side note: I don’t completely share Vidal’s pessimism, but he does make some interesting points. Especially his thoughts on our media in this country and specifically all the Iran talk over the last few years…….I just hope he’s wrong!

Tim Teeman
Times Online
The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is ‘rotting away’ — and don’t expect Barack Obama to save it

A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is 83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (“Of course I can”) and after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London’s National Theatre he stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? “Very good.” Where did they meet? Silence. The US? “Well, it wasn’t Russia.” What’s he writing at the moment? “It’s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.” He means self-glorifying? “You’ve stumbled on the phrase,” he says, regally enough. “Continue to use it.”

Vidal is sitting in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, where he has been coming to stay for 60 years. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, brown jumper, tracksuit bottoms; his white hair twirled into a Tintin-esque quiff and with his hooded eyes, delicate yet craggy features and arch expression, he looks like Quentin Crisp, but accessorised with a low, lugubrious growl rather than camp lisp.

He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during the Second World War, as Downing Street was “getting hammered by the Nazis. The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.” In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war, his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world’s greatest essayists. (more…)

side note: Another strong article from the people over at Salon.com! This falls in line with what we’ve been saying for years. The price of oil is globally set….so what that means that if there’s a shortage in the middle east, b/c of any sort of circumstances, then the price of oil with spike…not just in the middle east, but everywhere. So this article takes it a step further, explaining why we need to protect the interests of other countries…..a good read, if not a bit depressing how the people in charge explain this to the citizens of this country…..and even more depressing is that there are a huge number of us who buy into it without doing a damn bit of research.

By Michael Lind
Salon.com
Obama has the chance to end our Cold War hangover, and start an era where the U.S. is not the sole global policeman

While the economic crisis continues to overshadow other topics, world politics is undergoing rapid and dramatic changes. In areas from national security policy to trade, the Obama administration has repudiated Bush-era precedents significantly, if not rapidly enough for some critics on the left. The pressures on the administration to continue in the path followed by U.S. administrations since the fall of the Berlin Wall are intense, particularly in light of the victory of the hard-liners in Iran and new revelations about Iran’s nuclear program. Even so, President Obama in partnership with other world leaders has a genuine opportunity to bring the post-Cold War era to a definitive end and to preside over the greatest reorganization of global politics since the end of World War II.

During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt hoped that the postwar world could be policed by a great power concert or alliance, made up initially of the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union, along with Nationalist China. Corresponding to FDR’s concert-of-power security system would be new global economic institutions that would go beyond setting rules to promoting Keynesian demand management on a global scale in the interest of sustained and shared global growth. (more…)

side note: With this horrible economic downturn the world is experiencing….why not legalize marijuana and tax the shit out of it? It makes no sense to have all the money made the most profitable cash crop in the United States to end up in the hands of drug dealers and other criminal types. When I was in high school….it was easier to get a bag of weed then it was to get alcohol. Why? Because alcohol is regulated….you need an ID, purchasing is done in the open…..

by Christina Davidson
The Atlantic

A friend in San Francisco had advised I would see real live hippies hitchhiking north on US-101 through redwood country this time of year–migrant agricultural workers of a peculiar variety. Of all those drawn to northern California’s “Emerald Triangle” for the fall harvest of marijuana, the aged man I met in Eureka likely traveled the farthest, having just arrived on a Greyhound from South Carolina, fleeing depressed economic and mental states in pursuit of new opportunities in the cannabis trade.

When I first see “Pie-Dog,” as he later asks to be identified (”long story”), he appears to be struggling with an excess of baggage. I make a couple of U-turns to observe his slow progress as he trudges a short distance dragging a small bag stacked on a large suitcase with wheels, then backtracks to grab an oversized backpack and bed roll. His clothes look clean and new, as does the big suitcase, but he’s standing on the side of the road in Eureka with his destination scrawled on a tattered piece of cardboard. I sense a story.

