If you're looking to see a man seeking a different type of relief, there's Richard Bruce Cheney on Face the Nation today, panicking to stay one step ahead of the law, per Andrew Sullivan:
His digs on Colin Powell, choosing Rush Limbaugh over him, Oxycontin-fueled hate speech over the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "politically" because all Cheney knows is power and paranoia, are not exactly statesmanlike, unless you think of yourself as the state:...Here is a former vice-president, who enjoyed unprecedented power for eight long, long years. No veep ever wielded power like he did in the long history of American government. In the months after 9/11, he swept all Congressional resistance away, exerted total executive power, wielded a military and paramilitary apparatus far mightier than all its rivals combined and mightier than any power in history, tapped any phone he wanted, claimed the right to torture any suspect he wanted (and followed through with thousands, from Bagram to Abu Ghraib) and was able to print and borrow money with impunity to finance all of it without a worry in the world. But even after all that, he cannot tolerate a few months of someone else, duly elected, having a chance to govern the country with a decent interval of grace.
What character does this reveal? The same character that sees torture - torture - as a "no-brainer". The same man who believes that freezing naked prisoners to hypothermia or strapping them to a board for a 175th near-drowning or stringing them up in stress positions so long the shackles rust up is in line with America's constitutional history and custom. The same tyrannical temperament that cannot abide another reality existing which isn't hammered or tortured into the shape he wants and demands...
...And as history slowly accepts that this man disgraced his office more profoundly than any before him, as it sinks in that this man did not merely make mistakes, as all flawed politicians do, but committed war crimes, with pre-meditation and elaborate subterfuge, he slowly realizes what's happening to him. He can feel it. And so he resists the way he always resists - by lashing out, attacking, smearing, snearing, and grabbing every inch of the limelight he can.
The loyalty is to Cheney himself, of course, just as it was never to the President he supposedly served but actually managed, Colonel Tom Parker with real power, real guns, real waterboards to his name. Except in how he drags the former President in with him, maximum flail and, for Bush, maximum anchor. Again, per Sullivan:
So here's my questions. Cheney has arguably always been more powerful than Bush. So if he's strapping George to him on this whole torture trip, the possibilities are that not only he believes he'll survive by cloaking himself in Presidential privilege, but the ex-President has to be totally fine with it as well. So what if George W. Bush as, by extension, The Bush Family, isn't?How else to interpret this exchange?
SCHIEFFER: Did President Bush know everything you knew?
CHENEY: I certainly, yes, have every reason to believe he knew -- he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it.
He's not going down alone. Could we ask Bush and Cheney if they watched the actual tapes of torture sessions? And were they in the White House if they did so?
Does Bush, can Bush, throw Cheney overboard?
1 comment:
This is becoming a case not of the rat abandoning ship, but rather the rat lashing himself and his captain to the mast. When Cheney speaks now you can almost hear a gurgling sound.
ps: nice Col Tom Parker analogy.
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