Day: November 26, 2007

Is Cheney’s Latest Heart Ailment Real – Or Could It Be a Pretext for His Resignation?

Jon Ponder

Cable newsers are ga-ga over breaking news that Dick Cheney’s doctors discovered that he had an irregular heartbeat today:

“During examination he was incidentally found to have an irregular heartbeat, which on further testing was determined to be atrial fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm involving the upper chambers of the heart,” said spokeswoman Megan Mitchell.

She said Cheney would go to the hospital later Monday for further evaluation. She said that if necessary, he would be receive cardioversion, a procedure that involves the delivery of an electric impulse to the heart.

Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t seem odd that a vice president’s health problem might be discovered “incidentally” — or that his spokeswoman is, well, speaking about it. But this is Dick Cheney. And it brings us to a question: Is this story real, or could it be a fabrication meant to set the stage for Cheney’s resignation?

Before you dismiss the latter as speculation from a conspiracy nut whose tin-foil hat is on too tight, consider this:

  • Cheney and Bush created an incredibly elaborate and entirely false pretext for taking the country to war — a massive misinformation campaign that completely snookered the corporate media and a majority of the public and that has yet to be sussed out. Faking news of an irregular heartbeat in order to shuffle Cheney off the stage quietly is child’s play by comparison.
  • It’s a damn good excuse. The standard remedy for heart ailments like atrial fibrillation is to reduce stress. The only practicable way for a sitting vice president to reduce stress is to resign.
  • With Cheney out of the way, a new vice president could run for president with all the campaign advantages of the incumbency, especially including the ability to manufacture events and control the flow of news.

And the motivations for moving Cheney out under false pretenses are manifold:

[…]

Fox Anchor: Traitor Who Betrayed US Anti-Terror Secrets Deserves a Medal

Jon Ponder

In 1999, former Pres. George Bush famously said, “I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the name of our sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors.”

John Gibson, the Fox News anchor, takes an opposite view. He says he wants to “give a medal” to the Bush officials who deliberately jeopardized a top-secret, well-established CIA program that tracked the sales of weapons of mass destruction in black markets worldwide.

Why would a rightwinger like Gibby want to pin a medal on these traitors? Because the traitors are Republicans — a cabal led by Dick Cheney and that included Karl Rove and Scooter Libby — while the covert agent in charge of the CIA’s top secret WMD tracking program, Valerie Plame Wilson, made a campaign donation to Al Gore in 1999.

In her 20 years as a spy for the United States, Agent Wilson worked for a front business, an oil industry consulting firm called Brewster Jennings and Associates. She frequently traveled overseas where she developed a network of secret “assets” — foreign nationals who provided her with inside knowledge on the movement of chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons and materials in the worldwide terrorist black market.

The CIA will not say, of course, how many of these foreign assets were compromised, killed, wounded or kidnapped and tortured as a result of Cheney’s treasonous conspiracy to forfeit them by exposing Agent Wilson’s covert identity.

And only time will tell how many weapons of mass destruction were transported undetected because Agent Wilson’s network was compromised — and whether one or more of these weapons will be used to attack the United States.

But none of that matters to Republicans like John Gibson and his cohorts at Fox News and in the Bush White House, whose patriotism is a fake as the made-in-China American flags pinned to their lapels. Gibson’s remarkable statement advocating giving a medal to Rove, Cheney and Libby — the “most insidious of traitors” who betrayed vital national secrets — exposes him for what he is: an ideologue who puts his party ahead of his country even at the risk of national security.

Sen. Trent Lott To Announce Retirement Effective At the End of December

Jon Ponder

Trent Lott, the man who is probably best remembered for saying that the United States would have been a better place if Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina racist, had been elected president in 1948, is retiring from the Senate:

Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, plans to resign his seat before the end of the year, congressional and White House officials said Monday.

Lott, 66, scheduled two news conferences in his home state later in the day to reveal his plans. According to congressional and White House officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the announcement, Lott intends to resign effective the end of the year.

No good news here, however. Lott’s replacement will be appointed by the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, the former GOP lobbyist and RNC head, who is undoubtedly scouring the state right now to find the most ardent rightwing racist troglodyte available to fill Lott’s seat.

In fact, Gov. Barbour will be hard pressed to find someone who fits that description better than himself, and if the governor hadn’t just been reelected in a landslide in November, he’d probably put his own name at the top of the list of appointees.

The AP says Lott’s health is not an issue in his retirement, and the fact that no reason has been given for his abrupt departure — not even the standby “desire to spend more time with his family” — suggests he plans to cash in on his four decades as a Washington insider and power broker by becoming a lobbyist.

Lott, who made his comments about Thurmond at the late senator’s 100th birthday party, is the sixth Senate Republican who has announced retirement this year, according to the AP.