Dowd Demonizes Dick

In "Vice Axes That 70's Show," Maureen Dowd displays her usual lunacy.

This time, she digs her claws into Dick Cheney. She digs deep, ending the year with a big, liberal, paranoid bang.

It's vintage Maureenie - exactly what we've come to know and ... , well, what we've come to know.

Dowd writes:

We start the new year with the same old fear: Dick Cheney.

I can't say that I'm afraid of Dick Cheney. Nope, I'm not starting off the new year with that fear.

Maureenie doesn't speak for me.


The vice president, who believes in unwarranted, unlimited snooping, is so pathologically secretive that if you use Google Earth's database to see his official residence, the view is scrambled and obscured. You can view satellite photos of the White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol - but not of the Lord of the Underworld's lair.

Maureenie is being intentionally misleading. She asserts that Cheney "believes in unwarranted, unlimited snooping." That's ridiculous.

The Vice President believes in doing all that we can do to protect ourselves from TERRORISTS. That's not the same as a license for "unwarranted, unlimited" snooping.

Have 900 hundred FBI files been discovered in Cheney's office?

Oh, that's right. I'm thinking of the Clinton White House.

If the Bush Administration has been digging into the private lives of individuals not considered to possibly have connections with TERRORISTS, or individuals that do not pose a possible NATIONAL SECURITY RISK, I would deem that a shameful, inexcusable abuse of power.

For instance, if the FBI files of prominent Dems were found in Cheney's possession, I would call that a serious infraction. Such actions would be akin to the abuses under President Clinton. It would be completely unacceptable.

However, as usual, Maureenie makes generalizations that she cannot back up.

While she calls Cheney "pathologically secretive," I think Maureenie is pathologically delusional.

"Lord of the Underworld's lair"? That is positively cartoonish.

Maureenie has truly lost it. She sounds like the looniest of the Left, and that is really loony.

Vice is literally a shadow president. He's obsessive about privacy - but, unfortunately, only his own.

I consider the New York Times and Maureenie to be obsessed - with bringing down the Bush Administration.

"He's obsessive about privacy - but, unfortunately, only his own."

What a silly statement!

Like so many libs, Maureenie has gone so over the top that her views are laughable. What she writes cannot be taken as serious analysis.

Speaking of privacy, a few months back, didn't the New York Times attempt to snoop into the adoption records of the children of John Roberts?

YES. Privacy concerns? Right.

That brings to mind another example of liberal hypocrisy.

In September, Michelle Malkin wrote:

"Have you heard what Democrats working for Sen. Charles Schumer at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee tried to do here in my home state of Maryland to bring down Republican Lt. Gov. Michael Steele?

"Steele, a rising star in the party, is considering a Senate bid. Two of Schumer's staffers, including a former researcher for David Brock's Media Matters, obtained Steele's credit report by using his Social Security number, which they got from public documents. Under federal law, it is illegal to knowingly and willfully obtain a credit report under false pretenses.

"There has been no outcry from privacy advocates, the ACLU, the champions of clean campaigns, or any major MSM editorial board. Needless to say, if it had been Republicans involved in this outrageous scheme and the target had been a liberal minority politician, it would be a front-page NYTimes scandal. The Times (surprise, surprise) has yet to cover the story..."

The libs' selective outrage is so unbecoming, not to mention discrediting.

Back to Maureenie:

Google Earth users alerted The Times to this latest bit of Cheney concealment after a front-page story last week about the international fears inspired by free Google software that features detailed displays of things like government and military sites around the world.

"For a brief period," they reported, "photos of the White House and adjacent buildings that the United States Geological Survey provided to Google Earth showed up with certain details obscured." So Google replaced those images with unaltered photographs taken by a private company.

Even though the story did not mention the Cheney residence - and even though it's not near the White House - The Times ran a clarifying correction yesterday that said, "The view of the vice president's residence in Washington remains obscured."

Fitting, since Vice has turned America into a camera obscura, a dark chamber with a lens that turns things upside down.

Considering that the Pentagon was hit and the World Trade Center was destroyed by TERRORISTS, does anyone really think that it's out of line to obscure the details of high profile targets?

Way to assist TERRORISTS, Google! Very nice.

Moreover, is Maureenie actually saying that Cheney controls Google? She is suggesting that he somehow managed to keep views of his residence shrouded in secrecy.

That's just goofy. Typical Maureenie.

