Bush Not Subject to Oversight Either
– and even if he didn’t specifically say so, in retrospect that’s what he meant, go ahead, ask him.
Bush claims oversight exemption too
The White House says the president’s own order on classified data does not apply to his office or the vice president’s.
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.
The issue flared Thursday when Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) criticized Cheney for refusing to file annual reports with the federal National Archives and Records Administration, for refusing to spell out how his office handles classified documents, and for refusing to submit to an inspection by the archives’ Information Security Oversight Office.
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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.
The leaders of all authoritarian regimes consider themselves above the law – why should Bush be any different?
Note to American people: Authoritarianism has ceased creeping in your country, it’s now going at a good trot, you might want to stop that before it begins to gallop and you find that stopping it is close to impossible.
You just might find out you don’t like living under that sort of system even if your leaders are telling you it’s safer that way.
From the Eight Principles of Incompetence:
“Second Principle: Incompetence is ethics-impaired.
Consider the characteristics bestowed upon incompetents by their intellectual sloth, as outlined in the Zeroth Principle (Incompetence is driven by intellectual sloth), along with what I have written before: “(…) it is a fact that those individuals who are ‘corrupted’ by power are inevitably revealed at their core to be selfish, greedy, covetous, paranoid or fearful. Consequently, these use power expediently as a tool for the wasteful satisfaction of their every whim, want and need, or as a weapon to aim recklessly at their outwardly-projected inner demons. In short: only incompetents abuse power“. Incompetents cheat, lie, misuse, “backstab” and abuse anything and everything in order to get their way – and they always make perfectly quaint rationalizations, as well as giving themselves a deluded moral highground (or authority), to justify their wrongdoings. In other words, incompetents are morally hypocritical and ethically impaired, because of their intellectual sloth-driven reasoning/emotional immaturity, egocentricity, intellectual vanity/intolerance, and slavery to expediency.
Third Principle: Incompetence abhors transparency and accountability.
When you take into account the Zeroth (Incompetence is driven by intellectual sloth), First (Incompetence surrounds itself with incompetence) and Second (Incompetence is ethics-impaired) Principles, it becomes all too clear why incompetents prefer to do whatever they do under the cover of concealment and/or secrecy … and thus why they abhor transparency and accountability. Not surprisingly, whistleblowers, which are inherently viewed as “traitors”, constitute a veritable danger in the intellectual sloth-driven paranoid, petty minds of incompetents.”
This situation illustrates the Second and Third Principles in action.
Oh – and if I may – I would also like to refer you good folks to another previous entry of mine, titled “Caesar crosses the Rubicon: The Sequel?”
In short: this current, new development was predicted …
With this order Emperor for life George Augustus has crossed the Rubicon. Having said this, the Imperialist Amerikkka has always been a dictatorship in the moonbat world. As opposed to the Iranian and Sudanese democracies.
It’s not a legitimate concern shlemazl? Nothing could ever change America from the land of the free and democratic into the land of the used to be free and democratic?
Tossing the Iranian and Sudanese governments in there serves what purpose? Because they are worse?
Your thinking confuses me….
bad = bad when “bad guys” do bad.
bad = not so bad (even when it’s the same thing), possibly even excusable, and at the very least, for a good cause, when your “not bad guys” do things.
Interesting isn’t it?
When someone refuses to show their records, especially if they are a figure of authority, it usually means that they have something to hide.
“Nothing could ever change America from the land of the free and democratic into the land of the used to be free and democratic?”
First of all, freedom and democracy are two different things. Freedom is the ability to do what you (the individual) wants. Democracy means having the common people allowed to vote. If the majority of the people are social conservatives, or some other form of authoritarian, they will NOT vote for freedom.
Don’t believe me? Just ask the people who moved out of the South and went to places like New York and San Franscisco. And the draconian laws down there were not made by some elitist who disobeys the will of the people. No. The draconian measures often had popular support.
It’s such a titillating story for the underinformed. Too bad the boring legal fact is that the president is the interpreting and enforcing authority for his own directives. They mean exactly what he says they mean. A poorly-worded or incomplete order would be subject to interpretation by only the president; anyone else’s opinion, no matter how pedantic the parsing, is irrelevant.