Always two there are, a master and an apprentice.

[originalpckelly]

[derby378]

1. GEEK ALERT!

There used to be thousands upon thousands of Sith Lords in the Star Wars universe - until a freak accident wiped out all except for Darth Revan, who instituted the "one master, one apprentice" rule afterwards. It's also why every Sith Lord you saw in the movies was named Darth.

As for the real world - I hate to tell you this, but...

[originalpckelly]

2. Gonzo and even John Yoo were not the prime movers...

Addington and Cheney were. Addington was doing his master's bidding as his "client" was the VP.

And you know, you have to wonder if Addington wasn't somehow involved in the US Attorney scandal.

[Emit]

3. My thoughts, too, after reading this...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1178302&mesg_id=1178735

[originalpckelly]

9. They've been controlling Bush by manipulating what he receives.

Sure, Bush is stupid and he might be quasi-evil, but these folks are just pure evil. Bush is a child, like Reagan was before him. They do it so that the front man gets the attention, while the dark lord is in the background. (To use that sort of thing as a metaphor.)

I've said it before, but George W. Bush is meant to be Big Brother and Emanuel Goldstein all wrapped in one person. He's only required to make speeches and officially sanction something, but he doesn't really have a choice, the choices about the choices he gets to make, are made in advance by Addington and Cheney.

[Emit]

11. Funny you should mention that

I posted about Cheney and the COG exercises on a related thread. Read the excerpt here for context:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1171716&mesg_id=1171909

Here's a bit more on that subject that I thought relevant to your post. Makes one wonder whether the past 7 years have been nothing more than an elaborate twist on the COG plans Cheney and Rumsfeld participated in, with Bush as nothing more than one of these faux American "presidents":

This was not some abstract textbook plan but was practiced in concrete, thorough and elaborate detail. The Reagan administration assigned personnel to three teams, each named for a color, such as red and blue. Each team included an experienced leader, who could operate as a new White House chief of staff. The obvious candidates were people who had already served at a high level in the executive branch, preferable with experience in the national security apparatus. This was where Cheney and Rumsfeld came in since they had previously served as White House chief of staff in the Ford administration. Besides Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were regulars, other team leaders over the years included James Woolsey, later the director of Central Intelligence, and Kenneth Duberstein, who worked for a time as Reagan's real-life White House chief of staff.

Each time a team left Washington, it brought along a single member of Reagan's cabinet, who was designated to serve as the next American "president." Some of these cabinet members had little experience in national security; at various times, for example, the participants in the secret exercises included Reagan's first secretary of agriculture, John Block, and commerce secretary Malcolm Baldrige. What counted was not experience in foreign policy, but simply that the cabinet member was available to fly out of Washington with the team. It seems fair to conclude that some of these American "presidents" would have served as mere figureheads for their more experienced chiefs of staff, such as Cheney and Rumsfeld. Still, cabinet members were the ones who would issue orders (or in whose name the orders would be issued).

Rise of the Vulcans, James Mann, pp. 140-141

Reagan established his continuity of government program under a secret executive order. According to Robert McFarlane, who served for a time as Reagan's national security advisor, the president himself made the final decisions on who would head each of the special teams, such as Cheney and Rumsfeld. Within Reagan's National Security Council, the "action officer" for the secret program was Oliver North, later the central figure in the Iran-contra scandal. Vice President George H. W. Bush was given authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were run by a new government agency with the bland name of the National Program Office. It had its own building in the Washington area, run by a two-star general, and a secret budget adding up to hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Much of the money was used to buy advanced communications equipment that would enable the new teams to have secure conversations with American military commanders. In fact, the few details that came to light about the secret program were the result of allegations of waste and abuses in awarding these communications contracts to private companies and of the malfunctioning of equipment.

The exercises were usually timed to take place during a congressional recess, so that Cheney, one of the three team leaders, would miss as little work on Capitol Hill as possible. Although Cheney, Rumsfeld and the other team leaders took part in each exercise, the Reagan cabinet members playing the new "president" changed, depending on which cabinet official was free at a particular time. Once Attorney Ed Meese participated in an exercise that departed from Andrews Air Force Base in the predawn hours of Wednesday, June 18, 1986 ...

In addition to the designated White House chief of staff and his "president," each team would include representatives of the State and Defense Departments and the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as various domestic policy agencies. The idea was to practice running the entire federal government during a nuclear war. ...

~snip~

When George H. W. Bush was elected president in 1988, members of the secret Reagan program rejoiced, because the senior Bush had been closely involved with the effort from the start, wouldn't have to be initiated into the intricacies of the program and probably wouldn't reevaluate it. In fact, despite the dramatically improved climate in relations with Moscow, Bush continued these continuity of government exercises, with some minor modifications. Cheney dropped out as team leader after he was appointed secretary of defense. And after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse, the justification and underlying premise for the exercise changed. A Soviet nuclear attack was no longer plausible, but the exercise continued with a different nightmare scenario: What if terrorists carrying nuclear weapons attacked the United States and killed the president and vice president? Finally, during the Clinton administration, it was decided that this scenario too seemed farfetched, so officials decided to abandon the program as an outdated legacy of the cold war. There was, it seemed, no longer any enemy in the world capable of attacking Washington and "decapitating" America's leadership.

