Harpo's Cheney Style Cut-Out

In his excellent book, The One Percent Doctrine, Pulitzer Prize winning author, Ron Suskind, discusses ways and means employed by the Bush regime to dodge accountability:

"...the Bush presidency had been quietly innovating new concepts in regard to presidential accountability - changes largely intuited and instituted by the Vice President.

Cheney, as far back as the Ford presidency, had experimented with the concept of keeping certain issues away from the chief executive - a reversal of equations that operated before the media age obligated presidents to spend so much time speaking under hot lights. Cheney's view, according to officeholders from several Republican administrations, is that presidents, in essence, needed a failsafe if they were publicly challenged with an inopportunate disclosure about the activities of the U.S. government. They needed to be able to say they had no knowldge of the incident, and not be caught in a lie.

There has been no better Canadian practitioner of Cheney-style gutter politics than Stephen Harper. He's shown himself a master of the witches' brew of fear and confusion, spreading it around as thick as can be to achieve his ends. I immediately recalled Cheney's cut out theory, therefore, when I read the latest, lame explanation of why Stephen Harper waited seven months after receiving Shcreiber's letter alleging prime ministerial misconduct by Brian Mulroney before relenting and ordering some investigation of the matter. From the Globe & Mail:

The Prime Minister's Office said Mr. Harper never got the correspondence because it was received by the Privy Council Office – its bureaucratic arm – and was not forwarded to Mr. Harper.
“Even if it had been, it is unlikely Prime Minister Harper would have seen it,” PMO spokeswoman Sandra Buckler said in an e-mail sent late Friday night. In an e-mail Sunday, she added that the Privy Council also never communicated the details of that correspondence to Mr. Harper verbally, saying the first he learned of these accusations was when they were filed in court. “The Prime Minister was clear – he acted when he learned about the new allegations contained in the sworn affidavit. He did not know about the new allegations previously,” Ms. Buckler said.

Mr. Dion, Official Opposition Leader, said it strained credulity to accept that the Privy Council Office did not relay the allegations it received in the March, 2007, correspondence from Mr. Schreiber.

Sorry, Stephane, this doesn't strain credulity. To the contrary, it's now the way business is conducted by the far-right. It works. It can even let you get away with invading a country on the other side of the world based on nothing more than a veil of lies.