Wm. Rivers Pitt asks "Why?"

clipped from www.truthout.org     Vice President Dick Cheney is, by far and away, the most powerful man in the present administration. "Cheney's muscular views on presidential power, then and now, offer one answer to the question raised often by former colleagues in recent years: What happened to the careful, mainstream conservative they once thought they understood?"  What happened? Opportunity happened, at long last, George W. Bush and 9/11 and a manufactured state of permanent war happened. war in Iraq presented Dick Cheney with the means to fulfill his decades-old ambition: to invest the Executive branch with unprecedented and unlimited power, to settle a few festering scores with that nettlesome Legislature, and to cash in on the spoils of supremacy by rerouting every available dollar out of the Treasury and into tax-sheltered coffers of like-minded comrades in the oil and warfare industries,

I don't do anniversaries. It requires keeping track of things, and I don't do that very well. Needless to say, I was unprepared for this momentous occasion, five years into a war that was more theater than national security exercise from the first.

Pitt reduces the issues to the essentials in a way that most people who have retained their sanity throughout these five years of wretchedly corrupt, irresponsible and incompetent leadership can understand.

At this point, even the serious disagreements boil down to issues of motivation. But motivation for acts of felonious carnage, constitutional usurpation and the willful perversion of the arms of justice and national security into services dedicated to the preservation of a unitary executive by "whatever means" matters little.

The acts themselves and their consequences insist on resolution in favor of those oppressed, displaced, killed, maimed and exploited - and serve to utterly discredit any motive and any cheerleader for Bush.