You guys are so far out in right field you'll allow anything to be justified if it suits your political ideologies.

Bucco- The Pres. & his subordinates are required to faithfully execute the laws of the US. By definition, someone outside the executive must evaluate that execution, even if it's only the supreme court. See Nixon & the Tapes issue. Cheney, and only Cheney, since the Watergate issues were settled, exercised the incredible and unsustainable opionion (backed up by Gonsalez) that the separation of powers meant that the Executive was never subject to anyone outside of the Exec.

(Interestingly, it was Robert Bork who ended up firing Archibald Cox when the rest of Nixon's gov't refused to follow his orders for an unaccountable executive. (Thus making it understandable why people who value the constitution felt he and is ilk are a danger to it))

What's fascinating is that just after Bucco's post, Billie the Kid enumerates the positions that NOTHING can inhibit the executive (as long as he's a Right-wing, I assume) if he thinks he's protecting the president. Hitler, history's #1 right-wing hero, complained that the Jews were a threat to the sovereignty of Germany- let's give him a big "heil" for using national security without any oversight to try to eliminate that threat!

Absolute power without oversight is tyranny, plain and simple.

Bucco, you then go to talk about Obama & Gitmo, etc. I don;t agree with his thinking- but you know what? HE'S CONSULTING CONGRESS ABOUT IT! I don;t know whether laws were broken intentionally, unintentionally, or not at all. But when you have an executive that claims it has NO responsibilty to answer to anyone but itself- and you can also see this in Bush's Executive orders setting DHS/FEMA up as an un-investigatable body whenever he chooses to declare Martial Law- then again, we have tyranny.

Finally, Panetta has "revealed" what any program was. Only that 1.) The former heads of the CIA and other agencies didn't know about Cheney's orders, and that he didn't even find out about it until last week. And 2.) He stopped whatever "it" was. He, and the NYTimes, haven't released any classified information- they've only reported that an "operation" of some sort was found out about and stopped.

Finally, SteveZ says, "Party hacks and conspiratorial traitors are those who intentionally abuse the legal system and the public trust by creating political smokescreens to direct attention away from their actions or to hide their incompetence.

What's next? Claiming orphan's isurance benefits becasue you murdered your parents?
Please explain to us how that quote doesn't fit part and parcel into the entire Bush adminstration's handling of "faulty" (dishonest) intelligence about Iraq, it's incompetency about the war and ignoring or firing its detractors, and the handling of Katrina (Heck of a job, Brownie!)?


We have found out that virtually all of the excessive and, accoring to the SUpreme Court, illegal wiretapping and NSA eavesdropping produced virtually NO actionable intelligence. It appears Billythe Kid was willing to give up 300 million Americans' Constitutional right to privacy for absolutlely no gain, other than Dick Cheney's conspiratorial paranoia.

Let's remember folks, 9/11 happened on the Bush/Cheney watch. Plain, simple and factual. If something were to happen today, in July, wouldn't you guys be the first to blame Obama, even though he's been in office 2 months less than Bush was in 2001? Be honest now! Of course, and you'd find some paranoid excuse about being soft on terror or something.