The Cheney Rules: It's Legal, So Long As You're Republican
by Tamara Baker

Feb. 20, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- First things first: Thank God for Atrios.

If it wasn't for him and his blog -- which is crucial reading for folks like Paul Krugman -- I never would have heard about this little story in the Beltway insider publication The Hill:

FEBRUARY 19, 2003
GOP threats halted GAO Cheney suit
By Peter Brand and Alexander Bolton

Threats by Republicans to cut the General Accounting Office
(GAO) budget influenced its decision toabandon a lawsuit
against Vice President Dick Cheney, The Hill has learned.

Sources familiar with high-level discussions at the GAO
said Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), chairman of the
Appropriations Committee, met with GAO Comptroller General
David Walker earlier this year and "unambiguously"
pressured him to drop the suit or face cuts in his $440
million budget.

Walker yesterday acknowledged meeting Stevens, but denied
the senator threatened to cut funding for the investigative
agency. However, he confirmed that such threats were made,
although he said they came from a lawmaker not "in a
position to deliver" on them and did not occur recently.

The decision to drop the lawsuit has raised concerns that
Congress's all-purpose auditor has sacrificed its
traditional role as an independent arm of Congress.

The article goes on to mention that Walker, though he denied being pressured by Stevens, did admit that several lawmakers have in the past year threatened to cut GAO's funding if it didn't kill the Cheney lawsuit. Walker also admitted that these budget threats, taken together, were a factor that influenced his decision on February 7 to stop the Cheney litigation.

So what we have here is the head of a Federal agency admitting that one reason -- and, in my opinion, the major reason -- for his killing a Federal lawsuit against Dick Cheney was the fact that he had recieved several financial death threats against his agency from GOP lawmakers.

And not a single major media outlet has picked up on this story.

Dear reader, I want you to perform what Einstein called a "Gedanken-experiment" -- a thought experiment -- with me.

Imagine, if you will, that we have gone back eight years in time.

Imagine that Bill Clinton, fed up with the Republicans' abuse of the Office of the Independent Counsel, had sent several Democratic lawmakers go up to Ken Starr and threaten to cut all his funding if he didn't close up shop.

Can you imagine the holy hell that would break loose?

Starr would be on the phone to Susan "Jam Job" Schmidt of the Washington Post, his favorite tame stenographer before Isikoff and Drudge came along.

Schmidt would blast the news in the next morning's WP.

It would be on the evening news later that day. Brokaw and Rather and Jennings would compete to see who could diss Bill Clinton the hardest.

Rush would be eating out off of it for weeks.

And every cable squawk-artist would be railing 24/7 about "the high-handed thuggery of the Billary Administration."

But now? Nothing.

Nothing on TV, nothing in the papers, nothing anywhere -- except for The Hill, and Atrios' Eschaton blog -- the only blog I read every day. (I'd rather read that now than either Slate or the New Republic, and I used to read those religiously. I won't read the latter again, not until they dump rabid neocon Michael Kelly from the editor's slot.)

Oh, and by the way:

In 1998, Donald Rumsfeld attacked Bill Clinton for selling North Korea a nuclear reactor.

In 2000, ABB, on whose boards Rummy sat until he quit in 2001 to join Bush's cabinet, sold North Korea nuclear goodies.

To quote the title of a certain well-known new book once again: what liberal media?