1 Boring Old Man

Mr. Cheney’s Blind Spot
February 7, 2009

"THE UNITED States needs to be not so much loved as it needs to be respected." So declared former vice president Dick Cheney in an interview this week with Politico. Mr. Cheney is right – which is why he should be apologizing rather than defending the extreme Bush administration policies on detention and interrogation that he championed. Mr. Cheney asserted that the administration’s antiterrorism policies may have been unpopular but were necessary, and he offered sweeping and unverifiable pronouncements about their effectiveness. "If it hadn’t been for what we did – with respect to the terrorist surveillance program or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act and so forth – then we would have been attacked again," Mr. Cheney claimed…

… Mr. Cheney fails to recognize the damage these policies have done to the country’s reputation at large. They have alienated even once-stalwart allies, and they have played into the hands of terrorist leaders, who use the sordid images from Abu Ghraib and tales of abuse at secret CIA prisons overseas as political ammunition to recruit the next wave of suicide bombers and foot soldiers. Thanks to Mr. Cheney and his allies, global respect for the United States is at a low point. Part of the mission of preventing attacks must be to repair that damage.

I feel almost apologetic about how much I write about the immediate past – the Bush Cheney years. I can’t seem to let them go yet. I worry that it’s habit, and fear. The future is so uncertain, friends getting in financial trouble – maybe it’s just easier to dawdle in the anger of the past than look at now, or up ahead. But the conscious reason it fires me up is that there remains a sick, destructive attitude that still swirls around our heads, like it has for the last eight years. The Genie just won’t get back in the Lamp.

The snarling Cheney, the dismissive Lindsey Graham, the scowling John McCain are constant reminders of the sick, nasty self-righteousness that has hung over the land like the dust from 9/11 hung over New York. Cheney’s interview, "If it hadn’t been for what we did – with respect to the terrorist surveillance program or enhanced interrogation techniques for high-value detainees, the Patriot Act and so forth – then we would have been attacked again," is part of that. So is Graham’s, "This bill stinks!" There’s an arrogance in the delivery that feels like a cancer on the land. Even if we are attacked again, it won’t be because we shut down Guantanamo. Even if the Stimulus Bill doesn’t "work," it won’t be because it "stinks." It will be because the ideology of the recent past left us destitute and without recourse.