Didn't we see this coming? The Cheney Doctrine says McCranky and the Palin Gang can do and say any damn thing they like, and we can't touch them

"Subpoenas? Laws? We're the Palin Gang --

we use subpoenas to wipe our smelly butts!"

by Ken

It's not as if nobody warned us. Especially once the Democrats wrested control of Congress from the clutches of the full-time Bush co-conspirators, and Speaker Pelosi promptly announced that impeachment was "off the table." It wasn't just a matter of justice -- i.e., making the criminals pay for their crimes, appropriate as that would have been from a legal and moral standpoint. More important was the signal sent by allowing the career criminals of the Bush regime to walk:

We can't touch you. You're too smart for us. You can do whatever you damn please from -- from here to eternity.

Throw in all the well-intentioned efforts to peel the lid off the Republican transformation of our government into an organized-crime conspiracy working for the financial benefit of the wheeler-dealers who put a pestilential twerp in the White House and the ideological advantage of the organized wackos who helped do it. and the further efforts to turn the country into a single-party dictatorship, all the congressional inquiries, all the other investigations including the wave of damning reports by the regime's own long-neutered inspectors general -- efforts uniformly flouted, even sneered at by the regimists. Same message:

We can't touch you. You're too smart for us. You can do whatever you damn please from -- from here to eternity.

Yup, they beat the rap -- Cheney, Rove, the whole rampaging kit and caboodle.
And they did it sporting shit-eating grins on their faces, winking a they whined: "Pure partisan politics."

Oh, they couldn't do it alone. They did it with the enthusiastic collaboration of large quantities of voters and potential voters willing, often eager, to vote against their own interests -- people who behave so stupidly, they would need a 50-point IQ bump to qualify as morons.

And in the end, the regimistas were right. The squeaky, creaky wheels of justice never laid a finger on them. (Even when Irving "Lewis" Libby took one for the team, the figurehead boss of the crime family was there to fish him out of the drink.) And now, in good part as a result, the Right thinks it has across-the-board carte blanche.

So we get a presidential campaign in which not a word of truth is spoken.

And in the American Far North we have those newly made members of the Republican crime family thumbing their noses at investigations of their assorted malfeasances. Sure, they promised to cooperate with the Troopergate investigation, but that was Back Then, back before they became federalized soldiers in the family. And, oh yes, when the state investigators were about to issue subpoenas. No need to do that, they said, we're all friends here.

(Ironic parenthetical note: And yet it was possible for the Palin administration, which appears to have been merely thuggish and authoritarian, and making its wacko-Christian-zealot ideology law. By the standards of the local Republican crime families Governor Palin displaced -- the Stevenses, the Murkowskis, the Youngs -- the Palin Gang was, shall we say, "revenue neutral." Or maybe you just have to get your governmental sea legs before you feel entitled to treat the state treasury as your personal piggy bank and the state's business partners as your Daddy Warbucks.)

Call it the Cheney Doctrine. If Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten don't have to answer subpoenas, no matter what any stinkin' judge says, then why should Alaska's First Dude? (And speaking of the First Dude, have you ever seen anyone you were more sure was destined one day to dress in prison garb?) If Karl Rove can do whatever he damn pleases with his e-mails, no matter what the (sneer!) laws say, why can't the Palin Gang? It's all very well to say that, with the First Dude being illegally copied on every gubernatorial e-mail, no possible claim of executive privilege can be made. They don't even have to claim privilege -- they're Right-Wing Republican Hoodlums, they're above the law, they can do whatever they want

So here we have the McCranky regime running way ahead of the Bush regime: They've already got their first cover-up in place, and it's still more than six weeks to Election Day! Young Johnny himself is already exercising the Bush Privilege of spewing any damned lie he wants. The man who is a creature of the Washington Inside, whose political career is owned and operated by lobbyists, whose entire history has been committed to turning the American economy into the outlaw free-fire zone that is now imploding? Why, hasn't he been warning us all along?

Er, no, Young Johnny, you haven't. You're a fucking liar, and back in the Keating Five days you admitted you were on the take. (Of course you've gotten smarter about your nest-feathering in the days since.) Apart from enriching yourself and your cronies

Flip-flop? Me? Prove it, coppers! And while you're at it, you can take your damn subpoenas and shove them up your --


AND APPARENTLY THE CHENEY DOCTRINE ALLOWS THE
ARMY TO CIRCULATE ANY DAMN "INFORMATION" IT WANTS
Our colleague Lindsay Beyerstein directs our attention to a scandal reported by the Columbia Journalism Review, whose Megan McGinley reported yesterday:

Army Alters Photographs, Issues Them To AP

The Associated Press retracted two government-issued photographs last night after a photographer in Texas alerted the agency that the photos in question appeared to be doctored.

Bob Owen, chief photographer of the San Antonio Express-News, notified the AP that the photos of two deceased soldiers, who died in Iraq on Sept. 14, were nearly identical. Upon examining the photos, Owens noticed that everything except for the soldier’s face, name, and rank was the same. The most glaring similarity, Owen told CJR, was that the camouflage patterns of the two uniforms were “perfectly identical.”

After inspecting the photographs, the AP confirmed that the images were, indeed, Photoshopped, and issued eliminations on the two photos.

The elimination reads:

The content of this image has been digitally altered and does not accurately reflect the scene. No other version of the photo is available.

The photos were released by the U.S. Army at Fort Stewart in Georgia. Officials at the base could not be reached for comment.

“I’d like to think that the media holds itself pretty accountable and we try really hard to keep high standards,” Owen said. “Obviously the army, and the government, doesn’t see anything wrong with that [photo altering] at all.”

Did the Army not have actual photos of the two dead soldiers? Were the folks too lazy to dig them up? Or did they just like their faked photos better?

Apparently it just doesn't matter.

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