If Cheney & Rummy are Out, Who's In?

Ray McGovern writes that "Vice President Dick Cheney, whose unbridled chutzpah has led him to take public as well as private credit for being the intellectual author of US policy on torture, has become such a glaring liability that his tenure may be short-lived. There is a growing possibility that the vice president will resign at the turn of the year "for reasons of health," and that his partner-in-crime - in what Colin Powell's former chief of staff at the State Department, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, has labeled the "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal" - will choose to retire to his home in Taos early next year."

The foreshadow of what may lead to Cheney's demise was evident from the beginning, disguised in rhetoric most understood to mean the CIA quietly and legally going about the business of tracking down terrorists, their money sources, and their modes of communication:

"Just five days after 9/11, the vice president told Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press: 'We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side ... a lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies ... it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.'"

It's that last sentence that was most telling: "It's going to be vital...to use any means at our disposal...to achieve our objective." He certainly did that.

If Ray McGovern is right, Cheney's days as Terror Vice may be numbered, as they are also rumored to be for his cohort in crime, Rummy. I hope Mr. McGovern is right.

Only question is, who would replace them? If, as is the gossip, the government has essentially been run, behind the scenes, by Cheney, Rummy and Rove, and if Cheney and Rummy "resign" and Rove is indited and forced to resign as well, who will run the government? Bush? God help us.

Since there is no evidence that Bush has even attempted to distance himself from Cheney, Rummy and Rove's beloved neo-con agenda or unethical tactics--what can we expect to change with their replacements--if anything?

My glass half full side hopes beyond hope that there is some small part of Bush's scare crow brain and tin man heart that will somehow give him the courage to do the right thing, for once. But then my glass half empty side cuts in with: "The Wizard of Oz" is as fantastic as any wishful thinking about a new and reformed George W. Bush.

What will be accomplished, if anything, by replacing Cheney, Rumsfeld, and/or Rove--without a stated repudiation of their policies by Bush and his new appointees?

The answer, unfortunately, is that it wlll allow the neo-cons (who will continue calling the shots behind the scenes) to attempt to convince us--using the same unethical techniques of their predecessors (manipulating the media to do their bidding, lying, and smearing)-- that things will be different now, on the up and up, all nice and honest and mom and apple pie-ish.

Rest assured, as long as George W. Bush sits, like the Wizard of Oz, in the White House, they won't. No, Toto, we're not in Kansas any more.

SEE: t r u t h o u t - Ray McGovern: Cheney in Last Throes