Cheney In Charge

I was reading that Vice-President Dick Cheney has said that he is not a part of the Executive branch of the government. Now it has been awhile since going to school, but I pretty much keep learning, and I am sure that we still have an Executive, Legislative, and a Judicial Branch of government. "Tricky" Dicky is having a problem understanding his role in the government because of an assertion that, because he also presides over the Senate, that he is not a part of the Executive Branch. This would be funny, but it is a serious matter that he is trying to skirt with this verbal mumbo jumbo.

It seems that since 2003, Dick Cheney and his office have refused to cooperate with the Office of National Archives and Administration, who are charged with making sure that the executive branch protects classified information. Vice-President Cheney's staff have not filed reports on their possession of classified data, and at one point they actually blocked an inspection of their office. In addition to this inexcusable breach of security, Cheney's office tried to have the Office of National Archives and Administration eliminated.

Now Vice-President Cheney is very well known for this attempt to keep everything that he does secret, but this time he is in violation of an executive order signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1995, and subsequently updated and reissued under President George W. Bush in 2003. That's right, this is not a law enacted by Congress, but an order that was put in place by President Clinton and reaffirmed by President Bush, to make sure that classified information was protected, so Cheney has an issue with his boss that needs to be resolved. He has been the power behind the President all along, but his utter contempt for even pretending to let Bush run the White House is very evident in this move, and many others throughout the last few years, up to and including the war in Iraq, in which he was instrumental in pushing for and getting approved.

As his power has grown, as being the force that runs the White House, Vice-President Cheney has become almost uncontrollable by the President. As a matter of fact Cheney's office filed annual reports in 2001 and 2002, describing its classification activities, so it thought that they were under the auspices of the order for at least two years, but by 2003 Cheney was feeling his power and from that time on they have refused to comply.

President Bush will probably back off on this confrontation with the man "behind the curtain" of his Oz administration and the country shall again be the loser. It is a shame that so many of our young men and women are fighting and dying for an administration that wants democracy oversees, but finds everyway to subvert it at home.