alias Bruce.

The BP oil spill has wreaked havoc with more than

the sea life and human livelihoods of the Gulf of Mexico. It is affecting the political ecosystem as well.

Biologists say the ecological damage we are now seeing in dead animals and ruined habitats is just the beginning (WaPo 5/27). As things get worse, greater human consequences will follow (think seafood and tourism, huge factors in the Gulf economy). Not to mention the unknown ripple effects of such an environmental catastrophe on human health, globally migrating sea animal populations, and the national and international economy. Having surpassed the Exxon Valdez disaster now that BP's fig-leaf estimates have been yanked aside, the BP spill is taking on biblical proportions.

And the tide of oil is further undercutting the credibility of President Obama.

To be sure, the administration of Dick Cheney (and that sidekick what's-his-name) ran a legal payola scheme in the Minerals Management Service (MMS) that was second to none. But Obama -- who inherited an MMS whose officials legally collected bonuses from oil and gas leases while allegedly regulating those very leases(!!) -- still showed little interest in "change" until a publicly-visible disaster changed the PR landscape.

Now, suddenly, Obama's administration calls for separating MMS's leasing and enforcement arms, the President talks tough about clamping down on industry's disregard for safety and its cozy relationship with government regulators, and MMS head S. Elizabeth Birnbaum "resigns" after ugly details of her agency's corrupt culture come to light. But here is what her boss, Bold Reformer Obama, had to say about oil industry practices just 18 days before the BP spill, when he confidently called for expansion of offshore drilling: "It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don't cause spills. They are technologically very advanced." (WaPo, 5/27)

Obama has already, deservedly, lost trust and gained contempt for failing to lead on both meaningful health care reform and fair resolution of the Wall Street bank job. His quisling tolerance of the brazen tryst between government and big oil, and his shyness in using his powers except that of on-camera eloquence since the spill, have now earned him more of the same. That is something he cannot blame on George W. Bush. As Maureen Dowd put it in her NYT piece this week, "The laconic president is once more giving too much deference and trust to rapacious corporate scoundrels and failing to swiftly grasp and articulate the alarm of Americans."

This is not Change We Can Believe In, nor, seemingly, is it a president who can be believed. We will hear plenty of artful bluster from Obama in the coming weeks as the casualties of the BP spill become clearer. But left to his own devices, I think, Obama will ultimately spearhead little change that matters beyond the slam-dunk compulsion to divide the MMS. If he musters the will to do much more, it will be as a result of, tragically, having a massive Gulf spill kill to use as political cover.

That's not leadership. It's, well, Obama.

Thanks to Laurie for suggesting Dowd's piece.

"Dithering."

So Dick Cheney, that sneering ghost of failures past, has recently been hissing into the ear of the national punditry corps that Obama is "dithering" on Afghanistan.

It's an interesting accusation coming from Cheney, a man whose quick trigger finger and lack of perceptual acuity under pressure have made him a danger both to the world and to his hunting partners.

Not that prospects look good for a productively wise Obama response to the horrors in that tortured nation, which every day looks more and more like a mountainous quagmire for American hubris. It's looking clear that wrong-headed American military escalation is on the way. And it's also looking clear that furrow-browed Washington rhetoric about pairing a successful military surge with a hearts-and-minds political victory betrays a floundering cluelessness about how to actually pull this off. The honest folks in the room, I believe, already know that it cannot be achieved militarily and that it cannot be forced politically in a nation where the U.S. has cornered itself, with its drones and its dirty alliances, into the role of a hopelessly bloody-handed interloper. The growing comparisons to Vietnam are no coincidence, and Obama's nearly 300-day presidential record of spinal plasticity is no reason for confidence. Behind closed doors, the "realistic" options on the White House table may be various scenarios of good-old-college-try escalation followed, after a respectable interval, by the most face-saving winding down of U.S. intervention deemed politically possible. The Soviets tried to warn us.

But if Obama is, at worst, a weakling in the pull of a bad war, Cheney is a madman. There are reasons aplenty for deep deliberation on Afghanistan, not the least of which are the possible upcoming electoral defeat (or victory) of a corrupt and largely discredited Afghan government; the horrible prospects for the American war effort; and the hemorrhaging economy and spirit of an America caught in two bad wars and the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.

Add to that the fact that America's most catastrophic troubles of the past decade have resulted directly from dishonest and misinformed rushes to rash action (deregulation, Iraq), and you can make a pretty good case for dithering.

CheneyCare.

At last: someone in the mainstream medical profession is calling American health care what it is: A system of socialized medicine for our political leaders, unlimited care for the wealthy, and bad medicine for the rest of us.

