Out of my league

Connecting the dots, like the good investigative journalists, is not my forté. Nor have I been watching the political scene long enough to have a handle on who's who and what's what.

Of course, that doesn't keep me from questioning, or from having opinions! But mostly I just write about what I'm noticing and what I'm wondering about.

Like this Josh Marshall article.

I like Josh Marshall. I read his blog daily. He seems pretty astute to me. (Sorry, Josh, that would be a better compliment coming from somebody else.) Actually, I often use Josh's comments as self-congratulations when they mirror what I'm thinking. (Sorry again, Josh. I admit, I'm using you. Life sucks, huh?)

So. Here's what Josh has to say in a rather directed blaming of Dick "Dick" Cheney (as Maru sometimes calls him). I hope Josh is not letting Smirky McCodpiece (as Maru sometimes calls him) off the hook, and I don't think he is.

As I wrote almost a year ago in The Washington Monthly, take almost any blunder, miscalculation or bad act from the Bush White House and you’ll find Dick Cheney behind it.

Mr. Marshall then spells out a number of examples. (The list order - no particular - and numbers are mine. The text is his.)

1) Cheney’s recent effort to revive the now thoroughly discredited tie between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks was only the most recent, most public and most embarrassing instance of his role in misguided and manipulated uses of American intelligence.

2) Two weeks ago Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) gave voice to widespread and well-founded suspicions that Cheney’s office is the epicenter of the plot to expose Plame’s identity as a clandestine CIA operative.

3) But it’s difficult to find anyone today who thinks disbanding the Iraqi army was a good idea in the first place. And few thought it was a good idea at the time. Doing so not only worsened the security vacuum that now plagues the country, it took hundreds of thousands of armed men and — in a pen stroke — made them both unemployed and harder to control.

Who was the senior administration official most responsible for this ill-conceived idea?

Vice President Dick Cheney.

4) What was the main legacy of the vice president’s energy task force? A bill? No, it was embroiling the administration in a series of controversies and lawsuits...

5) Cheney was also responsible for shelving the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman commission so that he could spearhead his own task force so that he could put the administration’s stamp on whatever anti-terrorism reforms eventually got adopted. But Cheney got distracted by other matters, and his task force didn’t get down to business until after Sept. 11.

6) In March 2002 — right about the time he started poking his nose into the Niger uranium business — Cheney embarked on his only major diplomatic initiative: a tour of Middle Eastern capitals to line up support for war against Iraq...But when he returned a week later, those friendly Arab states were reconciling with Iraq for the first time in more than a decade at a summit of the Arab League in Beirut. It was a major embarrassment for the White House and a signal rebuke for Cheney’s brand of clumsy, strong-arm diplomacy.

7) Cheney and the now-fired Larry Lindsey were the two principal voices responsible for the president’s early and self-defeating opposition to the serious securities law reform that eventually became Sarbanes-Oxley bill.

Whew. Perhaps I have become too accustomed to hearing the other shoe drop in D.C. politics, but I can't help but wonder how all those things might fit together in some scenario where Dick "Dick" Cheney is trying frantically to keep his corporate interests profitable and stay out of jail.

Is he working on his own account, or does he need to keep George's interests guarded as well? Are these men evil and manipulative, scamming the world, particularly the American taxpayer? Or are they just greedy and incompetent bit players? Certainly they both have ties to corporate power. But it could be that corporate power is just using them and will toss them away at any time they become liabilities.

It also looks like it could be a case of a couple of basically incompetent but well-connected SOBs getting to the top, and proving the Peter Principle by now occupying positions they aren't capable of handling.

But, that's too boring a story. So I'm going with the evil, manipulative corporate shill one.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.