Get A Lawyer

Vice President Cheney defends the practice of the military and the CIA looking into Americans' bank records:

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Cheney said “national security letters” issued to banks and credit agencies were an essential tool for investigating terrorism cases in the United States.

He said the Pentagon had crossed no legal boundaries in issuing the letters independent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“There’s nothing wrong with it or illegal,” Mr. Cheney said. “It doesn’t violate people’s civil rights. And if an institution that receives one of these national security letters disagrees with it, they’re free to go to court to try to stop its execution.”

That's the rich man's answer to everything: if you don't like it, hire a fat-cat lawyer and sue me.

This is a rather odd position for Mr. Cheney to take, seeing as how the Bush administration is always complaining about "activist judges" and how the judiciary system has no right to stop government agencies like the Pentagon and CIA from doing whatever the hell the administration tells them to do.

There's also a pattern here that the Bush administration and the right-wing orcosphere has followed to the letter:

1. Dismiss the latest assault on the Constitution as old news or claim that it is the use of a power they've always had;

2. Follow that up by justifying it as an essential tool in their on-going and never-ending War On Terror;

3. Use the line out of all those World War II movies where the Gestapo interrogator says in clipped Teutonic tones while flicking the ash off his cigarette, "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about;"

4. Darkly proclaim that anyone who doesn't support the administration is a traitor.

Perhaps the most outrageous part of this maddening assault on our rights and our intelligence (pun intended) is the last one where the Vice President suggests -- hell, he proclaims -- that the opponents of the president and his divine revelations are playing into the hands of al-Qaida and other evil-doers. The truth is that it is the Bush administration who has lent encouragement to the terrorists with their weak and vacillating approach to fighting them, not to mention accomplishing their putative goal of destroying America from within by letting us do it ourselves with anti-democratic tactics like spying on our own citizens and bellicose bullying by the neocons like Dick Cheney.

Osama bin Laden has certainly stumbled upon the lazy man's approach to war with America: the first phone-in war. All he's got to do is send a threatening video or audio tape to some cable news network every six months or so and the terror level in the West goes through the roof. All it's costing him is the price of the tape and the shipping and handling (vs. the half-trillion bucks we've spent on not finding him). I'm thinking OBL is sitting in his cabin in the mountains of Pakistan, enjoying the view and chortling over how easy it is to make the Americans jump: to him it's like playing with a cat with a laser pointer. And Dick Cheney is one fat cat.