Joe Biden is planning a radical down-sizing of the Veep's job and he intends this to be his last major service to his country. During the campaign he called Cheney, "the most dangerous Vice-President in our history," and yesterday Big Time gave direct evidence against himself in one of the exit interviews he and W. are doing for the networks. On ABC he said that the CIA came to him to seek approval for torturing terror suspects in custody. ( Is there any other Administration in American history in which the chief intelligence agency would go to the Vice-President for the go-ahead? Or in which that Vice-President would willingly announce the fact on TV?) The specific practice in question was water-boarding which is as old as the Spanish Inquisition; the U.S. Government prosecuted, on war crimes charges, Japanese authorities who used it on American soldiers in the Second World War. It was illegal in the 40's and it is illegal now, according to international treaties which we have fostered and signed. "I was aware of the program . . . I supported it," he testified on television.
Cheney recommened a trip to the "dark side" after 9/11 and he himself was swallowed by it. Joe Biden knows that Bush-Cheney devised a particularly odious government in which a lazy, uninterested President passed off the real meat of the job to an over-reaching paranoiac. This last work of his will be, in a way, sacrifical--to make his job--and the personality that fills it--less consequential and to return it to its traditional place in American governance.
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