The Doomsayer

Maureen Dowd, NYT Op-Ed columnist had an extremely interesting column a few days ago about Dick Cheney. I was glad to discover that I’m not the only one asking serious questions about the former vice-president and just what he's up to these days.

Questions like, just what is it with Dick Cheney, anyway? The man who never talked is now the man who won’t shut up. The man who wouldn’t list his office in the federal jobs directory, who had the vice president’s residence blocked on Google Earth, who went to the Supreme Court to keep from revealing which energy executives helped him write the nation’s energy policy, is now endlessly yelping about how President Obama is holding back documents that should be made public.

Cheney was asked by Bob Schieffer on Sunday how America could torture when it made a mockery of our ideals and Cheney blithely gave an answer that surely would have been labeled treasonous by Rush Limbaugh, if a Democratic ex-vice president had said it about a Republican president. Doomsday Dick said, “Well, then you’d have to say that, in effect, we’re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent program that would provide us the information we need to protect America.” And this in spite of the testimony from former FBI agent Ali Soufan and former Bush administration State Department official Philip Zelikow, both of whom have voiced serious concerns about Bush administration interrogation policies and just how effective they really were.

Cheney had five deferments himself to get out of going to Vietnam, but he would rather follow a blowhard entertainer who has had three divorces and a drug problem and who also avoided Vietnam, than follow a four-star general who spent his life serving his country.

Even Republicans are complaining. An official with Bush 1 recently said that he was sure that Bush 41 doesn’t appreciate Cheney acting out and that he is giving the whole party a black eye just as Jeb is out there trying to renew the party.
Cheney unleashed is pretty much the same as Cheney underground: He’s batty and he thinks he was the president. Even Bush 41 and 43 have come to see Cheney differently and I don’t think that either of them has any idea what makes Cheney tick.

He has no coherent foreign policy viewpoint. He still doesn’t fathom that his brutish invasion of Iraq unbalanced that part of the world, empowered Iran and was a force multiplier for Muslims who hate America. He left our ports unsecured, our food supply unsafe, the Taliban rising and Osama on the loose. No matter if or when terrorists attack here – and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan red/blue state timetable – Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable. He still loves torture, Gitmo and scaring the bejesus out of Americans. He’s still trying to pull the GOP into a black hole of zealotry.

When Cheney was in the first Bush administration, he was odd man out. Bush 41, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell corralled Cheney’s “Genghis Khan” side, as it was known, and his “rough streak.” Cheney didn’t care for Powell even then.
According to Dowd, with W, “Back Seat” – Cheney’s Secret Service name in the Ford Administration – clambered up front. Then he totaled the car. And no amount of yapping on TV is going to change that when history is written.

The Betrayal of Our Moral Standards

The rant lady is back again! But how can we not look at what's happening in our country lately?

The past week we have been forced to take one more long look at what has happened to our moral ideas and standards as the issue of torture has made its’ way into the spotlight again. I realize and understand that President Obama wants to move ahead and deal with the serious challenges that we have facing us right now – an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. So, isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford? This was NYT Op-Ed columnist, Paul Krugman’s question in his column on Friday.

I have to admit that I don’t want to look at or for any more problems in this country today, but we are more than a collection of policies. And as Krugman said, we are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. We haven’t always done a perfect job upholding those ideals, but never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. Former President George Bush declared that, “This government does not torture people.” But it did and the entire world knows it. And it was done not to prevent another terrorist attack, it was done to justify a war the Bush Government was determined to wage on Iraq.

I have read articles not only by Krugman, but by former FBI supervisory special agent, Ali Soufan and Nicholas Kristof and Frank Rich also NYT Op-Ed columnists. The general consensus is that we need to investigate the Bush Administration’s abuses. The only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.

No one would be calling Tim Geithner away from his efforts to rescue the economy. Or Orszag, the budget director, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to reform health care, or Chu, the energy secretary, wouldn’t be called away from his efforts to limit climate change. Even the president needn’t, and according to Krugman, shouldn’t be involved. All that the president needs do is let the Justice Department do its job.

Like Krugman, I think America is capable of uncovering the truth and enforcing the law even while it goes about its other business. Still, there are many people who believe that revisiting the abuses of the Bush years would undermine the political consensus the president needs to pursue his agenda. Unfortunately, the answer to that is – what political consensus? There are still a significant number of people in our political life who stand on the side of the torturers, but these are the same people who have been relentless in their efforts to block the President’s attempt to deal with our economic crisis and will be equally relentless in their opposition when he endeavors to deal with health care and climate change. President Obama cannot lose their good will, because they never offered any in the first place.

I know there are lots of people in this country who just don’t want an ugly scene and I, too, feel that perhaps President Obama, who prefers visions of uplift to confrontation, is one of those, but the ugliness is already there – none of us can make it go away by pretending. And I suspect there are a lot of others that would prefer not to revisit those years because they don’t want to be reminded of their own sins of omission.

But the fact is that officials in the Bush administration instituted torture as a policy, misled the nation into a war they wanted to fight and, probably, tortured people in the attempt to extract “confessions” that would justify that war. And during the march to war, most of the political and media establishment looked the other way.

It’s hard not to be cynical when some of the people who should have spoken out against what was happening, but didn’t, now declare that we should forget the whole era – for the sake of the country, of course.

I’m afraid that I totally agree with Krugman that what we really should do for the sake of the country is have investigations both of torture and of the march to war. These investigations should, where appropriate, be followed by prosecutions, not out of vindictiveness, but because this is – I ‘d like to think – a nation of laws.

Krugman finishes by saying, that we need to do this for the sake of our future. For this isn’t about looking backward, indeed it is about looking forward – because it’s about reclaiming America’s soul.