I could not help but think about this thread when I read the following article from POLITICO:
CHENEY IN WONDERLAND
Michael Hirsh
Here is a multiple-choice question. See if you can get it right. Asking for advice from Dick Cheney on foreign policy is as sensible as:
A. Asking Anthony Weiner to advise you on how to "sext" and get away with it
B. Asking Ted Cruz's advice on how to build a political career by keeping your mouth shut
C. Expecting Vladimir Putin to say he’s sorry, and could we please forgive him
D. All of the above
OK, the answer—(D)—is pretty obvious. Maybe too obvious. But the question is: Why isn't it more obvious to more people than it appears to be? The fact is, Dick Cheney is making an aggressive comeback in American political life, and far too few people are laughing.
On Tuesday, the elder GOP statesman advised the Republican House Conference, which listened respectfully, about the need for a strong defense. On Wednesday, people packed the American Enterprise Institute—which continues to thrive as the beating heart of neoconservatism in Washington in defiance of a decade of grievously bad policy advice—to hear the former veep to speak on “9/11 and the future of U.S. foreign policy,” a prebuttal to President Obama’s speech to the nation Wednesday night about the Islamic State.
These were not one-off events: Cheney’s advice is actively solicited by many Republicans in Congress, perhaps more than it has been in years. He and his ever-devoted daughter, Liz, are still so influential in Washington they even found a place on our POLITICO 50 list this year—having become “once again the right’s most vocal champions of American power as an antidote to the world’s many dangers,” as we put it. And they have an important message about Obama: “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much,” Dick and Liz wrote in the Wall Street Journal in June, and “at the expense of so many.”
You want to talk expense? Let's talk expense. Let’s tally up all the expenses on the account of one Richard B. Cheney. More than 100,000 Iraqis dead and at least 10,000 Americans killed or maimed—all unnecessarily. Trillions of taxpayer dollars wasted, again all unnecessarily. A war that was also utterly unnecessary, with no reason or cause—instead a trumped-up and falsified case for invasion.
Another war, in Afghanistan—the necessary war, mind you—left unfinished for years while Cheney and Co. could act out their imperial fantasies in a faraway country utterly unrelated to 9/11. A doctrine of torture that left us in such a legal and moral muddle, with evidence so tainted, that not even the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, can be tried and convicted thirteen years later, after America’s longest-ever war (the 13th anniversary is Thursday, lest we forget).
A great nation, wounded horribly on that day 13 years ago, that in the hands of the Bush-Cheney co-presidency wounded itself more severely—in lost and destroyed lives, in exposing the vulnerability of our troops to jihadists, in fiscal irresponsibility, in loss of moral stature, in the diminution of the very power they touted as their ultimate goal and which Cheney dares to chide Obama over now—than any damage we ever suffered at the hands of al Qaeda.
By any reasonable, non-partisan measure of history, a Dick Cheney speech on “9/11 and the future of U.S. foreign policy” should be about how not to conduct U.S. foreign policy the way Dick Cheney did. How Cheney and Co. got the challenge of 9/11 almost completely wrong, and how 13 years later we are still paying for it. The ever-unrepentant Cheney gave not a hint of this in his AEI speech, of course, criticizing the president over and over, asking how Obama could “carelessly sacrifice America’s hard-won gains” in the Middle East, and faulting Obama for failing to impose American power on the world the way the Bushies did. “We must move globally to get back on offense in the war on terror,” he said. Disapprovingly, Cheney also quoted Obama as saying five years ago: “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.” Such humility apparently outrages Cheney. “When you have a president whose primary concern is never to, quote, ‘elevate’ America, it’s no surprise” that everything is going to hell, he said.
I have no desire to defend Obama here. There’s a fair case to be made that the president was feckless about Iraq, especially after he withdrew all U.S. troops in 2011, and that he was in denial for too long about the regrowth of radical Islamism – especially the new threat from Islamic State — in his eagerness to declare defeat against “core” al Qaeda and the war over. But Dick Cheney, of all people, has no stature to deliver this critique. Insanity was once famously defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If you’re going to listen to Cheney on the best way to preserve American power, your next stop should be Wonderland, to hear the Red Queen explain the rules of chess.
Yet Cheney is hardly alone in making a mockery of memory or common sense. There’s also his comrade-in-disaster, Donald Rumsfeld, who last year brazenly published a book called Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life, was invited on “Meet the Press” to talk about it and has become a semi-regular critic of the Obama administration on Fox News. A “trained ape” could do better in Iraq than Obama, Rummy told Fox last March.
Gee. What does that make Rumsfeld—an untrained macaque?
Here, as a reminder, is a capsule summary of Rumsfeld’s later career, which closely tracks that of Cheney: Missed the al Qaeda threat before 9/11.
Failed (in late 2001) to follow up on the pursuit of Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants at Tora Bora, which could have ended the whole affair. Decided (in mid-2002) to minimize stability operations in Afghanistan and confine peacekeeping to Kabul, opening the way to the return of the Taliban.
Pressured his president, the clueless George W. Bush, to shift his attention (in late 2002) to a war in an unrelated place, Iraq, based again on what we now know was indisputably false intelligence that Rumsfeld pressed on Bush only days after 9/11. Failed titanically—having gone into Iraq—to plan for post-combat operations there.
