Simply Disturbing...

The Washington Post has just come out with an incredible expose on the inner-workings of the W administration - with a specific focus on Vice-President Dick Cheney:

Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency

While most of the information reported has been speculated on and circulated around the blog-o-sphere for quite some time, it is very disturbing to see it in the WaPo with this attention to detail and siting of sources. If you haven't had a chance to check it out, please do yourself a favor and read it. This will become vital reading for anyone who actually cares about what is going on in our country...I am still in relative shock and will need to digest it a bit before commenting further. Here are, however, some highlights:

"Cheney expresses indifference, in public and private, to any verdict but history's, and those close to him say he means it."

"Before the president casts the only vote that counts, the final words of counsel nearly always come from Cheney."

"Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that "the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch," and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. Cheney is refusing to observe an executive order on the handling of national security secrets, and he proposed to abolish a federal office that insisted on auditing his compliance."

"The vice president's lawyer advocated what was considered the (what is known as the torture memo)'s most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line into torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because Congress "may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield."

"The irony with the Cheney crowd pushing the envelope on presidential power is that the president has now ended up with lesser powers than he would have had if they had made less extravagant, monarchical claims," said Bruce Fein, an associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan."

"The only person in Washington who cares less about his public image than David Addington is Dick Cheney," said a former White House ally. "What both of them miss is that ..... in times of war, a prerequisite for success is people having confidence in their leadership. This is the great failure of the administration -- a complete and total indifference to public opinion."

There were too many nuggets to post above. Read the article in its entirety. This is just the tip of this Titanic-killing iceberg. WaPo has two more episodes of this series coming out tomorrow and Wednesday. Tighten your seat belts, as I predict it will be bumpy with a slight chance of catastrophe for the W admin in the days and weeks ahead...