Pie-Dog tells me he’s headed into “the heart of the hippie triangle.” It’s a small community in the tri-county area of Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity, though I agree to not reveal precisely where. He has invested time and effort to get himself “on the inside” and does not want anything to disturb the fragile web of trust he has established.

Though California permits medicinal marijuana, producers exist in a legally gray area. The biggest headlines come when joint raids by local police and DEA net mass producers, whose crops far exceed even the most dillusionally generous interpretation of the law. But little guys get hit often enough to instill a self-protective atmosphere of suspicion against any outsiders, infiltrators, or spies. The paranoia induced by THC intake probably doesn’t help. (more…)

side note: Even after Katrina…..this country will not get on board with changing the way we view climate change. Granted, the ignorant and dumb in this country have had the microphone for too fuckin long…..and the rest of us, who live in reality, want it back so we can get create some real reform!

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.

And here’s the thing: I’m not engaging in hyperbole. These days, dire warnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of the most widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers. The prognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last few years.

What’s driving this new pessimism? Partly it’s the fact that some predicted changes, like a decline in Arctic Sea ice, are happening much faster than expected. Partly it’s growing evidence that feedback loops amplifying the effects of man-made greenhouse gas emissions are stronger than previously realized. For example, it has long been understood that global warming will cause the tundra to thaw, releasing carbon dioxide, which will cause even more warming, but new research shows far more carbon dioxide locked in the permafrost than previously thought, which means a much bigger feedback effect.

The result of all this is that climate scientists have, en masse, become Cassandras — gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.

And we’re not just talking about disasters in the distant future, either. The really big rise in global temperature probably won’t take place until the second half of this century, but there will be plenty of damage long before then. (more…)

side note: Frank Rich has such a beautiful way with words…even when he’s writing about subjects such as Vietnam and our current situation in Afghanistan. We hope President Obama has the strength to resist the military complex…..they are a very strong force, and we’ve seen them in action before……and at times, they have led us down the wrong path.

By FRANK RICH
The New York Times

THE most intriguing, and possibly most fateful, news of last week could not be found in the health care horse-trading in Congress, or in the international zoo at the United Nations, or in the Iran slapdown in Pittsburgh. It was an item tucked into a blog at ABCNews.com. George Stephanopoulos reported that the new “must-read book” for President Obama’s war team is “Lessons in Disaster” by Gordon M. Goldstein, a foreign-policy scholar who had collaborated with McGeorge Bundy, the Kennedy-Johnson national security adviser, on writing a Robert McNamara-style mea culpa about his role as an architect of the Vietnam War.

Bundy left his memoir unfinished at his death in 1996. Goldstein’s book, drawn from Bundy’s ruminations and deep new research, is full of fresh information on how the best and the brightest led America into the fiasco. “Lessons in Disaster” caused only a modest stir when published in November, but The Times Book Review cheered it as “an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.” The reviewer was, of all people, the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began in Vietnam and who would later be charged with the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis by the new Obama administration.

Holbrooke’s verdict on “Lessons in Disaster” was not only correct but more prescient than even he could have imagined. This book’s intimate account of White House decision-making is almost literally being replayed in Washington (with Holbrooke himself as a principal actor) as the new president sets a course for the war in Afghanistan. The time for all Americans to catch up with this extraordinary cautionary tale is now.

Analogies between Vietnam and Afghanistan are the rage these days. Some are wrong, inexact or speculative. We don’t know whether Afghanistan would be a quagmire, let alone that it could remotely bulk up to the war in Vietnam, which, at its peak, involved 535,000 American troops. But what happened after L.B.J. Americanized the war in 1965 is Vietnam’s apocalyptic climax. What’s most relevant to our moment is the war’s and Goldstein’s first chapter, set in 1961. That’s where we see the hawkish young President Kennedy wrestling with Vietnam during his first months in office. (more…)

side note: I think the problem is not that people don’t believe in Global Warming, well, there actually are some nutjobs that believe that…….but I think most people don’t want to actually make the daily changes in their lives that would be necessary to make the real changes. This is why obesity is such an issue in our country….most people know that eating a diet of mcdonalds and big gulps isn’t healthy….but they still do it!

