Laura Rozen:

That in turn suggests that this piece has been ready to run for some time. Insertions like the one about the veep’s office not being part of the executive branch and seriatim “softenings” show that jamming it into the paper at the end of June, when only cats and the homeless are around the read the paper, was made at the last minute.

Why? My guess is that this series ready to go during the debate over the supplemental funding of the Iraq war and that Downie or someone at the top held it back until Gellman and others started carrying snub-nose .38s to work under their seersuckers.

A key element of the coup is also ignored: the role of the press as revealed in the Libby scandal … : Note in particular paragraph seven the phrase that Cheney’s subversive roles “went undetected.” The correct verb is “unreported.”

This series is a landscape of an internal war. Parts of it are still smoking and some reputations are visibly dying–anonymously, for the moment. The journalistic graves registration people will go in later and tag the corpses.

Regarding the corpses, Rozen points out in an update to her blog entry that Jo Becker, one of the two coauthors of the WaPo piece, has already departed for the New York Times.

Meanwhile, Marcy Wheeler has some interesting analysis of possible sources and why these folks might have opened up:

. . I’d like to inventory the sources that Gellman and Becker used for their articles, as a way to understand where the shifting loyalties of the Administration lie. One thing that becomes clear by mapping this out is the centrality of Josh Bolten to many of the more damning accusations against Cheney. Thus, while these articles may reflect the fingerprints of Poppy (likely) or Scooter (implausible, IMO), I think it is primarily an attempt by the COS and possibly Condi to bring Cheney under control, aided by former Administration lawyers they know to have soured on Cheney’s ways.

Wheeler’s take on who talked and why is fascinating, but it’s too long to quote here in any depth. So read the whole thing!

h/t to CHS of FDL

Frank Rich of the New York Times had an Op Ed in yesterday’s Sunday edition that should be read far and wide. Fortunately it is now available at Common Dreams so you don’t have to fight your way through the NYT pay wall to read it.

Rich discusses the fact that since the surge has so far shown no appreciable positive effect, the party line has now morphed into a deemphasis of the significance of probable no-progress report in September. Then he goes on:

For the Bush White House, the real definition of victory has become “anything they can get away with without taking blame for defeat,” said the retired Army Gen. William Odom, a national security official in the Reagan and Carter administrations, when I spoke with him recently. The plan is to run out the Washington clock between now and Jan. 20, 2009, no matter the cost.

Precipitous withdrawal is also a chimera, since American manpower, materiel and bases, not to mention our new Vatican City-sized embassy, can’t be drawn down overnight. The only real choice, as everyone knows, is an orderly plan for withdrawal that will best serve American interests. The real debate must be over what that plan is. That debate can’t happen as long as the White House gets away with falsifying reality, sliming its opponents and sowing hyped fears of Armageddon. The threat that terrorists in civil-war-torn Iraq will follow us home if we leave is as bogus as Saddam’s mushroom clouds. The Qaeda that actually attacked us on 9/11 still remains under the tacit protection of our ally, Pakistan.

As General Odom says, the endgame will start “when a senior senator from the president’s party says no,” much as William Fulbright did to L.B.J. during Vietnam. That’s why in Washington this fall, eyes will turn once again to John Warner, the senior Republican with the clout to give political cover to other members of his party who want to leave Iraq before they’re forced to evacuate Congress. In September, it will be nearly a year since Mr. Warner said that Iraq was “drifting sideways” and that action would have to be taken “if this level of violence is not under control and this government able to function.”

(more…)

Now that I’ve got your attention I hope you realize that I’m speaking figuratively. And it’s not me speaking (or writing) at all, but rather “Pachacutec”, a regular contributor at Firedoglake.

You’ve staked out the most creative, progressive and politically incorrect ideas among the those in the top tier of Democratic hopefuls. Your anti-poverty agenda is heartfelt and really meaningful for what ails America. Your willingness to call bullshit on the “war on terror” is genuinely courageous.But you’re too gentle, so far, to be trusted. It’s time to get your hair mussed. If you don’t, you’re going to continue to get this kind of hit piece coverage. The elites hate you and your anti-poverty agenda because they see you as a traitor to your class. They think you’re a sanctimonious prig for calling them out on their own blatant hypocrisy.

. . .

If you want to win, you have to show you can dish out damage, smiling, and never break a sweat. So far, you’re not breaking through.

. . .

The questions for you, if you really want to pay the price to make the changes you say you want to make, are: can you hit a woman? Can you beat up, politically, on a black man and not feel guilty about it?

If not, please, stop wasting people’s time and money.