Vice Axes That 70's Show
by Maureen Dowd
We start the new year with the same old fear: Dick Cheney.
The vice president, who believes in unwarranted, unlimited snooping, is so pathologically secretive that if you use Google Earth's database to see his official residence, the view is scrambled and obscured. You can view satellite photos of the White House, the Pentagon and the Capitol - but not of the Lord of the Underworld's lair.
Vice is literally a shadow president. He's obsessive about privacy - but, unfortunately, only his own.
Google Earth users alerted The Times to this latest bit of Cheney concealment after a front-page story last week about the international fears inspired by free Google software that features detailed displays of things like government and military sites around the world.
"For a brief period," they reported, "photos of the White House and adjacent buildings that the United States Geological Survey provided to Google Earth showed up with certain details obscured." So Google replaced those images with unaltered photographs taken by a private company.
Even though the story did not mention the Cheney residence - and even though it's not near the White House - The Times ran a clarifying correction yesterday that said, "The view of the vice president's residence in Washington remains obscured."
Fitting, since Vice has turned America into a camera obscura, a dark chamber with a lens that turns things upside down.
Guys argue that women tend to stew and hold grudges more, sometimes popping up to blow the whistle on a man's bad behavior years later, like a missile out of the night, as Alan Simpson said of Anita Hill.
Yet look at Cheney and Rummy. Their steroid-infused power grabs stem from their years stewing in the Ford White House, a time when they felt emasculated because they were stripped of prerogatives.
[. . .]
Dick Cheney. Then and now, the man is a menace.
Read the whole thing at donkey o.d.
Maureen Dowd Cheney Politics White House Bush Dowd Republican corruption