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times

So, have you enjoyed the debate over health care reform? Have you been impressed by the civility of the discussion and the intellectual honesty of reform opponents?

If so, you’ll love the next big debate: the fight over climate change.

The House has already passed a fairly strong cap-and-trade climate bill, the Waxman-Markey act, which if it becomes law would eventually lead to sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But on climate change, as on health care, the sticking point will be the Senate. And the usual suspects are doing their best to prevent action.

Some of them still claim that there’s no such thing as global warming, or at least that the evidence isn’t yet conclusive. But that argument is wearing thin — as thin as the Arctic pack ice, which has now diminished to the point that shipping companies are opening up new routes through the formerly impassable seas north of Siberia.

Even corporations are losing patience with the deniers: earlier this week Pacific Gas and Electric canceled its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in protest over the chamber’s “disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality” of climate change.

So the main argument against climate action probably won’t be the claim that global warming is a myth. It will, instead, be the argument that doing anything to limit global warming would destroy the economy. As the blog Climate Progress puts it, opponents of climate change legislation “keep raising their estimated cost of the clean energy and global warming pollution reduction programs like some out of control auctioneer.”

It’s important, then, to understand that claims of immense economic damage from climate legislation are as bogus, in their own way, as climate-change denial. Saving the planet won’t come free (although the early stages of conservation actually might). But it won’t cost all that much either.

How do we know this? First, the evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer. (more…)

side note: This is part 3 of 3…scroll down to read the first 2 and to see my comments. This Glenn Beck character is good at what the article states….pushing people’s buttons to create buzz and hype…no matter the cost.

By Alexander Zaitchik
Salon.com
PART 3 of 3

Sep. 23, 2009 |

It was 1990, the midpoint of Beck’s career in FM morning radio. The morning zoo craze had peaked and the economy had stalled. Eight years after leaving Washington state with a suitcase full of skinny ties and dreams of working in Rockefeller Center, Beck was now a morning-drive journeyman with a family to feed and a reputation to save. Despite breaking quickly out of the gate at age 18, Beck did not enter the new decade within sight of the industry’s front ranks. New York’s Z100, the leading station in his world, was not calling him. Neither were program directors in L.A. or Chicago. There were no syndication offers to compete with national zookeepers like John Lander and Scott Shannon.

After his personal and professional meltdown in Houston, Beck found a new job in Baltimore at the city’s leading Top 40 station, WBSB, AKA B104. This time, however, he wanted a partner.

On the recommendation of a friend, he settled on a 27-year-old morning jock named Pat Gray. Although Gray and Beck had worked in Houston at the same time, they had never met. But the new team clicked. As Beck likes to tell it, it was DJ love at first sight, with the two bonding within minutes of meeting at the airport. Beck and Gray were unlikely bosom buddies. Gray was a Mormon who home-schooled his kids; Beck was a bong-ripping nihilist who could barely remember his kids’ names. But they shared a sense of humor and a love of morning-radio mischief. They also shared similar if inchoate politics. After their partnership ended in 1994, both men would go on to pursue careers in conservative talk radio. They now work together on Beck’s nationally broadcast radio show, The Glenn Beck Program. (more…)

side note: This is Part 2 of 3…scroll down to read part 1. I’ve also posted my thoughts at the start of Part 1.

By Alexander Zaitchik
Salon.com
The radio phenom takes over the morning zoo, makes fun of miscarriages and flames out.
Part 2 of 3

Sep. 22, 2009 |

When Glenn Beck assumed morning-show duties at KZFM in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1983, the zoo model was ascendant. It was the year Scott Shannon moved to New York to found Z100, where Shannon’s “Z Morning Zoo” made the station No. 1 in the market within three months of its birth. Closer to Beck’s new home, John Lander had just launched what would be a long-running and heavily syndicated morning zoo on Houston’s KKBQ.

