Of all the crimes committed by the Bush White House, both known and unknown, I can’t imagine that any could ever be worse than the official sanctioning of torture as a policy. Anyway, from the New York Times: White House seeks exception in abuse ban.

There’s been talk about McCain being named veep to replace Cheney after the latter’s as-yet-hypothetical indictment. This would certainly dovetail with my suspicions during the 2004 presidential campaign that McCain’s support of Bush back then was the result of a quiet agreement that McCain would replace Cheney sometime around 2006, in order to position him for a 2008 presidential campaign.

With this stuff about torture coming out now, though, I have to wonder if McCain would still be willing to do that. Maybe the stuff about Condoleeza Rice being slotted for that role makes more sense. It would certainly be more consistent with Bush’s history of appointments.

Neither McCain nor Rudy Giuliani (the other guy I see representing a credible Republican successor to Bush) is the sort of meek, whatever-you-say-boss person Bush likes to have under him. I could see either of them swallowing his pride long enough to do a few years under Bush if that was what it took to win the White House, but on balance I think an outside challenge in the Republican primaries to whatever toady Bush uses to replace Cheney is more likely.

Have I gotten far enough ahead of myself yet? Yeah, I think so.

Bring on the indictments!

This entry was posted by jbc on Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at 2:41 am and is filed under george_w_bush, the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.