Saturday, June 23, 2007
The Rules Don't Apply To Them
Lately I've been talking about how Mayor Moneybags Bloomberg believes he's special compared to everybody else around the country and the regular rules that apply to other folks don't really apply to him. Well, let's not forget that we already have a preznut and a vice preznut who believe the same thing:
Unfortunately for America, the "accountability moment" as Preznut Bush once termed it passed back in 2004 and now Bush and Cheney can do any old thing they want and there's nothing you or the Congress or anybody can do about it.
Unless we want to put impeachment back on the table.
Bush democracy - just like the rule of the Sun King.
WASHINGTON — The White House said Friday that, like Vice President Dick Cheney's office, President Bush's office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information.
An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 — amending an existing order — requires all government agencies that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn't specifically say so, Bush's order was not meant to apply to the vice president's office or the president's office, a White House spokesman said.
Bush amended the oversight directive in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to help ensure that national secrets would not be mishandled, made public or improperly declassified.
The order aimed to create a uniform system for classifying, declassifying and otherwise safeguarding national security information. It gave the archives' oversight unit responsibility for evaluating the effectiveness of each agency's classification programs. It applied to the executive branch of government, mostly agencies led by Bush administration appointees — not to legislative offices such as Congress or to judicial offices such as the courts.
...
But from the start, Bush considered his office and Cheney's exempt from the reporting requirements, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said in an interview Friday.
Cheney's office filed the reports in 2001 and 2002 but stopped in 2003.
As a result, the National Archives has been unable to review how much information the president's and vice president's offices are classifying and declassifying. And the security oversight office cannot inspect the president and vice president's executive offices to determine whether safeguards are in place to protect the classified information they handle and to properly declassify information when required.
Unfortunately for America, the "accountability moment" as Preznut Bush once termed it passed back in 2004 and now Bush and Cheney can do any old thing they want and there's nothing you or the Congress or anybody can do about it.
Unless we want to put impeachment back on the table.
Bush democracy - just like the rule of the Sun King.