There things stood until September 11, 2001, when the George W. Bush administration was jolted into reexamining the confident assumption of safety that had held sway when the program was phased out. Cheney and Rumsfeld were familiar with the Armageddon exercises of the Reagan era. They themselves practiced the old drills...

Rise of the Vulcans, James Mann, pp. 142-144

edited typos

[Emit]

13. Here's more

Cheney was the dominant figure on September 11. It was he who urged the president to fly to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, which had secure communications facilities. It was he who ordered that House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other congressional leaders be taken out of town to one of the Eisenhower-era bunkers built for use if America was under nuclear attack. In subsequent interviews explaining his actions on September 11, the vice president spoke blandly about the importance of ensuring presidential succession in a crisis. He never mentioned the clandestine exercises in which he and Donald Rumsfeld, accompanied by scores of civil servants, had occasionally sneaked out of Washington in the middle of the night to practice, for several days at a time, how to run America during a nuclear attack.

Soon after Bush returned to Washington on the night of September 11, Cheney began spending time at Camp David, so that he was outside the capital while the president was at home. As the autumn progressed and as American forces went to war in Afghanistan, the vice president was often reported to be working in an "undisclosed location" out of Washington. Eventually, the "undisclosed location" turned into a national joke, a routine for the comedy shows. It became part of Cheney's identity. The blend of solemnity and mystery was fitting for a man who, throughout his career, had embodied the twin propositions that (a) running a government was weighty, unglamorous business and that (b) he always had some secrets he could not discuss.

On September 11 there was one thing Cheney did not do: He did not address the nation. While running the Presidential Emergency Operation Center, he sent out no words of reassurance, delivered no "fight-them-to-the-beaches" oratory. That was the president's job, and for Cheney, the Silent Man, it was certainly just as well; if he was playing the role of Churchill, then it was Churchill without vocal cords. The president stumbled as he spoke to the country that night, but he recovered his public standing in a speech the following week.

While Cheney was by nature uncommunicative, there were also political forces at work to keep him mute. Inside the White House, a number of powerful people -- staff members like Karl Rove, Bush's political adviser, and Karen Hughes, the communications director -- spent their days ensuring that the president got full public attention and credit for being in charge of the battle against terrorism. After Cheney appeared on television on the Sunday after September 11 and gave an extraordinarily detailed, coherent account both of the events of that day and of the administration's emerging response, the vice president virtually disappeared from the airwaves for months. There were delicate suggestions that in the early days of the crisis he might have overshadowed the president.

Still, out of public view, Cheney was omnipresent, even when he was off in an undisclosed location and was participating in the administration's meetings only with his image and voice piped in on Secvid, the secure video teleconferencing system. It was Cheney's specter that hovered over the administration's policy deliberations, its internal wrangling, its decision making. Other administration officials could handle the TV interviews, the show business. But over virtually every foreign policy action the Bush administration took, whether on terrorism of Afghanistan, the Middle East or Iraq, there always loomed the ghost of this balding, white-haired, slightly pudgy, bespectacled man of deeply conservative views who took government seriously and worked as the consummate inside operator.

Rise of the Vulcans, James Mann, pp. 296-297

[DarkTirade]

14. The sith lords always used the title Darth.

Well before Revan was ever born.
And I think the one master, one apprentice thing started before Revan as well. It was put into place because the sith philosophy doesn't work very well in large groups. They tend to end up killing each other. Whereas a master/apprentice relationship allows one to learn from the other and the master will only be killed by the apprentice once the apprentice has become stronger than the master.
In fact, Revan and Malak ended up breaking that rule and basically mass-producing a sith army. Something that Darth Krayt attempted to do again in another story set more than a hundred years after the movies.
... okay, so I'm a geek.

[derby378]

15. Did Exar Kun ever go by the title "Darth?"

Yes, yes, I know - more geekiness for all the Trekkies to sit through. :silly:

[DarkTirade]

16. Hmm... I don't hink so.

Unfortunately I'm not so big into comics, so I haven't read his whole story arc, only the part when he actually turned to the dark side. :) But he never struck me as being much of one for tradition, hence his curiosity about non-jedi ways of using the force.

[whistle]

4. Time for an organizational chart of all operatives and advisor's to

...Darth Cheney with photos where possible

[originalpckelly]

7. I think that would be most prudent for us to assemble, seeing it graphically...

helps one understand something more clearly.

I think we're going to probably find that what we're dealing with here goes back to the Iran-Contra hearings, the one common thread that connects Dick and David. I think we're going to find something insidious, maybe something like Iran-Contra, only with al-Qaeda and 9/11.

[Emit]

8. Frontline had this one

This chart highlights how Cheney aggregated power at key national security centers -- the Pentagon, State and White House -- and lists the positions his friends and allies have held during the time period leading up to the 2003 war in Iraq.
(Click on boxes for more information.)

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/etc/network.html

[Gold Metal Flake]

5. You are correct.

And the helpers. See what happens when you let the vermin breed?

[Gold Metal Flake]

6. Rec this thread.

[LiberalEsto]

10. Please WARN people

when you post ugly pictures like these

:puke:

[tbyg52]

12. Wrong outfits

Someone please photoshop prison stripes onto these people!