Cheney Should Resign Now, and Go Shoot Something!

Cheney Should Resign Now, and Go Shoot Something! Sarah Whalen, sawhalen@xula.com.edu

US Vice President Dick Cheney on Sunday “Faced the Nation” and told America he’s here to stay.

“I’ve now been elected to a second term,” Cheney pronounced, as though he alone won the presidency, “and I’ll serve out my term.”

Cheney added that his motives are pure because unlike most vice presidents, he has no presidential designs.

If that’s so, mused CBS interviewer Bob Schieffer, then why not resign and make room for someone who does?

Now, am I on Homeland Security’s “enemies of America” list yet? But more importantly....

Of course, Cheney won’t resign. He’s worked too hard to place his wife, daughters and son-in-law in high-paying government jobs, and to achieve his vision of America — one of secret courts, secret judges, secret home searches, warrantless eavesdropping on citizenry, holding suspects in endless detention without charging them with crimes, and torturing prisoners.

Few men have the stomach, let alone the sweat glands, for Cheney’s grand vision of America. If Cheney leaves, Bush’s secret empire might just collapse.

Some call Cheney the co-president. To some others he is the Grand Inquisitor. Every ruthless leader suppressing terrorist insurgencies needs one.

Queen Isabella had Tomas de Torquemada, who helped her rid what eventually became Spain of its Jews and Muslims. Under Torquemada’s ruthless, relentless pursuit of Spanish national security, not even conversion or apostasy could “cure” Jews and Muslims of their religious association.

Medieval Spain considered them permanent insurgents. Pre-Spain tried Jews and Muslims in secret courts with anonymous judges, secretly searched their homes, spied on them daily, held them in endless detention without charging them with crimes, exiled, executed, and, most notoriously, tortured them.

But of course, Torquemadas aren’t born every day. People willing to do these things to other people, whether in the name of God or in the name of National Security — America’s new religion — with such efficiency and the glib ability to rationalize their actions and still make eye-contact and witty chit-chat on television, are a rare breed.

Medieval Europe had no United Nations, but there was an Apostolic See, where Pope Sixtus IV noted that Isabella’s Inquisitors “without observing juridical prescriptions” — that’s fancy talk for “following laws and procedures,” like the pre-Cheney constitutional protections you used to get in America when you were accused of crimes — “have detained many persons in violation of justice, punishing them by severe tortures and imputing to them, without foundation, the crime of heresy...that a great number of them have come to the Apostolic See, fleeing from such excessive rigor and protesting their orthodoxy.”

Republicans who want at least a shot at the next presidency hope Cheney will take his fancy Italian hunting rifle and barrel off to that big, baited doves-and-quail-aplenty hunting field in Texas, New Mexico, or his “native” Wyoming.

But Cheney says he won’t go, and it’ll be hard even for the most desperate presidential wanna-be to dislodge from office a man who packs big long heat and, after a couple of fizzy Dr. Peppers and “one beer,” mistakes his best friend and Republican benefactor Harry Whittington for a quivering quail and pumps him full of shot.

I mean, if Cheney thought Whittington was a bird, what will he think Sen. Bill Frist is?

It’s unclear whether Cheney’s departure would boost US President George W. Bush’s approval ratings from the truly dismal, persistent March figures of 37 percent as America’s civil liberties disappear and the war in Iraq drags on with not just high casualties but evidence of sadistic murders — something Cheney tried to obliquely pin on “Zarqawi” in his “Face the Nation” interview — and killings of women and children that transcend simple military error.

And it would be a good test of the much-vaunted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s untested mettle.

On “Face the Nation,” Cheney came close to understanding what he must do to save his party. “Bob, you know what this reminds me of?”

“It reminds me of 30 years ago when I was Gerry Ford’s chief of staff and you were the CBS correspondent covering the White House.”

What happened to President Ford when Cheney was his White House chief of staff? He got his yesyesyes kicked by a hayseed governor from Georgia — Jimmy Carter.

Torquemada’s clients were king and queen. He didn’t have to worry about elections. Some Grand Inquisitors have all the luck!

Yes, I know it's a Saudi paper, but as so frequently seems to be the case, it's also an American academic, with what appears to be a Xavier University EMail.

From In Context Blog

Who is Sarah Whalen?

Well, she's an Islamist apologist and the author of several deranged and incoherent articles that have been published over the past several months at the ever-titillating Arab News and The Palestine Chronicle. Among her other accomplishments, she's managed to blame Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg for their own murders and either Israel or the Bush administration (often both) for all of the world's other evils.

