Nixon: Gifts Of The Spirit 
Lest we forget, a globe gallivanting Ricard Nixon played a starring role in the origin of Iran’s Students Day, now being used by regime opponents in Tehran.
Nixon was to touch down in Iran, visiting the recently CIA reinstalled Shah and receive an honorary law degree. Student protesters were killed by the Shah’s army, and the event was commemorated by dissidents until his ultimate demise.
Making Friends Whereever We Go 
Because If We Can’t Laugh About Differences Over Torture… 
Light-hearted jibes about torture were in the house Sunday at DC’s Alfalfa Club dinner.
The annual gathering of Washington’s great and good is of course a temple of good natured joshing amongst the elite, the very pinnacle of our treasured bipartisanship. Thus Barack Obama found himself making light of the founding purpose of this entirely white until the 1970s dinner, honoring Robert E. Lee.
The sparkling event was brightened even more by the podium styling of “Jumping” Joe Lieberman, who the Washington Post reports wow’d them with topical laughs.
Lieberman’s rib-tickler sprang from Dick Cheney’s mysterious back-injury-while-moving-offices. “I had no idea waterboards were so heavy,” quipped the Nutmeg State Senator.
Where Did The Time Go? 
Part of the entertainment value of thumb-suckers musing over the Bush Administration’s “Legacy” is who asks the questions. It’s our old friends and perpetual whipping boys, The Media!
A part of society which for the most part went unquestioningly into battle in Iraq, and which let Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford go to their graves as demigods, is in charge of the searching questions in the last months.
And don’t think Bush’s people aren’t watching. Dick Cheney’s Lincoln/Truman lonely visionary talking points have been consistent over time, with Gerald Ford thrown in on occasion. The most recent example came in a follow up to his “So?” interview dismissing popular opinion over the war. Cheney claims that nice things said during Ford’s funeral week justify the Nixon pardon, which also means Iraq will look great in three decades.
“…he demonstrated, I think, great courage and great foresight, and the country was better off for what Jerry Ford did that day. And 30 years later, everybody recognized it…And I have the same strong conviction the issues we’re dealing with today — the global war on terror, the war in Afghanistan and Iraq — that all of the tough calls the president has had to make, that 30 years from now it will be clear that he made the right decisions, and that the effort we mounted was the right one, and that if we had listened to the polls, we would have gotten it wrong.”
Destiny’s Darlings 
Ready [Or Not] 
Excited panting about missile defense, Star Wars, or for true believers “President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative,” will likely climax today, the 25th anniversary of Reagan’s speech unveiling the concept. 
The breathing is already labored in the wake of the February US shoot-down of a falling spy satellite over the Pacific.
Investors Business Daily whipped itself into a frenzy over the recent Dick Cheney speech teeing off Hillary Clinton’s 3AM-Your-Children-May-Die commercial. 
The King of Mirthless Laughter charmed us all with his Darth Vader self depreciation, and said wistfully:
” the best tool we can leave to a future commander in chief is a weapon of defense to blow that missile out of the sky.”
In the Reagan manner, IBD took that dream, sprinkled it with pixie dust, and pronounced deal done!
“We don’t know who might pick up that 3 a.m. phone call, but 25 years ago Ronald Reagan made sure that if it’s about an incoming ballistic missile, the order will be: “Shoot it down.”..Today we can…Last month, the Aegis missile cruiser USS Lake Erie succeeded in shooting down a dying U.S. spy satellite, the National Reconnaissance Office’s NROL-21 Radarsat, before it could strike the earth with its deadly hydrazine fuel tank nearly full. It could just as easily shoot down an incoming nuclear warhead… thanks to Reagan, the next president will be able to give the order, in Cheney’s words, to “blow that missile out of the sky.” Happy anniversary, Ronnie.”
In the February shoot-down the actual “risk” posed by the falling satellite was overstated, leading many to conclude something else was going on. Critics pointed to “…the near impossibility that the hydrazine tank would survive the 50 g-forces acting on it during reentry, putting the probability of killing someone on Earth below 0.01 percent–NASA’s baseline standard. In the absence of a credible rationale, suspicions of ulterior motives abound. Mainly, many believe that the shoot-down was a disguised demonstration of the U.S. missile defense system’s ASAT capability.”
The shoot-down didn’t tell us much about hitting missiles, but may show how we can take war to space.
“…taking out a crippled satellite and destroying an attacking ballistic missile are not the same thing. Most importantly, the satellite’s trajectory was known in great detail and it could not maneuver under its own power. That’s not the case for enemy ballistic missiles, which have unknown trajectories for large portions of their flights …[and] are likely to be able to maneuver themselves midcourse and release decoys to confuse the missile-defense interceptors. … Navy personnel were able to choose the location and timing of the intercept.. The satellite was also several times larger than a ballistic missile would have been and was therefore easier to see”
Let’s have Reagan Legacy Casper Weinberger Jr. bring us back to magic time:
“It took that great visionary, the true man with the white horse, that symbol of Twentieth Century strength and goodness, the ultimate cowboy of the Lord, Ronald Reagan, to bring it down from the heavens for us and fight right up to his death to make it a reality.”
Hi-Yo, Silver! 
Smokin! 
The National Archives official who challenged Dick Cheney’s handling of classified documents and whose office Cheney then tried to abolish is quitting. And furthering our knowledge of Cheney’s machinations as he exits.
Ever Vigilant
J. William Leonard headed the Information Security Oversight Office [ISOO] at archives, which tracks Executive Branch practices dealing with classified material. When he discovered Cheney had stopped complying with the security regulations he went to the Justice Department seeking a ruling that the Vice President follow the law. Cheney’s office responded by trying to eliminate the budget for the ISOO.
Leonard spoke to Newsweek on how Cheney’s people made up their own make-believe classification system, which they claim they don’t have to report:
A number of people have noted that the vice president’s office stopped reporting to you and complying with ISOO in the fall of 2003 when the whole Valerie Plame case blew up. Do you think there was a connection?
I don’t have any insight. I was held at arms length [from that.] But some of the things based on what I’ve read [have] given me cause for concern. A number of prosecution exhibits [in the Plame-related perjury trial of I. Scooter Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff] were annotated, ‘handle as SCI.’ SCI is Sensitive Compartmentalized Information, the most sensitive classified information there is. As I recall, [one of them] was [the vice president and his staff] were coming back from Norfolk where they had attended a ship commissioning and they were conferring on the plane about coming up with a [media] response plan [to the allegations of Plame's husband, Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson.] That was one of the exhibits marked, ‘handle as SCI.’
These were internal communications about what to say to the press?
Let me give you some the irony of that. Part of the National Archives is the presidential libraries….So we’re going to have documents [at the libraries] with the most sensitive markings on it that isn’t even classified. If I were going to do a review [of OVP], that would be one of the questions I would want to ask: What is this practice? And how widespread is it? And what is the rationale? How do we assure that people don’t get this mixed up with real secrets?
But in the spirit of the holiday season, let’s all enjoy another laugh about the Clinton papers and UFOs.