Like dozens of stations launching generic zoos around the country, Beck’s first morning show was titled simply “The Morning Zoo.” It wasn’t a playbook zoo, as it lacked an ensemble, but it had a zoo spirit. It was fast-paced and featured skits and fake characters voiced by Beck. Beck’s main cartoon character was named Clydie Clyde, a Muppet-voiced alter ego who sounds like the love child of Yoda and Kermit the Frog. Today the descendants of Clyde live on without names. Beck lapses into voices to imitate anyone he doesn’t like, while going boggly-eyed and waving his hands around like he’s slipping on a banana peel. (Clyde was based on the most widely imitated such character at the time, “Mr. Leonard” from Shannon’s New York Zoo team.)

“Beck’s Corpus show was just him, Clydie Clyde and the news reader,” says Tod Tucker, who hosted the slot following Beck’s at KZFM. “He was extremely talented and he knew it. At first we didn’t get along because he was so arrogant, but we became friends. He always talked about going to New York City and making it big. That was his dream.”

He didn’t advertise it, but at 19 Beck was the youngest morning zoo host and program director in the country. “At the time I thought he was in his mid- to late 20s,” says Barry Kaye, former program director at KITE, a rival station. “He was an incredible talent to be working at that level at that age.”

“Glenn was a talented young preppy kid with a bit of an attitude,” remembers Meryl Uranga, a program and music director at KZFM. “I had never smelled clove cigarettes before I met him. Hanging out with Beck was also the first time I ever saw certain drugs. He partied a lot.”

Along with giving Beck the space to develop creatively, Corpus Christi offered a crash course in the business side of radio. As a manager and programmer, Beck was responsible for tailoring KZFM’s appeal to Corpus Christi’s complicated market, a diverse population split between Hispanics, whites, blacks and active military. And there was enormous pressure to get the formula right. At the time, KZFM was engaged in a heated ratings war with its rival, KITE. (more…)

side note: When I first watched Glenn Beck on CNN, I was blown away! How in the hell could CNN let this tool on TV….spouting off his bullshit….more then those other right-wing tools. That is when I came to the conclusion that CNN was more concerned with revenue then actually reporting the news…..follow the FOX model. I was not shocked when Beck moved to FOX News…..they are a match made in heaven. I didn’t want to post anything Beck related, but his ratings and the excitement that he generates among the dumb flock out there requires that we know who this guy is, and where he came from. This allows you to talk to those folks out there who think every word Beck says is Gospel. He is exposed as the fraud everyone thought he was……..

By Alexander Zaitchik
Salon.com
PART 1 of 3

Early one morning in May 1979, a 41-year-old divorcee named Mary Beck went boating in Washington’s Puget Sound. Her companions on the expedition were a retired papermaker named Orean Carrol, whose boat she helped launch near the Tacoma suburb of Puyallup, and Carrol’s pet dog. Exactly what happened next remains shrouded in morning mist, but among the crew, only the dog would survive the day. The boat was recovered late that afternoon adrift near Vashon Island, just north of Tacoma. It was empty but for two wallets and the frightened animal. Mary Beck’s body was discovered floating fully clothed nearby. Carrol’s corpse washed ashore at the Vashon ferry terminal the following morning.

The county coroner found no evidence of violence on either body. Police investigators told Tacoma’s News Tribune that the double drowning appeared to be a classic man-overboard mishap — a failed rescue attempt in which both parties perished.

At the time of Beck’s death, she held custody of her 15-year-old son, Glenn, with whom she had moved to Puyallup. She had left her estranged husband William behind in Mt. Vernon, Wash., another small city 100 miles due north. After producing two daughters and a son, the Becks’ marriage had collapsed in 1977 under the weight of Mary’s chemical addictions and manic fits of depression. It was in the two years bridging this divorce and his mother’s drowning that a teenage Glenn Beck launched one of the most bizarre and unlikely careers in the history of American broadcasting.

