Take Cheney's advice & do the opposite; practical advice

Arianna Huffington: Dick Cheney: The Magic 8 Ball of American Politics
Arianna Huffington Mon Jul 25, 2:04 PM ET

Is it just me or is Vice President Dick Cheney starting to become more and more like the comically malevolent Mr. Burns on The Simpsons? Except in the Vice President's case, the unpleasantness is not so comical.

It's certainly true that he has uncanny political radar. In fact, he exercises it with amazing consistency: you can count on him to do the wrong thing time after time after time.

Take his latest endeavor: a behind-the-scenes effort to kill legislation being drafted by Sens. John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and John Warner that would, among other things, "bar the military from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross; prohibit cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees; and use only interrogation techniques authorized in a new Army field manual."

The Senators are merely attempting to codify practices the White House says it's already following... and prohibiting the abuse of those held in U.S. custody seems like a tough goal to find fault with. But Cheney has, warning the three GOP stalwarts during a private meeting on Capitol Hill last week that their bill would undermine the president’s ability to wage the war on terror.

Sure it'd be nice if we could trust the Bush administration to do the right thing as it seeks to protect us from terrorist attacks -- but it’s proven that we can’t. And even if the White House had a shred of credibility left, we shouldn't. This nation was founded on skepticism and distrust of those in power. Our founding fathers didn't even trust themselves to do the right thing, creating specific rules for what a president should -- and shouldn’t -- be allowed to do, and giving the legislative branch oversight over how the executive branch fulfilled its duties. Remember "trust but verify?" It's just another way of saying oversight.

It's amazing the extent to which Congress has ceded that responsibility. This negligence of its constitutional duties is what allowed us to get so deeply into the disastrous war in Iraq in the first place.

If we could trust the executive branch, you wouldn't have to read sickening things like this story about the Defense Department defying a federal judge’s order to release secret photos and videos from Abu Ghraib.

The cluelessness of this administration about how to build and nurture a democracy clearly isn't confined to the Middle East.

My suggestion is that after he leaves office, we keep Mr. Burns Vice President Cheney around in an advisory capacity, a sort of political Magic 8 Ball. For every issue that comes up, we ask him what he would do. And then we do the opposite.

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