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Conservative bloomberg columnist hates cheney Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_carlson&sid=aSNmOk6yWx1shttp://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&refer=columnist_carlson&sid=aSNmOk6yWx1s
Margaret Carlson , who was a columnist and deputy Washington bureau chief for Time magazine, is a columnist for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.
Will Libby Case Make Bush Wise Up to Cheney?: Margaret Carlson
Nov. 3 (Bloomberg) -- In the 2000 presidential election campaign, George W. Bush, the happily married, in-bed-at-nine, born-again governor, vowed to restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office. Last week, in one way, he carried out his promise.
Bush resisted the impulse of any White House under investigation to blame the investigator. He actually let special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald do his job.
He may have realized Fitzgerald was beyond criticism. When you see the real thing -- a rock-ribbed, straightforward, trustworthy public servant, without TV training, a clothing consultant or handlers -- it's riveting.
And unlike our last independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, Fitzgerald didn't leak, didn't drag anyone's mother before the grand jury, didn't publish a lurid, 1,000-page report.
Fitzgerald's stature doesn't mean Bush couldn't have taken a swipe at him to undercut the finding that there was an attempt to smear a dissenter and lying about it inside the West Wing.
The president isn't afraid to take on heroes, after all: Former Secretary of State Colin Powell wasn't invited back for a second term. But Bush never criticized how much Fitzgerald was spending or how long he was taking. He called the process ``dignified'' and didn't try to trivialize the perjury charge that resulted.
After Miers
If only he'd nominated Fitzgerald to the Supreme Court. He meets many of Bush's criteria: He's Catholic, the non-elite son of a doorman, not part of the ``judicial monastery'' and immersed in real life as a U.S. attorney. He might even have a mother who, like nominee Samuel Alito's, would answer the door and say her son was against abortion.
But Bush decided to go in the other direction, to nominate Alito, someone who was the opposite of what he said he was looking for when he named Harriet Miers a month earlier. Alito is an Ivy Leaguer straight out of the judicial cloister. While Miers's faith was all we were supposed to talk about, it's now anti-Catholic bigotry to mention Alito's.
That proved to be a tipping point in the deteriorating relationship between the parties. Alito's nomination, coming after Fitzgerald's inquiry led to just one indictment and the warning that his investigation was never meant to be a referendum on the war, was too much.
Shutting Down
Republicans were nearly gleeful. The Miers nomination had ended with a whimper, not a bang. They'd dodged a bullet and had themselves a rip-roaring conservative appointment to the Supreme Court. The Bushies were back in the saddle. Take that, chumps.
Two days ago, Democrats decided not to take it. Instead, they took the nearly unprecedented step of shutting down the Senate. Republicans called it a stunt, a hissy fit, the tantrum of a spoiled child.
Democrats called it a principled stand after showing incredible patience with the Senate Intelligence Committee. Its chairman, Pat Roberts of Kansas, agreed in 2004 to hold a second phase of hearings on prewar intelligence, to explore just who did the cherry-picking that made it look as if Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was ready to give them to his good friends in al-Qaeda.
Republicans asked Democrats to please kick those hearings down the road until after the 2004 election. Democrats agreed. That deal was struck 18 months ago.
Three O'clock Thoughts
By partially giving in and agreeing to a bipartisan group of six senators to monitor the committee's progress, Republicans insist they're not responding to the Democrats' ``stunt.'' They're only doing what they were going to do anyway.
Hogwash. They would rather eat glass than have more hearings. With U.S. deaths in Iraq passing 2,000, an insurgency ever-more sophisticated and no end in sight to the fighting, Republicans don't want any acknowledgement that we may be there for no reason whatsoever.
In any event, while the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, may be the end of the leak investigation, it may be the beginning of Bush's facing up to the rump operation being run out of the veep's office.
I don't think he knows the half of what goes on over there. Maybe he will wake at three some morning regretting how he was seduced by the Utopian neocon dream of bringing democracy to the Middle East by invading Iraq.
You know the vice president's office has become a dark and insular bunker when someone like Libby ends up paying the whole price for the clique that took us to war.
Libby, whom I've known for more than two decades, was what we called back then a young fogy, a guy so reasonable and modest and sensible he made the rest of us look like immature hotheads. I couldn't picture him telling a white lie, much less a transparent one about something serious. The only explanation is that he fell in with the wrong crowd.
The tragedy of Libby being the only one to take the fall may not be in vain. If Bush is paying attention, it may bring an end to the Cheney Administration.
Last Updated: November 3, 2005 00:10 EST
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