We call it a living document but has anyone checked up on it lately?
For all the animus directed at W, he may not be the one to worry about. His hand-picked veep (better to say self-selected?) looms larger with new story from this rat-infested administration.
Part of this is simply about managing your boss, as Andrew Card should have understood, given his background. But this isn’t a corporation or a golf club, rather the world’s only remaining superpower, assuming that’s still true.
To that end, Prof Delong is on fire today:
The first rule of being a minister for a weak, confused Sultan–whether Selim the Sot or W–is that nobody persuasive ever gets to see the Sultan alone. Jim Baker let Jeanne Kirkpatrick see Ronald Reagan alone on February 17, 1983:
Thur Feb 17 1983: Jeanne Kirkpatrick reported on her trip to Central America. A grim story. Our Ambas. Hinton under the direction of the same kind of St. Dept. bureaucrats who made Castro possible are screwing up the situation in El Salvador. I’m now really mad. Bill C[asey]. is bringing George
S[hultz]. up to date and then I’m determined heads will roll, beginning with Ambas. Hinton…
And four months later Reagan couldn’t remember that he had himself, personally, fired Ambassador Hinton:
Thu Jun 9 1983: Ambas. Hinton just relieved as Ambas. to El Salvador, stopped by. He’s a good man and did a fine job under extremely difficult circumstances. I hope he can convince some of our left leaning Congressmen how wrong they are…
No later than June 30, 2001, Bush’s chief-of-staff Andrew Card, the assistants to the president, and the entire cabinet should have gone to him with one demand: Dick Cheney doesn’t see you alone, or we all resign today. They didn’t.
It’s still not too late for them to do that today.
There’s a bunch of other evidentiary material further up in the piece: he makes a good case that we are in a constitutional crisis, specifically this:
The best explanation of the pardon is… fear that Mr. Libby might be tempted to provide more information about the cabal to turn the presidency (and vice-presidency) into “regal,” if not out-and-out dictatorial, authorities totally independent from any scrutiny or accountability. This is simply one more illustration of the mendacity and corruption at the heart of the Bush Administration….
Does no one think that for a sitting president to pardon people who were indicted and converted during his tenure for crimes committed during his tenure — ie in his service or at his direction — is unseemly?