Uncle Dick's Big Day in Court

Duck Hunting Fans Get Ready!

I wish it were ironic, but it's just coincidental how much ducking the administration does of accountability or responsibility. Everybody else makes mistakes, but stuff just happens to the old Bush-Cheney team. I'm really looking forward to hearing how Uncle Dick helps poor little George keep his feathers preened in front of the 9/11 commission, but we'll never know since the President won't even go on record publically even with his babysitter present.

Speaking of which...

Today is Uncle Dick's big day in court with his Fowl-fightin' buddy, Mr. Justice Scalia, who helpfully issued a 21-page memo that indicated his price was higher than a mere duck hunt. It reminds me of the old George Bernard Shaw story about how he offered a grand lady a million pounds to sleep with him. She twittered and accepted, and then Shaw asked her to sleep with him for a pound. "Why, I'm not that sort of woman!" she said. "Why, of course you are, Madame, we've already established that. Now we're just haggling over the price." My apologies if I haven't re-told this exactly, but the official transcript of Shaw's meeting with the lady was done in closed chambers. My theory is the duck hunting trip was the payback for tossing the election to Uncle Dick, and that Scalia's price for a mere Supreme Court ruling for executive privilege is just dinner for two at Denny's.

"If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined." -- Justice Scalia

Boy, you said it, brother.

The issue, of course, is whether the selected government of the Supreme Court can keep their secret meetings that result in public policy secret. I wouldn't be surprised to find out the entire Energy Task force actually focussed on taking over Iraq to maintain the oil supply, but it's probably just the usual ho-hum talk about how to help industry at the expense of everybody else on the planet.

I hope John Kerry picks a vice-presidential candidate soon so he has a dog who will hunt duck. Cheney's been unleashed on Kerry, emerging from the undisclosed duck blind from where he manages the puppet strings to do a few pro-forma attacks.

The administration's so secretive they don't even tell their hosts they're going to turn a "major speech on foreign policy" into a partisan hack attack. Cheney's abuse of an invitation to speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri hasn't gotten the full attention it deserves, but it sure as heck takes a rude customer to make a Missouri academic publicly protest.

It does remind one how far conservatives have fallen in stature since Winston Churchill appeared at the same venue in 1946. You didn't hear Sir Winston whine about how Clement Atlee was weak on defense or how his war record was distorted. Check out the speech in detail to see how quickly Cheney gets from Truman to Churchill to bashing Kerry by name 23 times.

This is how the old bait and switch was presented to the school the day before Cheney's speech:

The vice president "selected Westminster to be the venue for this particular speech. We have been told it's on foreign policy, but no details have been given to us," Mike Odneal, a school spokesman, said Friday.

Poor Missouri saps,