Since launching his talk radio career in the late ’90s, Beck has constructed a persona anchored in a biography of struggle and redemption. It is a narrative with shades of another haunted Washingtonian who found entertainment fame, Kurt Cobain. Both men hailed from broken homes in the drizzly Pacific Northwest. Both men would find youthful fortune behind microphones while struggling with drugs, prescribed and recreational. Both would contemplate suicide before their tethers finally snapped in 1994. That year Cobain would wrap his mouth around a loaded shotgun. Beck, after contemplating doing the same while listening to a Nirvana album, would not. (more…)

side note: This is why I was against the bailout from the very beginning. The first red flag was of course the Bush Administration asking for $750 billion and not telling us what it would be actually used for. Of course, we can’t account for barely any of that money….then there was the $2-3 trillion the Federal Reserve loaned out under their emergency powers….and we still have no idea where that money went, or who it was given to. Then….when Obama took over…he put the same people in charge of fixing the problem who had actually been apart of creating this mess……..

By Mark Deen and David Tweed
Bloomberg.com

Sept. 13 (Bloomberg) — Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize- winning economist, said the U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

Stiglitz’s views echo those of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who has advised President Barack Obama’s administration to curtail the size of banks, and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, who suggested last month that governments may want to discourage financial institutions from growing “excessively.”

A year after the demise of Lehman forced the Treasury Department to spend billions to shore up the financial system, Bank of America Corp.’s assets have grown and Citigroup Inc. remains intact. In the U.K., Lloyds Banking Group Plc, 43 percent owned by the government, has taken over the activities of HBOS Plc, and in France BNP Paribas SA now owns the Belgian and Luxembourg banking assets of insurer Fortis.

While Obama wants to name some banks as “systemically important” and subject them to stricter oversight, his plan wouldn’t force them to shrink or simplify their structure.

Stiglitz said the U.S. government is wary of challenging the financial industry because it is politically difficult, and that he hopes the Group of 20 leaders will cajole the U.S. into tougher action.

G-20 Steps

“We aren’t doing anything significant so far, and the banks are pushing back,” he said. “The leaders of the G-20 will make some small steps forward, given the power of the banks” and “any step forward is a move in the right direction.”

G-20 leaders gather next week in Pittsburgh and will consider ways of improving regulation of financial markets and in particular how to set tighter limits on remuneration for market operators. Under pressure from France and Germany, G-20 finance ministers last week reached a preliminary accord that included proposals to claw-back cash awards and linking compensation more closely to long-term performance. (more…)

side note: Kinda makes me depressed to see these numbers. There is a serious problem in this country and it needs to be addressed now! We can’t wait any longer, b/c if we don’t deal with this, and we let the boomers retire….we’re likely to bankrupt. These boomers are not in good shape and the stats back this up. We know that diabetes is going to be the #1 killer in America soon…….why won’t Americans wise up?

By Gabriel Winant
Salon.com
We spend far more per person than other wealthy nations, but we’re less healthy. What’s wrong with this picture?

President Obama is set to address Congress to try to haul healthcare reform from the thicket it’s caught in. Presumably, he’ll seek to remind elected officials — and more important, perhaps, viewers at home — of just how bad it is out there, and how important it is that reform not be allowed to die yet again.

As a reference guide for those watching the end stages of the president’s toughest fight, Salon has gathered some of the key statistics. Obviously, healthcare, and its associated economic and policy debates, have complexity far beyond what a list of statistics can show. Still, the following data, ranging from insurance coverage to public opinion to legislative politics to health outcomes, paint a fair picture of the state of medicine in America.

