Politics Ends At The Border

[Trent Lott is now backing off this story, claiming that he was confused between the November 2 story about Dick Cheney's lobbying for the US to be able to legally torture prisoners and the November 7 story about the US using former islands of the gulag archipelago to hold prisoners.  Maybe so, maybe not.  I still wonder how much this White House discloses just to their domestic allies, based on party and politics, not Constitutional function.  Witness James Dobson's special double sooper secret phone call from Rove to reassure him about Harriet Miers with information that the White House apparently didn't bother to give Arlen Specter.]

My ass it does.  That's just another club the Republicans use to beat the Democrats who try to rein in the worst Bush administration "bombs fulla freedom" barbarisms, since the Republicans simply won't do it. 

By way of Atrios, we read this:

Trent Lott stunned reporters by declaring that this subject was actually discussed at a Senate Republican luncheon, Republican senators only, last Tuesday the day before the story ran in the Washington Post. Lott noted that Vice President Cheney was also in the room for that discussion and Lott said point blank "a lot of it came out of that room last Tuesday, pointing to the room where the lunch was held in the capitol." He added of Senators "we can't keep our mouths shut." He added about the vice president, "He was up here last week and talked up here in that room right there in a roomful of nothing but senators and every word that was said in there went right to the newspaper."

Read that again.  The Vice President gave special information concerning our nation's security apparatus to Republican Senators, Republican Senators only.  Last I checked, political party wasn't supposed to be grounds for determining who gets what information about national security operations.  Either you're cleared or you're not.

But Cheney and the Bush Administration don't give a damn about anything except their tribe.  Remember that the next time some Republican apparatchik is howling about how politics needs to stop at the border, and the Democrats need to STFU about the Bush Administration's foreign policy choices.