"Boy, was I wrong," says the dean

note the date - june 28, 2005 - as the moment that david broder, the consummate spokesperson of washington's elite punditry and the unabashed consumer of all the pearls that fall from the mouths of the white house swine, began to let a little light shine in on the fetid swamp that passes for his mind...

[W]hen presidential candidate George W. Bush chose Dick Cheney as his running mate, I applauded the choice... . Boy, was I wrong.

[...]

Bush has allowed Cheney to play a bureaucratic role inside the White House that Cheney never permitted anyone to employ when he was guarding the door as Gerald Ford's chief of staff.

He could exercise this power only with the compliance of the president and only because he often could bypass the procedures he had put in place in the Ford administration, procedures meant to protect the president's interests. He used his intelligence and his grasp on the levers of power -- and most of all he used secrecy -- to outflank and outwit others and thereby shape the Bush administration's agenda.

It was not illegal, and it was not unconstitutional, but it could not have happened unless the president permitted it and enabled it.

remember, i said that it was only a LITTLE light... when he says it "was not illegal, and it was not unconstitutional," i will give broder the benefit of the doubt and assume he's referring to cheney's exercise of power... the remaining light that needs to penetrate his thick skull is that many of the OUTCOMES of that exercise of power are very clearly BOTH illegal AND unconstitutional... ah, well... a step at a time...

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