Commentary By Ron Beasley
We have discussed the latest revelations on Dick Cheney here and here. Today on NPR's Fresh Air Jane Mayer of The New Yorker and author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals was interviewed. I suggest you listen to the entire thing but give you a few of the points she makes.
Dick Cheney from his earliest days has believed that the responsibility for National Security lay exclusively with the President of the United States and that congress should have no involvement. As a result he felt no responsibility to obey any laws to the contrary. This paragraph from The Dark Side explains the workings of Dick Cheney's mind.
Cheney in particular had been chafing against the post-Watergate curbs that had been imposed on the president's powers since the mid-1970s, when he had served as Gerald Ford's chief of staff. As Vice President, Cheney had already begun to strengthen the power of the presidency by aggressively asserting executive privilege, most notably on his secrecy-enshrouded energy task force. He'd told Bush, who later repeated the line, that if nothing else they must leave the office stronger than they found it. Now Cheney saw the terrorist threat in such catastrophic terms that his end, saving America from possible extinction, justified virtually any means. As Wilkerson, Powell's former Chief of Staff who went on to teach National Security Affairs at George Washington University, put it, "He had a single-minded objective in black and white, that American security was paramount to everything else. He thought that perfect security was achievable. I can't fault the man for wanting to keep America safe. But he was willing to corrupt the whole country to save it."
In the interview Mayer also points out that although Cheney was a member of congress at the time during the Iran Contra affair Cheney sided with the administration.
What we see in Dick Cheney is a constitutional outlaw. Any law that he disagrees with can simply be ignored.
Mayer thinks that while Obama has tried to avoid "looking back" the continuing revelations and activities both domestically and abroad may make that impossible.
It all comes back to Nixon. We tend to lay the state of the country and the GOP at the feet of Reagan, but really, Nixon was the fount whence the shit really first spewed. The rampant graft and criminality of Nixon -- bags of money exchanged in the White House for presidential pardons of known mobsters Hoffa and DeCarlo -- laid the foundation for all subsequent Republican administrations. Secrecy, plenary power, secretly found, illegal undeclared wars, illegal covert activities, illegal domestic ops, its all there. It's all Nixon. And the same pricks who were then pushing executive unitary power did it, finally, with Bush.
ReplyDeleteOf course, Bush & Cheney, i.e. Cheney, added their own twist to the traditional mix of profiteering and criminality -- overt public admission of a world wide network of officially sanctioned torture chambers, complete with routine sexual torture. And, the best part of it all, is that this officially sanction torture regime was used to produce false confessions of fake evidence in order to convince the country and the UN to go to war with Iraq.
That Cheney. He's a charmer for the GOP. Which is exactly the problem with the GOP right now. They sanctioned this guy for eight years -- covered and ignored blatant his criminality -- and still endorse him when he talks about Guantanamo and torture. And there's Cheney, still "chafing against the post-Watergate curbs that had been imposed on the president's power since the mid-1970s."
Please, Richard Cheney, leave this good earth. Leave it now.