The Dish

Well, the only language Cheney understands is force. And even if it were to fail, the instructive power of the exercise would be considerable. Most Americans are not yet fully aware that this vice-president believes that the executive branch is not subject to domestic or international law, has inherent powers to arrest, detain indefinitely without charges and torture anyone on earth if it so wishes, and can wire-tap Americans without any court oversight for good measure. These are not emergency powers in wartime, but permanent new powers since we are in permanent new state of war. Alongside our constitution, Cheney has constructed a rival governing force, a protectorate, answerable to no one and no law, dedicated to our security. We do get to select that protector every four years (our "accountability moment"), but that’s the extent of our ultimate constitutional and legal protection. This is not self-government; it’s delegation of power to a single leader-guardian-decider. The president is not really the president in this constitutional model. Presidents preside over a constitutional order. Protectors act as constant and energetic guardians of the security of others. They are outside the law, because they believe the law impedes the necessity for risk-free security.

A debate that helped flush out this theory of executive power, that exposed its workings clearly and forced Cheney to defend and explain it under oath may not lead to successful conviction, but it would be a national service, especially if Cheney’s protectorate is going to be inherited by a person as power-hungry, secretive and ruthless as Senator Clinton. A reader adds:

[T]he Founding Fathers created an asymmetrical impeachment system. A president or vice president can be impeached by the House on a simple majority vote. But it requires two-thirds to convict in the Senate. I think one can clearly infer from this that the Founding Fathers did not intend for impeachment to be extraordinarily difficult, but they did wish to guard against its abuse. This being the case, I don’t think it is wrong for the House to institute impeachment proceedings against Cheney — if any vice president in our history deserves it, it is him. And keep in mind that no claim of executive privilege would be possible in an impeachment investigation without creating additional grounds for impeachment. So what if the effort dies in the Senate? If the Founding Fathers wanted the bar set high they would have required a two-thirds vote in the House as well.

What’s stopping the Dems? It’s time to out-Cheney Cheney.

(Photo: Stephen Chernin/Getty.)

Glenn Reynolds is busy blaming the New York Times for losing the war in Iraq, but the president isn’t going to stoop to that level. He knows the NYT hasn’t been planning the occupation, just criticizing it. In a recent speech, the president clearly signaled a new p.r. strategy to explain the chaos in a country we’ve been ineptly occupying for four years:

"When the decision was made to liberate Iraq, I was going on what my advisers were telling me and what everyone has said for nearly a century—that the U.S. military is the best in the world," Bush said. "But if that were the case, and we did have the most powerful army, navy, marines, and air force on the globe, we would be winning, right?"

The president admitted that he’d been toying with the idea that a thorough lack of quality in personnel, from the top U.S. commander to the lowest-ranked private, is the only way to account for the colossal failure in Iraq, given that everything on the administrative side of the war has been carried out with the utmost care and precision.

Over to you, Michelle Malkin.

You know: all those Republicans at the grass roots who were demanding that the president pardon Irving Libby for perjury. It turns out that, according to Gallup, they make up a whopping 6 percent of Americans, compared with the 66 percent who think the president’s job is to uphold and defend the justice system, not to undermine it for special favors for his friends. "The base" is often a fiction for cliques in Washington whose constant goal is to defend their own privilege and power. And boy do the neocons know how to do that.

Just a couple of very smelly feet.

"There’s no question that Thompson has moved on abortion — he wasn’t pro-life at the start of his political career — and he is doing himself no favors by failing to acknowledge it," –Ramesh Ponnuru, NRO.

Rudy Giuliani really isn’t ready for prime-time, is he? Here’s his response to the historically large number of Americans who say that the country is on the wrong track:

"I ask you this question: If America is going in the wrong direction, where is the rest of the world going? Where is Russia going? Where is England going? Where is France going? Where is Africa going? If we are going in the wrong direction, the rest of the world is falling off a cliff."

This man wants to be president?

David Boaz asks:

1. Would you support a presidential candidate who is divorced, has estranged relations with his children, never sees his grandchildren, rarely attends church, strongly opposes a law to ban gays from teaching school, and as governor signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law?

2. Would you support him if you knew his name was Ronald Reagan?

Fact One: The U.S. military is unable to sustain its current surge in Iraq past next March, regardless of policy decisions. Fact Two: the "Iraqi" "government" has failed to meet any of the benchmarks for political progress we were told should be a criterion for continuing to police Iraq’s civil war. This was another lie, of course. Bush never had any intention of actually framing the military strategy according to Baghdad’s political process. But it’s a lie that will now be usefully exposed, along with the others. Just for the record:

This spring, Congress agreed to continue funding the war through September but demanded that Bush certify on July 15 and again on Sept. 15 that the Iraqis were living up to their political promises or forgo U.S. aid dollars.

The official said it is highly unlikely that Bush will withhold or suspend aid to the Iraqis based on the report.

Of course, Dick Cheney’s response to seeing the edge of a cliff approaching is to accelerate.
    

The scientists have done a study. Money quote:

These results clearly suggest that yawning regulates the temperature inside your head, and that perhaps we yawn to cool our brains. What we don’t have here is any biochemical cause-and-effect, but this is an incredibly interesting theory all the same.

The findings, if valid, draw a few unexpected conclusions about yawning. First of all, rather than stimulating sleep, a good yawn should fend off falling asleep. And secondly, far from being an indicator of boredom, yawning would appear to be a mechanism for maintaining attention.

So be sure and remember this for your next staff meeting — it’s an excellent excuse, and possibly even a valid one!

A personal fave: "I love my dead gay son."