Insurance coverage

Americans insured through employer (2007): 159,311,384 (53.4 percent)

Americans insured individually (2007): 14,541,782 (4.9 percent)

Americans insured through Medicaid (2007): 39,296,423 (13.2 percent)

Americans insured through Medicare (2007): 36,155,452 (12.1 percent)

Americans otherwise on public insurance (2007): 3,253,122 (1.1 percent)

Americans uninsured: 45,657,193 (15.3 percent)

(Source: Kaiser Family Foundation)

Americans uninsured at the time of President Clinton’s reform proposal: Approximately 37 million

(Source: Fox News)

Number of health insurance company mergers in past 13 years: Over 400

Percentage of state health insurance markets that are “highly concentrated” under Department of Justice guidelines: 94

Percentage increase in profits at 10 of the country’s largest insurers, 2000 to 2007: 428

(Source: Health Care for Americans Now)

Political landscape

Democratic senators for a public option: 45

Democratic senators against a public option: 1

Democratic senators open to a deal: 13

Vacancies: 1

Republican senators against a public option: 38

Republican senators for a public option: 0

Republican senators open to a deal: 2

(Sources: Open Left; Wall Street Journal)

Percentage of poll respondents in favor of “President Obama’s plan to reform healthcare”: 48

Percentage in opposition: 51

Percentage who believe that problems with healthcare system “will eventually affect most Americans”: 65

Percentage who think most Americans “will continue to get good care”: 32

Percentage who would “feel more secure” with current healthcare system: 52

Percentage who would “feel more secure” with President Obama’s proposal: 44

Percentage in favor of “a public health insurance option administered by the federal government that would compete with plans offered by private health insurance companies”: 55

Percentage opposed: 41

(Source: CNN)

Amount spent by the healthcare industry daily on lobbying: At least $1.4 million

(Source: Washington Post)

Health spending and outcomes

Average health insurance premium for family coverage in 1999: $5,791

Average health insurance premium for family coverage in 2008: $12,680

(Source: Kaiser Family Foundation)

National per capita spending on healthcare, 2007

United States: $7,290
Norway: $4,763
Switzerland: $4,417
Luxembourg: $4,162
Canada: $3,895
Austria: $3,761
France: $3,601
Germany: $3,588
Netherlands: $3,527
Belgium: $3,462
OECD average: $2,964
Life expectancy for these nations, 2006

United States: 78.1
Norway: 80.6 (more…)

side note: As I keep trying to hammer home…..the reason why Americans support torture is they don’t know their history. We need to redo out educational system in this county so people can learn from the mistakes made by past generations….so we just don’t repeat the same bullshit over and over. We get dumber and dumber as a nation as the years go by…..just look at what people think about those “elite intellectuals”…we used to want those guys leading this country….now we want the “regular, grits eating Texan to run this country”, with the motto of “lets kick ass!”……
(sorry to all the NT readers who eat grits!)
For anyone that hasn’t seen the Frontline program, “The Dark Side”….you should check it out, really helps explain how Cheney was able to push his agenda over the 8 years with minimal push back.

By Derrick Z. Jackson
Boston Globe

The more Dick Cheney defends torture, the more we Americans must end our tortured ambivalence. Either we are above using the same interrogation practices that police states use, or we are are not.

Discuss
COMMENTS (301)
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8/31/09 Cheney says CIA inquiry is politically motivated
This past weekend, the former vice president said he knew about waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques used by CIA personnel on terror suspects and even defended officers who went beyond authorized methods. He said they were “absolutely essential in saving thousands of American lives and preventing further attacks against the United States.’’

Going further, he said it “offends the hell out of me’’ that the Obama administration has decided to investigate prisoner abuse by the CIA. He called it an “outrageous political act’’ that will demoralize the intelligence community to the point where “nobody’s going to sign up for those kinds of missions.’’

It would be easy at this juncture to demonize Cheney, who was so wrong so often in his eight years in office, most notably about the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that he and President Bush used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. That war has cost the lives of more than 4,300 American soldiers, with another 31,400 wounded, and about 100,000 documented deaths of Iraqi civilians, according to Iraqbodycount.org.

But Cheney’s role is an old, if still developing story. After all, he warned us five days after Sept. 11 that our government would work on the “dark side.’’ He told the late Tim Russert, “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.’’ A majority of Americans thought Cheney was right. Despite the false pretenses for war and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuses that were exposed in the spring of 2004, Bush and Cheney were reelected. (more…)