1 Boring Old Man

Bartlett Targets Deadeye Dick
by emptywheel

Remember when Dick Cheney shot an old man in the face and then attempted to cover it up by reporting it through the local press? Well, Dan Bartlett wants you to know that that whole cover-up was Dick’s idea demand.

Then there was the time Cheney shot his pal during a hunting accident in Texas. "We couldn’t get hold of him for quite a bit of time," Bartlett said. "They were strategizing on their own, which as always got me worried. I called down there, and I finally get ahold of some of the people traveling with him and they kind of laid out their strategy. " ‘We’re not going to talk about this. We’re going to give it to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times in the morning,’ " Bartlett said. He was stunned. This little paper couldn’t even find the reporter because it was the weekend. "So finally, I said, ‘I have to talk with the vice president directly. I have to intervene in this.’ I get him on the phone. ‘Mr. Vice President, I know you don’t have any traveling press with you, but we need to pull together a pool, either get them down there, get you on the phone with them. We need to work this out.’ "Dead silence." Then: " ‘This is how we’re going to handle it.’ "’Okaaay, Mr. Vice President.’ Hang up the phone and the rest is history," Bartlett recalled.

Then of course, we knew that Cheney was the one behind the cover-up. He seems to be the one behind all the cover-ups in this Administration. Just so you know, though, it wasn’t Dan Bartlett’s fault.

Paranoid thinking is always the same. There is always a background of Grandiosity – "I’m the center of attention." There is always mistrust – including mistrust of confidantes [eg Bartlett], ergo one must maintain control. And there is always a "pseudocommunity," some "they" that are "out to discredit me." It often becomes true that there are people out to discredit paranoid people, but it’s because of how they’ve acted in the past. The paranoid person is completely unaware that their behavior does, in fact, cause the very thing they’re afraid of – people being out to get them. The underlying force in the paranoid person is intense Envy. Envy is the most painful of emotions because it’s insoluable. Paranoia is a solution to dealing with envy by denial and projection – "It’s not me that envies them, they envy me. They’re out to get me because I’m so powerful, smart, etc." The intolerable feeling of "less than" becomes a feeling of "more than" – but then there’s a vulnerability to attack. Reality is plastic because it must fit this self-aggrandizing scheme. Hatred of "the enemies" along with amassing power to fight them is just part of the package.

He’s a militant who avoided any service of his own in the military and he has been most forceful in the last 10 years or more in fulfilling some of his more ancient commitments that the United States has a right to inject its power through military means in other parts of the world. […]

You know he’s been a disaster for our country. I think he’s been overly persuasive on President George Bush and quite often he’s prevailed. It was one of his main commitments to go into Iraq under false pretenses, and he still maintains those false pretenses are accurate.

Bush allows torture: Carter

George W. Bush’s administration tortures detainees in defiance of international law, former US president Jimmy Carter charged Wednesday. "I don’t think it, I know it, certainly," Carter told CNN television when asked if he believed the US administration allowed the use of torture.

Carter rejected Bush’s statement last week that the United States does not torture terror suspects. "That’s not an accurate statement, if you use the international norms of torture as has always been honored, certainly in the last 60 years, since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was promulgated," Carter said in the interview. "But you can make your own definition of human rights and say, ‘we don’t violate them.’ And … you can make your own definition of torture and say ‘we don’t violate it,’" said the former Democratic president and Nobel laureate.

Asked if Bush was lying, Carter said: "The president is self-defining what we have done and authorized in the torture of prisoners, yes."