Oh Yeah ...There'll Be Hard Karma A'Comin' ...

A short follow-up to last night's Yoo's Crossing.

Cheney's Cheney was also before the committee yesterday, and, if you didn't think David Addington was a royal asshole before the day began, you couldn't avoid thinking that by the time the sun set.

Just being labeled "Cheney's Cheney" covers a great deal.

I mean, that is the apex of assholiness!

Bush Policy Authors Defend Their Actions

The testimony from David S. Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, and John C. Yoo, a former senior Justice Department lawyer, was light on new details but heavy on rhetorical disputes with members of a House Judiciary subcommittee. Both witnesses avoided direct answers to a host of questions about their roles in preparing the legal ground for harsh interrogation tactics while arguing that such methods had been crucial in preventing another terrorist attack on U.S. soil after Sept. 11, 2001.

And Dana Milbank really nailed it, in his "When Anonymity Fails, Be Nasty, Brutish and Short";

He had the grace of Gollum as he quarreled with his questioners. In response to one of the chairman's questions, he neither looked up nor spoke before finishing a note he was writing to himself. When Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) questioned his failure to remember conversations about interrogation techniques, he only looked at her and asked: "Is there a question pending, ma'am?" Finally, at the end of the hearing, Addington was asked whether he would meet privately to discuss classified matters. "You have my number," he said. "If you issue a subpoena, we'll go through this again."

Think of Addington as the id of the Bush White House. Though his hidden hand is often merely suspected -- in signing statements, torture policy and other brazen assertions of executive power -- Addington's unbridled hostility was live and unfiltered yesterday.

This lead Phillip Carter, in his Intel Dump column to notice "Crikey. No wonder they kept Addington in the shadows; public advocacy is clearly not his gig."

No, hardly.

He looked like a small child, refusing to eat his broccoli, and was going to sit there at the table, glowering, being nasty, cleverly, without actually using the language, saying, over-and over "Fuck you, I'm not eating that fucking broccoli ...!" ... For as long as it took, before Mommy and Daddy caved (and if this 110th Congress will be known for one thing, it is caving).

Tim F., over on Balloon Juice, sums that up pretty well, in his "Your Government In A Nutshell";

Fundamentally, the reason why Bush officials like Yoo and Addington show such total contempt for Congress is also the answer to the question that Conyers asked John Yoo: a rule without a penalty is no rule at all. If Congress won’t enforce the law when the President breaks it, then why should he pretend the law is there? For all intents and purposes it isn’t. Yoo’s answer to Conyers, then, is to lean back, smirk and ask what are you going to do about it?

Both sides of that conversation know the answer: nothing. Maybe Conyers will hold another hearing and invite another Bush official to crap on his desk.

When these cretins finally leave office (Yoo's out already, a law professor, if you can believe that!), you probably don't want to be standing next to them, or, even be in the same room with them ...

There's some seriously hard karma coming their way, and it will be absolutely ugly ...


Bonus Addington Assholiness

Think Progress: Addington won’t talk about torture because ‘al Qaeda may watch C-SPAN.’

Mustang Bobby: Torture? What's That?

Dan Froomkin: Contempt of Congress

Kate Klonick: Quote of the Day: Vice President Is a "Barnacle" on the Legislative Branch

John Cole: Priorities are Straight

Controlled Unclassified Information ... Brilliant!

I suppose, the big, unanswered question that comes out this news today is, what crony company is going to get the contract for the Super Special Secret Decoder Rings?

And, is there a secure telephone line in this treehouse?

Some kind of Odd Fellows handshake?











Leave it to the Bush Grindhouse, to wrap up their super secrecy reign of terror with, yet, more super secrecy.

While a number of articles sprouted up on this new, Commander Guy-penned-in-the-bubble law, Smintheus, over on Daily Kos, looks to be the first out-of-the-gate with it back on 10 May;

On Friday afternoon, with George Bush in Texas for his daughter's wedding, the White House finally released its new Executive Branch rules for designating and disseminating what used to be known as "sensitive" information. The most common term in the past for such material has been "Sensitive But Unclassified" (SBU), though there was an an alphabet soup of competing classifications in various agencies. In part, the new rules create a uniform standard across the Executive by replacing SBU etc. with a new classification, "Controlled Unclassified Information" (CUI).

Furthermore, after passage of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 federal agencies had been encouraged to apply the SBU designation to just about anything they didn't feel like releasing to the public. Hyper-classification was out of control.

In fact, Friday's memo doesn't even pretend to rein in secrecy. Quite the opposite, it looks like the Bush administration used the crafting of new rules as an opportunity to expand the range of government secrecy.

Walter Pincus, in the WAPO today, offered a look at what this might look like;

Sometime in the next few years, if a memorandum signed by President Bush this month ever goes into effect, one government official talking to another about information on terrorists will have to begin by saying: "What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination."

That would mean, according to the memo, that the information requires safeguarding because "the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure would create risk of substantial harm."

Pincus also notes that "Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, described it as a "not even half-baked" exercise in policymaking".

DavidK, over on TPMMuckraker notes;

The saving grace may be that many of the hard decisions about how CUI will work have not been made, and likely won't be made until after President Bush leaves office. So federal officials may dodge one of the memo's more comical requirements: "oral communications should be prefaced with a statement describing the controls when necessary to ensure that recipients are aware of the information's status."

And Matthew Yglesias muses "You've got to sympathize with the Bush administration. Sometimes you're running the government but, inconveniently, it's not the government of Burma and so you need to be accountable to voters, other branches of government, public opinion, etc."

Hmmm ... I wonder how much this has to do with post-administration investigations and subpoenas?

Christ, they're on their way to establishing that anyone in the Bush Grindhouse can refuse to cooperate, or even acknowledge, that they said "Good Morning" as soon as they hit the office under this thing.

And, Lord knows, with the pinheads like John Yoo and David Addington inside they bubble, they've probably already put together reams of legal arguments on how "Good Morning" is a "national security issue" and that any release of information on "Good Morning", could be an advantage to the terrorists.

Next thing you know, Matt Sludge will have screaming headlines, the Right Wing Freak Show bashing Barack Obama, and the Democrats, with being appeasers, for saying "Good Morning" in public, to their staffs, family and friends.

It will become the the Verbal Lapel Pin Brouhaha.

And John McCain?

With is age, and his flip-flopping, how is Stumblin' Bumblin John McCain ever going to remember to get this straight?

Are Post-It Notes covered under this?


Super Secret Bonus Links

SourceWatch: Bush administration fetish for government secrecy

Russ Feingold: Government in secret - The Yoo memo is just one example of Bush's hidden laws

Amanda at Think Progress: Bush Administration Hides More Data, Shuts Down Website Tracking U.S. Economic Indicators

Steven Aftergood: The Age of Missing InformationThe Bush administration's campaign against openness

Scott Shane: U.S. archives making public data secret again; Reclassifications shrouded in mystery

Robert Parry: Bush's War on History