Among those most overwrought about alleged illegality by the Bush White House in not informing Congress of a covert CIA effort to kill al Qaeda operatives is liberal radio host and MSNBC pundit Ed Schultz.
The implications of such rank criminality are profound, Schultz told his radio listeners on Tuesday (click here for audio) --
SCHULTZ: I was absolutely astounded today listening to Liz Cheney on MSNBC. Let me, this is one of my favorites right here. She makes the declaration that there were no laws broken. Here we go --
CHENEY: Laws were not broken and I think that you've got a real problem here, because the potential prosecution that we're talking about now from the attorney general is of CIA operatives. Now the president of the United States himself stood in the White House and issued a statement saying, you know, I'm going to release the details of the enhanced interrogation program but we aren't going to prosecute the people who carried out the program. People can get this statement online. The president said that himself.
Now you've got the attorney general saying, well, maybe we will. You know, that has not happened before in American history and it's a real, very dangerous precedent to set, that somebody comes into office and begins to treat policy differences with a predecessor as criminal differences.
SCHULTZ: She's forgetting that laws potentially were broken because there was not full disclosure. You can't allow people in power to just go do whatever they want to do. Unless you want to be like Khrushchev. Unless you want to be like Castro. Unless you want to run a dictatorship.
The fact is is that, where there's smoke there's fire. And the fact is is that Liz Cheney is trying to make this a political issue, as if Nancy Pelosi has got something to do with it. Nancy Pelosi has just said, look, I was given inaccurate information, so the Right makes her a target. And now they're trying to claim now that Leon Panetta has come out and said, look, there was a program out there that you weren't briefed on. Now they're trying to claim that, well, he's doing that to give political cover to Nancy Pelosi and I'm saying, for what?! For who?! This is crazy!
Yet while Schultz was condemning dictatorial repression on Tuesday, he was advocating it on his radio show the day before (click here for audio) --
Now I have a theory. If things get tough for Obama, if he can't get health care by the end of the year, if the job creation doesn't turn around, and if he sees any momentum whatsoever being gained by the Republicans, he can go this route and play the card and put the hammer down on Cheney and remind the American people just how foul the Bush administration was.
How about that -- excoriating the tactics of Khrushchev and Castro while calling on Obama to emulate them. Not that I couldn't hear White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel say the same thing. Difference being, Emanuel wouldn't say so publicly.
To his credit, Schultz is more transparent than most liberals, who are adept at hiding their true beliefs behind the amorphous mush of political correctness. Not so with Schultz, a veritable id of the Left. Curious about what liberals think but few say aloud -- listen to Ed!
In fairness to Sgt. Schultz of the '60s sitcom "Hogan's Heroes," whose photo is shown in the post, he wasn't enough of a Nazi to go along with what Ed Schultz is suggesting.
