Cheney energy security strategy swinery secrecy legality fantasy jeopardy irony: a cursory history

[Yes, it parses perfectly well in standard headline-ese.]
by RonK, Seattle

Dick Cheney chaired a task force to formulate the administration's energy security plan. Big Energy exec's are suspected of undue influence on the results. Cheney's office asserts authority to conceal meeting rosters and agendas.

Congress's GAO fell short in their quest for discovery ... but Cheney is now 0-for-4 in federal court versus private sector litigants, and rapidly approaching the Final Jeopardy round in the Supreme Court.

So what's the irony? The Cheney Task Force at the heart of this controversy was supposed to produce a Plan ... a Wonderful Plan ... and WaPo's Dan Morgan (whose work here I cannot commend highly enough to dKos readers) excavates the infighting:

As congressional negotiators begin trying to resolve differences between House and Senate versions ... big business lobbies that often help shape such measures are divided, battling one another over key provisions ... raising concerns that the final product could be a patchwork of compromises that does not solve such urgent problems as how to streamline the nation's power grid ...

The divisions may also force Republican lawmakers, who have taken charge of drafting the final package, to pick and choose among industries and companies that are among their party's largest and most loyal supporters. ...

To push their interests, players in the electricity industry have invested heavily ... Federal election records list 83 law and lobbying firms involved in electricity issues at the end of 2002 ... But in the case of the energy bill, big donors are often arrayed against one another.

In other words, for all the determination to act in concert and lock naysayers out of the process ... for all the constitutional foofaraw ... there's NO PLAN.

The pigs have knocked over the trough, they've trampled the slop into the mud, now they're chewing on each others' legs, but THERE AIN'T NO SUCH @#%$ING PLAN!

And I find that ironic. I find the whole travesty of this menagerie's tattery tapestry of peremptory banditry simply ... well ... just don't get me started.

Posted September 12, 2003 12:32 PM | Comments (86)