Feasting at the Cheney trough. The silly uproar over a parody of Lynne Cheney made us want to look a little closer into the family's numerous conflicts of interest and compromises of reality.
First of all, Atrios asks the question why White House legal counsel — paid for by American taxpayers — is being inappropriately called in to head the anti-parody effort on behalf of Dick's wife. "God, we spent 6 months arguing about which phone Al Gore used to call donors," says Atrios.
Meanwhile, back at the Halliburton trough, things are looking rosy (WSJ, subscription required):
The Pentagon said it is tapping a subsidiary of Halliburton Co., Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, to oversee efforts to control oil-well fires, should Saddam Hussein torch Iraq's oil fields in the event of a U.S. attack.
The Pentagon said it intends to use a plan developed by Kellogg Brown & Root Inc., a unit of Houston-based Halliburton, if Mr. Hussein sabotages his fields. The plan also addresses assessing damage to oil facilities, the Pentagon said.
Mr. Cheney served as chief executive of Halliburton until 2000, when he stepped down to become the running mate of President Bush.
The development positions Kellogg Brown & Root as a leading candidate to win the role of top contractor in any petroleum-field rehabilitation effort in Iraq. The job could involve coordinating dozens of smaller specialty contractors that do everything from helping clear mines and build roads to putting out fires and repairing damaged wells.
But Halliburton is also playing its own special role in the War on Terror — for the other side (also WSJ):
Halliburton Co. says an oil-field device that contains radioactive material was stolen in early December from its operations in Nigeria.
Atomic-watchdog officials are concerned that the material -- americium 241 -- could be used to create a so-called dirty bomb, an explosive to scatter radioactive agents in a densely populated area.
[...]
The theft occurred between the towns of Wari and Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta, in the heart of the country's oil-producing region. The well-logging device, which was in a locked storage box that weighs about 200 pounds and is the size of a small car engine block, is used to detect the presence of oil at various depths, said Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall.
Michael Levi, director of the Strategic Security Project for the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington think tank, said these devices typically contain about 10 curies of radioactive americium. If this were combined with a pound of TNT and exploded, an area covering 60 city blocks would be contaminated with a radiation dose in excess of safety guidelines of the Environmental Protection Agency, he said.
Thanks to Halliburton, this will put a whole new spin on Nigerian email scams.
Back to wife Lynne Cheney. Although this gentle flower requires legal princes paid for by American taxpayers to defend her dubious virtue, she's doing okay in the financial department. Since leaving defense giant Lockheed's board of directors in 2001, she's helping to destroy wealth by decimating shareholder value in mutual funds (Forbes):
Politicos and their friends feast at the fund trough. American Express' stock funds were the worst performers among the largest 25 fund families, says Lipper. Yet for 45 of its 47 retail funds, directors still signed off on expense-ratio increases last year. Guarding fund shareholders' interests are Lynne Cheney, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Senator Alan Simpson. Each earned $122,000 for fund stewardship last year.
Why, that's almost as much as the $105,000 Dick would have saved on his taxes in dividend income alone!
It all adds up to the same thing: rewarding incompetence is a family value if you're a Cheney Republican.
