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SEVENTEEN
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COLUMN
SEVENTY-TWO, JUNE 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)
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BY MAUREEN DOWD
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HOW TO STAY IN OFFICE AFTER THE H-BOMB HITS
Date:
Sun, 3 Mar 2002 17:31:19 -0800 (PST)
From: portsideMod <portsidemod@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: portside@yahoogroups.com
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60
Feet Under
By
MAUREEN DOWD
March
3, 2002; The New York Times
WASHINGTON
- In a banner headline on Friday, The Washington Post blared: "Shadow
Government Is at Work in Secret." The article said President Bush had
assembled a cadre of officials to operate under the radar, out of the sunlight.
This
is news?
The
president did that on Jan. 20, 2001.
But
it turns out that after Sept. 11, wanting to make sure that everything wouldn't
collapse if there was a nuclear attack on Washington, he did it again. He formed
a secret government within a secret government. A shadow of a shadow.
It
suits this administration to a T- ball, reflecting its twin obsessions with
secrecy and self-perpetuation.
The
president realized that Dick Cheney couldn't govern all by himself after an
Armageddon, so he set up a pre-post-apocalyptic staff, sending about 100
midlevel officials to two subterranean locations outside the capital.
Now
Mr. Cheney is Lord of the Rings, ruling over his very own Moria, an underground
kingdom of bureaucratic hobbits and orcs.
"Officials
who are activated for what some of them call `bunker duty' live and work
underground 24 hours a day, away from their families," The Post reported.
The
hidden administration is known as Continuity of Government, or C.O.G., while the
one at 1600 Pennsylvania is known as C.O.D., or Continuity of Dynasty, a project
designed to keep the Bushes in the White House until 2008 and beyond.
In
the bunker, the Bush-Cheney dream of ruling without justifying their actions is
beautifully realized. The administration-in-waiting features only the executive
branch.
Continuity
does not require checks and balances. Sixty feet under, the vice president will
never be sued by the General Accounting Office. Executive privilege is safe when
the only branch is executive.
The
Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, said on Friday that he hadn't even been
told about the existence of a shadow government, much less offered a cranny or a
cot in case of a nuclear attack.
"We
have not been informed at all about the role of the shadow government or its
whereabouts or what particular responsibilities they have and when they would
kick in," Senator Daschle said drily. First he'll have to figure out which
administration to pry the information from " the secretive one or the really
secretive one.
The
Bushies probably need Mr. Daschle's space for Karl Rove, a.k.a. King C.O.D. And
by keeping out the legislative and judicial branches, the atomic government can
continue to do what it's already done: set up a long mahogany bar with
single-malt Scotch for Pioneers, out-of-gas Enron chieftains and other corporate
sycophants.
Down
there, they won't have to heed the nagging of Senator Robert Byrd, who last week
threatened to stop writing "blank checks" for the military if the
administration could not explain its war plan.
The
Bush bunker does not bother with bipartisanship or even the pretense of it. It
is all about blank checks and carte blanche.
If
Washington gets whacked, C.O.G's mission is to maintain "essential
government functions."
C.O.G.
will implement the I.R.S. dictum that in the event of nuclear attack, tax
collection will continue (from the poor and the middle class, not the rich). It
will undoubtedly figure out how to keep up those arsenic levels after the E.P.A.
is flattened and commence drilling in Alaska after the Energy Department is
gone.
Without
Democrats or journalists, the underground executive branch can operate the way
the real executive branch would like to, and frequently does - without a lot of
second-guessing, Freedom of Information Act requests, complaints from civil
libertarians and attention to the rights of Marin County hot-tubbers.
Nothing
will be transcribed. So there will be no reason to clean up the language in
President Bush's transcripts, as the White House has done routinely since 9/11.
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