Surprise Surprise!

Yes those are the words of the lovable Gomer Pyle but they also could have been the by line of David Broder's commentary on Cheney that I simply dismissed yesterday as a bad 8th grade civics paper. Well Josh Marshall asks, where has Mr Broder and the rest of the DC punditry been that last few years?

Yesterday David Broder wrote a column which one TPM Reader, more or less fairly, described as Broder's expression of shock, shock at just what Dick Cheney has been up to over the last six-plus years. And this is a good opportunity to say that the Post's 'Angler' series seems to be becoming the trigger for that transition moment where consensus establishment opinion goes from seeing the vice president as the powerful administration heavy with a sometimes creepy but largely comic penchant for secrecy to an altogether more nefarious force who has used his unprecedented power as vice president to advance an agenda of official secrecy, non-accountability, untrammeled executive power, legitmized torture and general degradation of the rule of law.

But this is far too easy. Because the simple fact is that we've known almost all of this for years.

I started writing about Cheney about the same day I started this blog. The earliest post I can find is from October, 2005 - It's All About Cheney

While the news and rumors surrounding the Plame case may be focusing on Karl Rove and Scooter Libby it is also bringing to light what many of us have suspected all along, it's all about Vice President Dick Cheney.

Lawrence Wilkerson, last week who said:

....that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

I list of other posts from 2005 can be found here and it's all the same - the source of all evil is the office of the Vice President. In addition to the DC punditry we also have some Republicans now questioning the activities of Mr Cheney. The same question applies to them. What bunker have you been hiding in the last six years. As Digby explains

But I have to say that nobody should be surprised by this when you consider how this lawless cabal took power in the first place. They showed very early on that they would let nothing stand in their way and from their first moments in office they governed as if their institutional power meant they had a mandate to enact their entire agenda by any means necessary. (Bush like to call it "political capital" --- I suspect Cheney just called it raw power.)

I think the most amazing thing about all that is that 9/11 was just frosting on the cake for these guys --- they were prepared to do all this stuff anyway. Cheney said he'd taken office with the intention of "restoring" presidential power. The GWOT made it easier to do the national security stuff, but he would have done it anyway.