A wickedly effective new ad campaign (pictured above; I saw it in the online New York Times) tells the story. The sponsor is CheneyCare.org, a national project of the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee, who have been pushing for progressive health care policy for years. The ad's message: Dick Cheney (he of the chronically failing heart) and his cohorts in government leadership enjoy for themselves precisely what they preach against for the rest of us: nationally-subsidized health care that covers everything, with no excuses crafted by accountants or "review panels" of mercenary doctors. Cheney, in fact, as the ad puts mercilessly in our faces, would likely be dead without the comprehensive government-financed health care he takes for granted.

The rest of us should be so lucky.

But the ad suggests that we non-Cheneys ought to start making our own luck. A good place to begin is to make some noise. Sign the online CheneyCare petition calling for health care for all. While you're at the CheneyCare site, you can also deliver some choice words to your generously-health-covered elected representatives, and if you like you can add your own true tale of woe to a growing body of health care horror stories the site is collecting nationwide.

The real problem here, of course, is that Cheney and his pseudo-conservative neocon henchmen are using the language of conservatism to conceal an agenda of big government -- but big government in service of the wealthy and the powerful. Big government that lavishes health coverage choices on senators and CEOs while putting HMOs in charge of the rest of us. Big government that pours oceans of cash into wars and public policies that serve the interests of the few. Big government that steps in to persecute some (e.g., so-called terror suspects) and to block the rights of others (e.g., gays) and to limit privacies and liberties (e.g., a woman's right to choose, a law-abiding citizen's right to not be spied on) according to its own autocratic ideological gospel.

Fortunately, when a government treats its citizens in this way, some citizens tend to fight back.

For its part, the CheneyCare campaign is teaching us, in its own way, what the Bush Administration has already learned from librarians:

Never, ever piss off a nurse.

Dick Cheney Comes Clean on Iraq.

For a truly flabbergasting peek into Dick Cheney's clarity about invading Iraq, watch a video clip from a 1994 Cheney interview now being circulated by MoveOn.org as part of their fundraising campaign. It really must be seen to be believed.

The Post Outs Cheney.

Even if you only read The Washington Post for one week this year, this is the week to do so.

Sunday June 24 through Wednesday June 27, the paper is running an exhaustive front-page investigative series detailing precisely how Dick Cheney has exerted overwhelming influence in the George W. Bush Administration on torture, war, secrecy, presidential powers, tax cuts, budget deficits and other issues at the very heart of this Administration's scorched-earth excesses.

The series is entitled "ANGLER: The Cheney Vice Presidency." Quoting a procession of Cheney allies and rivals, some by name and some anonymously, Post reporters Jo Becker and Barton Gellman piece together a revealing and sometimes harrowing historical narrative, going all the way back to the Ford White House, of how Cheney has single-mindedly set out to make the Presidency immune to legislative or judicial oversight.

As of this writing (about 3 a.m. Wednesday June 27, before release of the series' final installment), the Post series is no Woodward and Bernstein blockbuster. It provides no new revelations of shocking illegality or hitherto-unknown constitutional violations. Rather, it pulls back the curtain on Cheney's key role as instigator and enforcer of the shocking illegalities and constitutional violations that have become the hallmark of the Bush II Administration.

Cheney is, without question, the most powerful American vice president in the history of the office, as well as one of the most reclusive. The "Angler" series shows him secretively at work: engineering Presidential permission for cruel and inhuman treatment of detainees (in violation of the Geneva Conventions) against the pitched opposition of top CIA and military officials; ramming through tax cuts favoring the wealthy in spite of the misgivings of top figures such as Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan; circumventing Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice (much to their later fury) on issues of extralegal presidential powers and mistreatment of prisoners; composing Bush's list of possible Supreme Court nominees; and more.

Cheney's dominance itself is not news; it has been public for years that government personnel nicknamed him "Edgar" (after puppeteer Edgar Bergen), and we know too well who played the part of the wooden puppet perched on Cheney's knee. But the accomplishment of the Post series -- and it's a horrifying one -- is its riveting documentation of Cheney's 30-year mission of creating a presidential near-monarchy, and the reporters' battle-by-battle chronicling of Cheney's no-holds-barred grip on White House policy, aided by his mercenary counsel, David Addington, of whom I have written previously.

As reporters Becker and Gellman pithily (in the third installment of the series) describe Cheney's influence: "The president is 'the decider,' as Bush puts it, but the vice president often serves up his menu of choices."

Sure, it would have been nice if the Post had bothered to do this kind of investigation back in Bush's pre-lame-duck days, when we could have prevented some of Cheney's damage. But, especially given the credulous public mindset in the early years of the Iraq war and the cowering stance of so much of corporate journalism, better to have some late truth-telling than none at all. And in fairness to the two reporters, many of their sources were probably now willing to talk only because Cheney's authoritarianism and Bush's deciderism have turned out so badly.

So I suggest you read it while you can. It's worth it.

(Originally posted 6/27/07)