Rip Van Broder Awakes

Rubs his sleepy eyes.

Leaps to his uncertain feet.

And the Dean of the Beltway Buffoons…

…denounces the lack of autogyro service to the Prussian consulate in Siam (h/t "The Simpsons")

…is appalled by all of the suffragettes running around showing all of that skin. Even in the newsroom! And the mouths on some of them!

…is saddened by the collapse of the Hanseatic League, but has a very good feeling about this “League of Nations.”

…is glad that fortified wines, demon rum, and all other liqueurs and spirituous beverages have finally been outlawed,. Not that he himself doesn’t enjoy the occasional Beefeater Negroni with the boys after a hard day nudging sentences together, but everyone knows the rabble grows lazy, idle and impious when allowed to indulge in such things. He ably reports that speculations about such “prohibition” leading to a rise in organized gangsterism are greatly exaggerated. After all, haven’t eugenicists proven that, like the Negroid and Mongoloid races, the criminal classes are unintelligent, and therefore incapable of gathering together for common purpose?

…is horrified that when he hits the “Return” key on the electro-typographic device his publishers want him to use, it just fucking sits there. But at least is does have a lovely drink holder for his Beefeater Negroni.

..and is shocked that little Dicky Cheney -- that barefoot bureaucrat with cheeks of tan. With thy turned-up pantaloons, and thy merry whistled tunes – has turned out to be an egg-sucking brownshirt with the conscience of a raptor and soul of a Hun!

Who all of the 32 Contiguous United States could ever have anticipated such a thing!

(h/t TPM)

From the WaPo

Cheney Unbound
By David S. Broder
Thursday, June 28, 2007; A25

Years ago Lamar Alexander, the senator from Tennessee, told me of a lesson he had learned as a young man on the White House staff: It is always useful for the president to have at least one aide who has had a successful career already, who does not need the job, and who therefore can offer candid advice. When he was governor of Tennessee, Alexander made sure he had such a person on his staff.

Later, when presidential candidate George W. Bush chose Dick Cheney as his running mate, I applauded the choice, thinking that Cheney would fill the role Alexander had outlined. Boy, was I wrong.

The role model for Alexander was Bryce Harlow, the diminutive, modest and universally trusted White House player in the Eisenhower and Nixon years. Cheney, as described in a breathtakingly detailed series in The Post this week by reporters Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, is something else.

What they discovered, in a year of work that reveals more about the inner workings of this White House than any previous reporting, is a vice president who used the broad authority given him by a complaisant chief executive to bend the decision-making process to his own ends and purposes, often overriding Cabinet officers and other executive branch officials along the way.
…
Secrecy was one of his tools and weapons, and his lawyers -- Scooter Libby first and now David Addington -- frustrated other policymakers by their willingness to shape or reshape the law to suit Cheney's arguments.

It is easy to see why former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who had been recommended for the job by Cheney, complained afterward that "there is no policy process," because the decision-making was often short-circuited by the vice president's private access to the Oval Office.

O'Neill was not alone in feeling that way. The secretary of state, the national security adviser and the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board also discovered to their surprise that Cheney had gone behind their backs to get his way with the president.

What Gellman and Becker have described is a decision-making process in which 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.
…

And then, it being all too much for him, Rip Van Broder rolled over and went fitfully back to the Land of Nixon, Nehru and Nod.

But then again, what do you expect.

I mean this is a man who slept right through his chance to be a

Coffee Achiever!