Goebbels (Hitler's propagandist) employed that technique with great success.

As for wanting to know only what one wants to know, I say “people who live in glass houses…”

– The only reason Cheney isn't on trial right now for obstruction of justice and/or ordering Scooter Libby to out Valerie Plame is because he sealed Scooter's lips with the “commutation” of a sentence that had yet to be served.  By commuting the sentence instead of issuing a full pardon, Cheney preserved his former employee's ability to plead the Fifth if he were ever called to tesitfy under oath about Cheney's role in the Plame outing.  (And yes, despite what Rush Limbaugh, the FOX screechers and their fellow travelers in the right-wing blogs say, Scooter Libby outed Valerie Plame.)

– Since 2003 he's refused to comply with Executive Order 12958, which prescribes a uniform system for classifying, safeguarding and declassifying information. 

– He very likely broke the law on 9/11, seizing control and issuing orders while claiming to have been given Bush's OK to do so — a claim most of those in the know seriously doubt.

– Remember how y'all were having conniptions in 2001 over Scooter Libby's OTHER former employer, Marc Rich, being pardoned by Clinton for having oil dealings with Iran over twenty years before?  Interestingly, none of you conservative Republicans made so much as a squeak when Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney was flouting Clinton's own 1995 Executive Order forbidding American companies for dealing with Iran.  Cheney broke this law all throughout the 1990s and even to this day, getting around the rule with shell companies that are Halliburton subsidiaries yet technically based overseas.

As I said, this is by no mean complete.  But these are all things that if any one of them had been done by a Democratic Veep, you'd have rushed to Blair House with a noose in one hand and an effigy of said Veep in the other.

Try reading something other than National Review.  You might learn something. But mosy likely you probably just don't want to know.  And wish others were ignorant as well.

The “proof” would come in the Impeachment Inquiry hearings.  I presume you oppose such  proceedings.  Why? Afraid of what you (and others) might find out?

Check out the recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon for a very funny skewering of this recent Cheneyist insanity.

This issue also arose in the litigation over Cheney's Energy Task Force and his refusal to provide access to any documents involving it, I believe (can't remember for sure anymore).  Assuming these documents have not already been destroyed, it will be interesting (one fine day) to see the “plans” for Iraq's oil certainly contained therein.

Lamentably, times seem to have changed.  Still old school, however, I find it tiresome to read bloggers over and over again taking accusations, converting them instantly into supposedly known facts, and then proposing draconian measures as REQUIRED by their newly found “truth.” And I find it even more exasperating to see words of those who forget (in the words of one of my old professors) that “the false is never so false as when it's almost true.”

Incidentally, citing other partisans — even dozens of them — in my mind does NOT make an accusation true.

Neither does the simple(carefully edited to avoid lawsuits) repetition of the accusations by headline hungry media. The last I heard, “Trial by Media” was not in our Constitution.

Since this type of tar-and-feathering has been around a long time, we can go back thousands of years and find the notion that the truth cannot be ascertained simply by taking the untested words of one who has an ax to grind (see Susanna's story, and our trial by jury system).

One of the reasons I find EB's articles (like this one) so refreshing is that they take me back to that remembered time when accusations did not make something true, let alone basis for punitive actions.

If they are able to escape being confronted with their lawbreaking while still in office, if their their absurd constitutional “arguments” escape formal examination and they do not suffer public ignominy for their actions, then future presidents will absolutely attempt the same duplicitious actions, erect the same regimes of secrecy and shadow lawbreaking under the spurious guise of the “commander-in-chief” power. 

Cheney's intentional, willful lawbreaking must be confronted by us or we will further degenerate as a nation, a people and a democracy.

We are in agreement, then, that the impeachment of Cheney would be good for the country. Please call your Repub representative and request that s/he support the impeachment of Cheney.  Thanks!