The Daily Breeze
Sunday, November 06, 2005
The vexing case of the missing VP
Libby is often described as Cheney's Cheney. What if he's really Cheney.
By Dale McFeatters
(snip)
A theory gaining credence here is that Fitzgerald has bigger fish to fry. If Libby goes to trial, the prosecutor, according to one news account, will "call some of the most senior officials in government, like the vice president, to the stand."
And why the vice president? To see who -- or what -- shows up. Fitzgerald -- and this is only a theory, mind you -- is sweating Libby, the vice president's shadow and alter ego, to answer a far more serious allegation: What have you done with Dick Cheney? Where is he? Is he being held incommunicado somewhere? Or worse?
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Early in the Bush administration, the vice president became famously reclusive and silent, ostensibly for security reasons, but when the threat blew over he remained out of sight, taciturn and sullen in his few public sightings. People who knew him in his years as a congressman, President Ford's chief of staff, and defense secretary in the Bush I administration don't remember him that way.
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What if the real Cheney went into his undisclosed secure location at Raven Rock Mountain, Pa., and someone else came out? Sure, someone named Dick Cheney gives speeches to select Republican audiences, but Cheney's appearance is a common physical type -- a stout, bespectacled, balding, white man. Washington is overrun with them. They even have their own trade association. It's called Congress. Republicans will believe anything the Bush II administration tells them, and if they're told that the generic Babbitt speaking to them is Cheney, well, fine, it's Cheney.
(snip)
Libby is often described as Cheney's Cheney. Maybe he isn't Cheney's Cheney. Maybe he's Cheney.
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http://www.dailybreeze.com/opinion/articles/1952432.html Dale McFeatters is a Washington-based editorial writer and columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is mcfeattersd@shns.com.