I’m no fan of Dick Cheney. That is for sure. And the way he’s behaving is par for the course – the kind of thing that gives male human beings a bad rep. But I feel sorry for him. You do something that’s an obvious big time screw up, and it can’t be undone – ever. And in your mind, there’s nothing right to do. Denial doesn’t work. Gushing apologies don’t help. Macho discounting is a waste of time. People ask you questions and there’s nothing to say. The mind tries and tries to reframe it, and it always comes out the same. It’s the stuff of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
His style of dealing with things is awful, but there is no right way. He can’t wake up and have it be gone, and that’s the only thing that would help.
That said, how can we get him out of office?
Mickey, I can’t believe you’re feeling sorry for him–have you gone soft on us?? I might have felt some inkling of sympathy for him had he come right out and said from the getgo that he made a mistake and was sorry and felt bad, or whatever. But for him to maintain the screw-you-I-don’t-have-to-answer-to-anybody attitude like he does for everything else forfeits any entitlement to sympathy in my book. I can’t believe that no one in any of the articles, or even in any of the blogs I’ve read on it, seem to focus on the claimed rationale for waiting so long—“We were all just so concerned about poor Harry” and the statment from Katharine Armstrong that, after Harry was taken to the hospital the rest of them “sat down to dinner and then went to bed.” If they were all so concerned about Harry, how did they just all sit down to dinner? And it’s inconceivable that the subject of how this would play in the press could not have been a topic of dinner conversation. Of course there’s no chance that anyone there will ever tell the true story, but the obvious reason for “arranging” with the high sheriff to wait until the next day to talk to him directly is that they were all having a little of the Shooter’s Sherry you mentioned in an earlier post. I liked your earlier reference to the behavior of the idle rich . . . let them eat cake–or birdshot.
You know, he is one of the biggest jerks that ever walked. But if you’ve ever done something like he’s done, whether it was of your own doing or out of your control, that feeling is so powerful that you can empathize with the Marquis De Sade. But as for Dick, his arrogance with this is staggering. I agree with you totally. If the N.S.A. weren’t monitoring our communications, I’d have some dicey suggestions…