Cheney and Mr. H.

This week I watched Frontline's excellent account of Cheney's life's work trying to transform US democracy, such as it is, into a dictatorship. His techniques: developing new legal interpretations of presidential powers, using existing presidential powers in new ways to achieve control over all legislation, appointing patsies who simply take orders and then take the fall (Gonzales), running roughshod over the judiciary wherever possible. I have to wonder as the AECL isotope story unfolds, does Harper just copy those guys or are they working in concert? They used an Order in Council to get rid of Keene but pretended it was Parliament's wish - only Parliament can dismiss someone in such an arms-length position. Then they sent out their trained seal to take the heat.

It seems that ever since he was elected Harper has worked to weaken every check and balance on priministerial power - we all felt instinctively that this man had a worrisome agenda, did we ever think that it was to transform our democracy into a dictatorship? And do we have any idea why?