Dick being Dick

Dick Cheney put down his vial of goat's blood long enough to do an interview with Sean Hannity this week. Cheney was the most secretive dude since that other famous Dick (Nixon) so it makes it especially enjoyable that he is now calling on the Obama administration to release documents about waterboarding: "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

Cheney hasn't always been such a huge fan of transparency. There were the undisclosed locations and the fact that the VP's residence vanished (Cheney's dark magic, me thinks). Here's how historian Edward Larson described him: Commentators and comedians have ridiculed Vice President Dick Cheney for invoking executive privilege to deny one set of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee while, at the same time, asserting that his office is not part of the executive branch so as to deny another set to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives. As a historian, though, I admire the Vice President’s chutzpah. Rather than being laughably ridiculous, his seemingly conflicting and transparently self-serving claims on these matters have at least enough historical support to qualify as artful dodges rather than baseless evasions.



Part I



Part II
Here's a link (embedding disabled for some reason).