TBT: The Brutal Truth

Our Cocks Are Showing

Newsweek's Isikoff & Taylor show us that a large wedge has been driven into the heart of the Bush Administration like a wooden stake through the heart of a vampire ... and it has HAMDAN written all over it. Unlike real wooden stakes that typically kill their blood sucking hosts, this one has turned the White House into a divided camp of parasitic megalomaniacs fighting each other over the right/privilege to drive thier own rubber-stamp Congress right off the legal, ethical, and moral cliff to see if it can fly (sorta like they did previous with our Treasury and their own "Culture of Life" meme):

David Bowker vividly remembers the first time he heard the phrase. A lawyer in the State Department, Bowker was part of a Bush administration "working group" assembled in the panicked aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Its task: figuring out what rights captured foreign fighters and terror suspects were entitled to while in U.S. custody. White House hard-liners, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and his uncompromising lawyer, David Addington, made it clear that there was only one acceptable answer. One day, Bowker recalls, a colleague explained the goal: to "find the legal equivalent of outer space"—a "lawless" universe. As Bowker understood it, the idea was to create a system where detainees would have no legal rights and U.S courts would have no power to intervene.

...

But the complaints went unheeded. The hard-liners forcefully argued that in wartime, the president had virtually unlimited powers to defend the nation. They may come to wish they'd listened a little more closely to the warnings. In a ruling late last month, the Supreme Court came down squarely on the side of the dissenters. The case involved Ahmed Hamdan, a captured 37-year-old Yemeni who once served as Osama bin Laden's driver and now sits in a Gitmo cell. The court blocked the Pentagon's plans to try Hamdan as a war criminal in a military commission authorized by President Bush. The court's reasoning was complex, but the majority opinion, written by Justice John Paul Stevens, concluded that the military commissions, with their limited protections for the rights of the accused, violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the basic provisions of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions—precisely the argument that Taft, Bowker and other State Department lawyers had tried to make four years ago.

Of course, we can't forget that Senators Graham and Kyl tried to fool the Supreme Court by pulling an Enron -- stuffing the Congressional Record with a cooked-up 12,000 word colloquy that never happened on the Senate floor only to turn around and file an amicus brief in favor of the Bush Administration's motion to dismiss Hamdan under the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) by citing the fraudulent debate from Congressional Record. Not only did their actions stab Sen. Carl Levin in the back but it reeked of contempt of court.

But the real hilarious (and ironic) part of the Newsweek article follows below:

The court decision's possible effects have set off an intense debate within the administration over how to respond. One camp, headed by national-security adviser Stephen Hadley and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, want to use the decision as the basis for a wide-ranging "fix" that would accept a role for Congress and the courts on detainee issues. That would, at a minimum, require Congress to authorize military commissions under new rules that provide greater protections for the accused—and establish some standards for the treatment and interrogation of terror suspects. (It could also lead to a shutdown of Guantánamo—a goal President Bush has moved toward in recent weeks.)

But hard-liners—led by Addington, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff—are fiercely resisting. They, along with some congressional Republicans, want to nullify the court ruling by rewriting portions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and granting the president the powers the court rejected.

The Hamdan decision has rendered the White House into the equivilent of a chicken coop where the two biggest cocks -- Bush and Cheney -- are beak to beak and neck feathers up in a stare down, readying to start pecking and spurring the shit out of each other and the irony is in exactly what they're fighting for -- which rooster has dibs on the Republican rubber-stamp Congress to expand presidential powers!

Bush's agenda to "fix" the problem would require Congressional involvement in drafting new legislation and Cheney's agenda to snub the Supreme Court by pumping a slug of revisionist birdshot into the UCMJ also requires Congressional involvement and approval. Picturing the cockfight in my mind sure gives me a bad (good?) case of the cackles but, if I was a bettin' man, I'd go all in on Cheney as the cock that'll rule the roost in the end while palming a few chips to place on the other cock underneath the legal betting window to break even because of his penchant for scratching signing statements into everything. What can I say - the like those bettin' odds!

However, I must admit that this cockfight within the White House brings a whole new meaning to something my Dad used to tell me when I was wee squab -- something about having as much sense as a chicken, I believe it was. But, if Dad were still alive to see the state of affairs in Washington right now, he probably retire that insult for being very unfair to both me and chickens as he'd be hard pressed to find anything more stupid than the worthless shower of dumb fuckin' clucks we're stuck with ...

posted by Sizemore at 8:03 PM

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