The Obama-Cheney Merge

Long time readers will recall that I was one of those annoying dogs yapping at the heels of Dick Cheney when he had all those secret meetings with oil industry executives while establishing U.S. energy policy. I differed from the Bush administration’s position that executive privilege shielded the content of those meetings, as well as the industry attendees. Yes, I’m sure the fact that I was opposed to the Iraq war might have factored into my curiosity about the meetings, since we were invading a country with vast oil resources, but it didn’t seem like a national security issue and I felt that the input our leadership received was fair game, since energy policy affects us all. Many of our Democratic and liberal friends, here and at other sites, joined me in my complaints.

Now, I hope that these same folks will band together with me once again to demand some accountability from President Obama about his meetings with health industry executives over pending health care reform policy. Thus far, it doesn’t look like it will be forthcoming.

Invoking an argument used by President George W. Bush, the Obama administration has turned down a request from a watchdog group for a list of health industry executives who have visited the White House to discuss the massive healthcare overhaul.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent a letter to the Secret Service asking about visits from 18 executives representing health insurers, drug makers, doctors and other players in the debate. The group wants the material in order to gauge the influence of those executives in crafting a new healthcare policy.

Even more so than energy policy, this doesn’t sound like information which would be of particular use or interest to our terrorist enemies abroad, but is of tremendous interest to us. For all I know, the industry representatives are telling you some very useful things, like, “Please, Sir. Don’t destroy our industry.”

Either way, though, you’re developing policy initiatives which will affect pretty much everyone in the country in an incredibly intimate way. Even though we’re not currently invading and occupying a country with vast health care resources waiting to be mined beneath its surface, we’d like to know the advice you’re getting and what you’re doing with it. What say we have some of that sunshine you talked so much about on the campaign trail and just open up the books?

We’ll definitely leave the comments section open here for good while to allow all of you who joined me in criticizing Cheney over the energy industry meetings to call on President Obama to practice what he preaches. For what it’s worth, I’ve been touring some of my favorite Right leaning blogs and I’m not seeing much in the way of complaints over this. I guess many of them really do believe that what the Executive branch does behind closed doors is their business. I respectfully disagree, unless it affects national security and would endanger our military or intelligence operatives.

UPDATE: During the Wed. night presser, the President was actually hit with a question on this and claimed that a letter was going out now with a full list of names. It would be nice if it didn’t take this much pressure to get it, but if they follow through, good for them.