A sample (from the Pearl article):

But what largely incenses Muslims all over the world should trouble everyone — Israel’s power to compel obedience from the most powerful nation on earth. Danny Pearl was killed not for “being” Jewish, but for what “Jewish” has come to mean, rightly or wrongly, in a part of the world that sympathizes and suffers with those the Israelis have dispossessed from land, from culture, from civil rights. Danny was killed not by powerful actors in service of some evil ideology, but by those powerless before Zionism, an ideology that sacrifices Palestinians for “freedom” and “security”. . .

Really. And from her latest:

The Mahdi army is on the move again. It’s the Energizer Bunny of Iraqi urban militias. What makes it keep going and going and going?

Neocons insist it’s Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr’s deep hatred for America. But what if the Mahdi army and Sadr are fighting because they love democracy, particularly freedom of speech and freedom of the press?
What if some Iraqis don’t trust getting their news from the “occupier?” What if they are willing to fight and die for the right to talk their own talk?
Is it just coincidence that last March’s Shiite uprising boiled over when then-US Ambassador Paul Bremer arbitrarily closed Al-Sadr’s daily newspaper, Al-Hawza, for “spreading anti-American views” and calling Bremer names?

This is a woman whose relationship to reality appears to be somewhat tenuous. So I wasn't too surprised to find that I'm hardly the first to question her incredibly elusive credentials.

Sarah Whalen teaches at Loyola University School of Law, New Orleans; she is an expert in Islamic law and taught Islamic law at Temple University School of Law.

That's what she was claiming a few months ago. More recently, though, she apparently chose to drop Temple:

— Sarah Whalen is an expert in Islamic law and teaches law at Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana.

She doesn't just "teach" at Loyola University School of Law, by the way, she's a professor (don't miss this story - the professor angle is important).

But, perhaps because a check of the Loyola University School of Law faculty doesn't show her name, she's now switched to the past tense:

— Sarah Whalen is an expert in Islamic law and

taught law at Loyola University School of Law in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Did she? The only mention of her teaching at Loyola that anyone's been able to find to date (and it's apparently now long gone) was a single course at the Department of Religious Studies (not School of Law) entitled "Islam, Muhammad, and the Qur'an," and she was listed under the category of "extraordinary faculty" as an "instructor." WTF?

But wait! When she spoke earlier this year at Penn State's Dickinson School of Law, an institution that's probably a little more scrupulous about checking academic credentials than, say, Arab News, Al Jazeera or The Palestine Chronicle, her rather extensive CV included no mention of Loyola whatsoever and no mention of her teaching at Temple. Which isn't to say that it wasn't an impressive CV. In fact,

A frequent contributor to publications such as Arab News and The Palestine Chronicle, Whalen is widely published in both the United States and the Arab world on issues relating to international and Islamic law and on subjects ranging from the invasion of Panama to terrorism in Japan. She is certified to practice law in three states and is a seasoned litigator in the fields of personal injury, class actions, domestic relations and criminal law.

As a former research assistant for Dr. Piero Gleijeses at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University, Whalen conducted extensive archival research on U.S. foreign policy, Cuba, Africa, and several Cold War projects. She also served as a consultant on international security issues for the United States Armed Services from 1984-1989 and worked as an attorney advisor at the United Nations Headquarters in New York from 1984-1986.
Whalen holds a B.A. degree in anthropology from the University of Miami; a J.D. from New York Law School; an M.A. in History from New York University; and an LL.M. from Temple University School of Law. She also specialized in comparative public and private international law while attending The Hague Academy of International Law in the Netherlands.

Wow. I honestly don't know what to make of this. Especially since there's not one reference to most of these credentials anywhere else on the internet, either. She does appear to practice law with a New Orleans firm and her B.A. and J.D. degrees, at least, are listed in Martindale-Hubbell (but not her LL.M., which is odd, since an LL.M. is an advanced law degree, which she allegedly earned eight years ago). Well that, at least, seems to pin her down a bit.

But, no, a Google search for her law firm turns up only one hit, which turns out to be a user post (scroll down about 3/5 of the way) at Free Republic in which someone is attempting to track down, you guessed it, the credentials of the elusive Ms. Whalen. The post shows a listing from lawyers.com in which yet another version of Whalen's history is displayed, this one including a stint as "Lecturer and Adjunct Professor" at Loyola, with no mention of the Law School.

Unfortunately, I was unable to duplicate the results of that lawyers.com search. My attempts yielded 0 results. And it further appears that the name of the firm has changed, their website is "under construction," and no reference to the new firm includes a reference to Sarah Whalen.

Here's a item of interest: she was appointed legislative liason for the River Region Caucus of the St. James Parish last year. I think this is pretty solid, but basically irrelevant.

So who is Sarah Whalen? I have no idea. And it doesn't appear that anyone else does, either. Maybe she's just a really private person.

(I can't leave this topic without mentioning that The Blue Octavo Notebooks has been on to Ms. Whalen for quite some time.)

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