Frontline & "Cheney's Law": A review.

Tonight. 9 PM, TPT. Ch.2 (Tomorrow, 9 p.m. ch. 17)

Once whoever comes next and historians begin clearing rubble from the administration of George W. Bush and trying to explain how this disaster happened the smart ones will start by boring into Dick Cheney’s bunker. If there’s any doubt left that Cheney is the ideological and tactical tent pole of the W* circus, tonight’s episode of “Frontline”, called “Cheney’s Law”, strips away another thin layer uncertainty.

The essence of “Cheney’s Law” is the vice-president’s breathtaking disregard for Constitutional niceties and his aggressive pursuit of highly-parsed, highly self-serving legal opinions. Opinions supporting a broad expansion of executive power in favor of the current administration, with little or none of the required congressional oversight.

This expansion, steeped in secrecy so strict key players like the Secretary of State (Colin Powell) and National Security Advisor (Condoleeza Rice) were kept out of the loop on the most provocative decisions, extends from Bush’s notorious “signing orders”, vividly detailed in a Pulitzer-winning article by the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage, coercion of the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith, (with regards to Bush-Cheney’s interpretation laws concerning extraordinary rendition and torture) and a smattering of the squeeze put on the now infamous nine U.S. attorneys shown the door for being insufficiently loyal/acquiescent to the Bush team.

To the well-informed, little here is new. But the less-than acutely aware will be stunned. It is still astonishing-to-appalling to hear a first-person description of the famous hospital bedside scene with Alberto Gonzalez and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card trying to get then Attorney General John Ashcroft — no one’s idea of an ACLU whacko — to sign off on another extension of a plainly illegal domestic surveillance program.

Producer Michael Kirk, who has obviously cultivated respect and sources from previous documentaries (“Rumsfeld’s War”, “Endgame”, “The Lost Year in Iraq”), gets Goldsmith, a lifelong ideological conservative — now in the news trying to put distance between himself and what he regards as the Cheney team’s reckless disregard for the rule of law — to talk at length about his experience in the grip of Cheney and David Addington, Cheney’s personal lawyer.

Author Ron Suskind turns up in support of the basic thesis, that it is Cheney from who policy directives flow, with Bush as little more than a rubber stamp. Suskind, Pulitzer Prize winner and former senior national affairs writer for the Wall Street Journal, is best known for his two most recent books, “The Price of Loyalty” about former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s brief, unpleasant experience with Cheney and Bush, and the even more jaw-dropping, “One Percent Doctrine”, a genuinely startling behind-the-scenes look at how completely systematized Cheney and Bush’s chief strategist/public sock puppet act has always been.

(Check out the chapter on then Saudi Crown Prince — now King — Abdullah’s visit to Bush’s Texas ranch for everything you need to know about who is actually running this government, and who pretty much does as he’s told.)

By now documentaries like this are well past preaching to the hardened choir. A fair number of independents and political agnostics know something is profoundly screwed up, maybe even criminal. “Cheney’s Law” solidifies the “reality” around the last six years.

(It was Suskind who got the following classic quote from a member of the Bush team:

“The aide said that guys like me were, ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.”

The question for the commercial news media — the vaunted newsrooms of CBS, ABC and NBC — is where are they in raking together all the disparate
but now available facts on this, dare I say, epic story? True, in 15 minute bits, “60 Minutes” has delivered some goods. But the skeptic in me says commercial news will wait until well after Dick Cheney has left office to program the obvious — if then.


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