http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/23/elizabeth-warren-dick-cheney-executive_n_787848.htmlRecently enough that you may still recall it, a secretive, paranoid man who had previously headed a major multinational energy company found himself vice president of the United States. This man deliberated privately with the heads of major oil companies as his administration set up a new energy policy that, perhaps coincidentally, wound up being strikingly generous to oil companies. The same man played a crucial role in leading the nation into a disastrous and costly war in a country that -- again, perhaps coincidentally -- held the world's second-largest oil reserves.
When, at the time, a few annoying sticklers for detail suggested there were problems with this flavor of policymaking, that perhaps it would have been better to hold deliberations in public so that people other than the heads of giant energy companies could have a say in the nation's handling of energy, they were derided by this man and members of his party as naive and idealistic. Why clutter up the proceedings with citizens, journalists and other nudges who do not know how to get oil out of the ground? Leave things to the experts, we were told.
So it is nothing short of astonishing to absorb the current spectacle. Republican members of the House -- the same people who defended national troglodyte Dick Cheney in his effort to block public scrutiny on oil policy -- are now criticizing the way Elizabeth Warren is making preparations for a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as if it were some sinister plot to destroy the republic.
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It is a cynical ploy premised on the belief that American memories run short -- so short that we have already forgotten how today's ardent protectors of due process are the same people who allowed Dick Cheney to run energy policy like an elaborate Christmas morning for oil companies.