Guys argue that women tend to stew and hold grudges more, sometimes popping up to blow the whistle on a man's bad behavior years later, like a missile out of the night, as Alan Simpson said of Anita Hill.

Yet look at Cheney and Rummy. Their steroid-infused power grabs stem from their years stewing in the Ford White House, a time when they felt emasculated because they were stripped of prerogatives.

More of Maureenie's psychobabble and armchair psychoanalysis--

Funny, as well as psycho.

Clearly, Maureenie has issues.

Rummy, a Ford chief of staff who became defense secretary, and his protégé, Cheney, who succeeded him as chief of staff, felt diminished by the post-Watergate laws and reforms that reduced the executive branch's ability to be secretive and unilateral, tilting power back toward Congress.

The 70's were also a heady period for the press, which reached the zenith of its power when it swayed public opinion on Vietnam and exposed Watergate. Reporters got greater access to government secrets with a stronger Freedom of Information Act.

Chenrummy thought the press was running amok, that leaks should be plugged and that Congress was snatching power that rightfully belonged to the White House.

So these two crusty pals spent 30 years dreaming of inflating the deflated presidential muscularity. Cheney christened himself vice president and brought in Rummy for the most ridiculously pumped-up presidency ever. All this was fine with W., whose family motto is: "We know best. Trust us."

Oh my God! Maureenie has really gone over the edge. I think she's in desperate need of an intervention.

Her construction of these lame scenarios creeps me out. It's weird.

The two regents turned back the clock to the Nixon era, bringing back presidential excesses like wiretapping along with presidential power. As attorney general, John Ashcroft clamped down on the Freedom of Information Act. For two years, the Pentagon has been sitting on a request from The Times's Jeff Gerth to cough up a secret 500-page document prepared by Halliburton on what to do with Iraq's oil industry - a plan it wrote several months before the invasion of Iraq, and before it got a no-bid contract to implement the plan (and overbill the U.S.). Very convenient.

Defending warrantless wiretapping last week, the vice president spoke of his distaste for the erosion of presidential authority in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam.

"I do believe that, especially in the day and age we live in, the nature of the threats we face, it was true during the cold war, as well as I think what is true now, the president of the United States needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," he intoned. Translation: Back off, Congress and the press.

Checks, balances, warrants, civil liberties - they're all so 20th century. Historians must now regard the light transitional tenure of Gerald Ford as the petri dish of this darkly transformational presidency.

Maureenie is truly doing a disservice here.

She is completely dismissing the realities of past presidencies, Dem presidencies. Maureenie is the Queen of Sins of Omission.

Consider this: when Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, supported by President Ford, pushed a plan to have the government help develop alternative sources of energy and reduce our dependence on oil and Saudi Arabia, guess who helped scotch it?

Dick Cheney. Then and now, the man is a menace.

Of course, she's suggesting that the Demon Dick wanted to personally profit from U.S. oil consumption.

Gee, what did the Clinton Administration do to help the country kick its oil addiction?

Maureenie fans, consider this:

Researchers at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government examined the environmental policy record of former President Bill Clinton. Environmental quality improved overall during the decade, the researchers found, continuing a trend that began in the 1970s, although improvements were much less than during the previous two decades.

From 1997, something else to consider:

[In the 1996 election, Clinton's] record on the environment wasn't based on a record of positive achievement but instead on his attacks on Congress. The president had prevented deep cuts in spending on the Environmental Protection Agency and he claimed credit for stopping the most egregious attempts to revise regulations such as those regarding endangered species and water quality standards. But the real Clinton environmental record centers not on the salvation of Nixon-era regulations and agencies, but on what has been left undone.

Criticism from environmental groups has centered on the lack of action in two important areas: local air-quality control standards and global greenhouse emissions. On air-quality, the White House has taken what it would like to call a centrist position. The Clinton administration remained silent on demands by EPA head Carol Browner for tougher standards, but also resisted Republican demands for changes that might reduce standards for certain localities.

If we are to accept the theory that Cheney was motivated by a quest for personal profits from oil, what was Clinton's reasons for failing to push for stricter environmental regulations and alternative energy sources?

Obviously, in terms of the truth, Maureenie is thoroughly misguided and intentionally misleading.

She's lucky that the Times and other lib propaganda rags suffer from the same lack of direction and morality. The woman has an audience that accepts her babbling as gospel and buys into the demonization of Vice President Cheney.

It's sad, but true.