Quickie Politics

Meet the Vice Squad. Um, those are the goons appointees behind the V.P. Cheney. Clip:

In fact, we used to say about both [Rumsfeld’s office] and the vice president’s office that they were going to win nine out of ten battles, because they are ruthless, because they have a strategy, and because they never, ever deviate from that strategy … They make a decision, and they make it in secret, and they make in a different way than the rest of the bureaucracy makes it, and then suddenly foist it on the government -- and the rest of the government is all confused.

Did Jack Abramoff learn some of his illegal tricks from the apartheid era South African government? Harpers thinks so.

Abramoff went into “show business” and produced Red Scorpion, “an anti-Communist parable filmed in Namibia” starring the muscle-bound Dolph Lundgren. But saying that Abramoff was in show business is like describing Jeffrey Dahmer as a man who “dabbled in nouvelle cuisine.” Red Scorpion was not simply a sloppy piece of propaganda; it was a project of South African military intelligence, and Abramoff, according to my sources, was a willing asset of the apartheid government.

Kindasleazy Rice had to make a statement about Iran last week after the Iranians revealed that they had enriched some uranium. It must be difficult for a Secretary of State to put down a ruthless regime while sharing the platform with a ruthless dictator and calling him friend, but Ms. Rice did so with aplomb. Al Kamen of the Washinton Post has the story and the picture of Ms. Rice with Equitorial Guinean President Teodoro Obiang Nguema. Clip:

Obiang, a somewhat unsavory and corrupt character who seized power in a 1979 coup, runs a regime regularly condemned by the State Department for human rights violations, including torture, beatings, abuse and deaths of prisoners and suspects. He's gotten as much as 97 percent of the vote in recent elections, he told CBS's "60 Minutes" a while back, but that was because "there is no one left in the opposition."