Remained stubbornly in denial of the growing insurgency. Persisted, as the Taliban crept back in Afghanistan in the mid-2000s, in insisting that Afghanistan was stable, delivering speeches on how well the country was doing under America’s “modest footprint.” And of course through it all Rumsfeld never figured out what the hell he was doing at all in the “war on terror,” having complained that he lacked the “metrics” to figure out who was winning or sinning after 9/11.
This history mercifully stops there—around 2006—because by then even W. had had enough of Rumsfeld and fired him, over Cheney’s objections. Was there ever a worse defense secretary? Yet it put not a crimp in Rummy’s career plans, or his comfortable retirement, or the invitations he gets from TV producers to opine, with that familiar chuckling, self-assured Rum-stud wit, on the faults of our current president.
But despite these indisputable legacies, making them among the worst public officials in American history, the Bushies keep coming back, like those pests you can’t quite get rid of in your backyard. It’s not just Cheney.
Only in the last week, there was W. yukking it up on the stage with Bill Clinton, pretending that he’s just another honorable ex-president rather than arguably one of the most disastrous occupants of the Oval Office we’ve ever had (Bill, ever the genial get-along guy, pretended along with him).
Rummy, who by any reasonable standard of international justice could very well have faced trial in The Hague by now—as could Cheney— is free to enjoy his dotage and eat out in restaurants and get carted around in TV network-supplied limousines.
Condi Rice, coming off her stellar performance aiding, abetting and enabling these bunglers (at least for her first four years in power), is sometimes still talked of for the 2016 GOP ticket and is said to be interested in restoring probity to the NFL by becoming its commissioner.
Never mind hoary virtues like shame or honor. Or integrity or truth. It’s fair to wonder if something as basic as accountability exists any longer. At least in Washington. It’s a concept that has worked very well for civilization—accountability. Companies that peddle bad goods or services go out of business (except on Wall Street). Restaurants that serve bad food typically fail. Bad movies and books bomb. Even bad dictators eventually get toppled. Only in Washington, it seems, are public officials and pundits alike immune from this concept.
Only in this city can you peddle execrably bad ideas year after year and still receive not only an invitation to speak—along with a fat paycheck—but enthusiastic applause too. Only here can historically incompetent screw-ups like Cheney and Rumsfeld still be welcomed back into the insiders’ game with little reflection or irony. Only within the Beltway could an absurd mountebank like Bill Kristol get a rich contract from ABC to be a resident pundit after being catastrophically wrong on almost everything he has said for better than a decade.
It hardly seems there’s accountability left even in the electoral system.
House Republicans can do anything they want—as long as they adopt the most extreme right-wing position—safe in the knowledge that the scared white people who make up most of their districts will never vote them out.
Congress is at historically low approval ratings, and yet only four House incumbents were defeated in primaries this year. Take Darrell Issa. Even before he took over the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, with zero evidence, Issa called Obama “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times.” In his relentless search for evidence (and headlines) since, he has found nothing to back up that statement—his most recent dry well was Benghazi—making himself look like a clown again and again and again (and making even his partisan Democratic predecessor Henry Waxman look like a sage statesman by comparison). Put some white paint and a red plastic nose on Issa, and Barnum and Bailey would take him tomorrow. Yet Issa, utterly devoid as he is of credibility, is still invited onto the talk shows and gets handily re-elected every two years.
And again, to be fair, it’s a bipartisan phenomenon. Barack Obama’s administration has specialized in allowing the powerful escape accountability—especially on Wall Street—and prosecuting journalists who push for more of it. Not to mention letting the Gitmo nightmare linger on long after he promised to deal with it.
Isn’t there anything we can do? I genuinely don’t know. But it’s worth asking how we as a nation went from being governed by people like Jefferson and Adams and Washington—or Lincoln and Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt or even, more recently, George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan—to this pathetic circus, with the blind, like Cheney, leading the even blinder, like the House Republicans.
Is it that partisanship has become so much the iron law of our times that it trumps everything else, even facts and memory? Is it that none of us can sort fiction from fact any longer in the misinformational maelstrom of the Information Age?
Yes, rumor and deceit were always there, from the founding days of the republic.
Partisanship and double-dealing and deliberate misinformation have always been part of our national story. Even the founding fathers were complicit.
The deified Thomas Jefferson subsidized James Callendar (the Bill Kristol of his age) to slander John Adams in the scandal sheets of that day and planned to sell off his slaves to pay off his debts while talking about his abhorrence of the practice—all the while quietly shtupping Sally Hemings. FDR lied and dissembled his way through 15 years in office, got power-hungry and packed the Supreme Court.
John F. Kennedy—well, we know all about his private morals. And yet somehow back then, through 200 years of stumbling forward, the big decisions were made responsibly. There was, in the end at least, accountability when it came to those big decisions. Now it seems there is none. There are no standards left. Now we are lost. And I don’t know the way back. Or if there is one.
I suppose a good start would be, at the very least, to say that enough is enough—and to stop listening to Dick Cheney.
Michael Hirsh is national editor for Politico Magazine.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...#ixzz3Cy8mHQkm
Dick Cheney beats the war drums
