Sunday Reading

Want to take some time and do some reading on the Bush crack-up?

Ok. How about Sidney Blumenthal's piece on how the administrations claims of executive power are being slowly, but systematically dismantled. Or how about Marcy Wheelers speculation on who Blumenthal is talking about when he discussed "high administration officials" who are admitting that they've likely acted illegally. Finally, there's this piece on how the above pieces fit together in the battle to keep Scooter Libby out of jail. Digby speculates that given the Scootsters role in all of this, he has a considerable amount of "leverage" if he should choose to use it.


Update: Wow. More Sunday reading for your enjoyment. Excerpt from the opening graf:

Just past the Oval Office, in the private dining room overlooking the South Lawn, Vice President Cheney joined President Bush at a round parquet table they shared once a week. Cheney brought a four-page text, written in strict secrecy by his lawyer. He carried it back out with him after lunch.

In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, according to witnesses, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review. When it returned to the Oval Office, in a blue portfolio embossed with the presidential seal, Bush pulled a felt-tip pen from his pocket and signed without sitting down. Almost no one else had seen the text.

Cheney's proposal had become a military order from the commander in chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to any court -- civilian or military, domestic or foreign. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and would be tried, if at all, in closed "military commissions."

"What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded, a witness said, when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part.

and Digby's take on the article:

This is exactly the kind of manipulation that is made possible by a weak and stupid president. Reagan was not particularly bright, but he gathered people around him who were not insane, had known him forever and shared his goals. Bush is a child whose agenda was whatever the last person he spoke with told him it was.

I know that I sound like a character in an Oliver Stone movie, ("one pristine bullet? That dog don't hunt!" ) but I have never been sanguine about the fact that all the big money boyz and all the power brokers in the GOP traipsed down to Austin to meet that grinning moron and came away thinking he was the right choice to run the most powerful nation on earth. It makes far more sense to me that they wanted to install Cheney from the beginning (remember the energy task force?) and they needed an empty suit with a winning personality to actually run for the office. Maybe it really was a quiet coup, who knows?

Kudos to the WaPo for doing this series (this is the first).