In the past week, I’ve twice been close enough to Dick Cheney to kick him in the shins. I didn’t. It’s probably a federal crime of some sort. But a girl can fantasize. I did, however, assume the Stay-away-from-me-you’ve-got-cooties stance that Jimmy Carter used when posing with Bill Clinton at the presidents’ powwow in the Oval.
The first time was Tuesday, when Cheney left the ceremony where he gave the oath of office to senators. The senators seemed thrilled, especially Joe Biden, who was getting sworn in for just two weeks and was excitedly showing off a family Bible the size of a Buick. But I thought it gave the ceremony a satirical edge to have the lawless Vice presiding over lawmakers swearing to support and defend the Constitution that he soiled and defiled — right in the heart of the legislative branch he worked to diminish.
The second time I crossed paths was Thursday night, at a glitzy party at Cafe Milano for Brit Hume, stepping down as a Fox anchor. It required extreme defensive maneuvers — much zigging and zagging — to avoid Cheney, Wolfie and Rummy, all three holding court and blissfully unrepentant about the chaos they’ve unleashed on the world.
“My conscience is clear,” Rummy volunteered to Bob Woodward, talking about how he’s interviewing people for his memoir. Woodward was stunned. “I was as speechless as I was in July 2006 when I interviewed him and he said he was not a military commander, that he could make the case that he was ‘by indirection, two or three steps removed,’ ” Woodward told me afterward.…Cheney’s theory of executive “unitary” power and pre-emptive war and frightening the world was a theory of Constitutional thuggishness. Asked last week by Mark Knoller of CBS Radio in one of his exit interviews to name the “biggest mis-impression” people had about him, Cheney replied with a laugh, “That I’m actually a warm, lovable sort.” He went on to seriously assert that his image as “a private, Darth Vader-type personality” has been “pretty dramatically overdone. I think we made good decisions,” he told Knoller, adding with even grander delusion, “I think we knew what we were doing.”He protested “the notion that somehow I was pulling strings or making presidential-level decisions. I was not. There was never any question about who was in charge. It was George Bush. And that’s the way we operated. This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, is simply not true. It’s an urban legend, never happened.”
The fact that Cheney is now putting all the blame for all the messes squarely on W. shows once more how the bureaucratic master outmaneuvers his younger partner. Even on his way out, Vice is still on top.
Having Rumsfeld there just adds to the bizarreness of these final days. How many Secretaries of Defense say, "My conscience is clear," after they leave office? At least his saying that indicates that a lot of us have times when we think he ought to toast in some lower level of Dante’s Inferno to get in touch with why his conscience ought not be so clear.
The only quote in this piece that makes any sense was Cheney’s, "I think we knew what we were doing." He means it one way, but I took it another.I think he did know what he was doing – he was rewriting our Constitution and our way of being a country in his own image, to our detriment. As a psychiatrist and Psychoanalyst, I’ve been around a lot of people who had to face that their behavior and their self-image were widely divergent. It’s not easy to do. It’s usually preceeded by a long period of self justification and self-serving explanations. But, somewhere down the line, the people who are going to get better finally get around to looking in the mirror and seeing a more accurate reflection.
I think that’s why so many columnists are so fired up. Bush and Cheney haven’t looked in the mirror. I doubt that they are even capable of doing that. "It required extreme defensive maneuvers — much zigging and zagging — to avoid Cheney, Wolfie, and Rummy, all three holding court and blissfully unrepentant about the chaos they’ve unleashed on the world." It’s hard to be around someone who is openly denying an obvious truth, "This whole notion that somehow I exceeded my authority here, was usurping his authority, is simply not true. It’s an urban legend, never happened." Well, it did happen, not that Bush’s "authority" means much. As I’ve said over and over, there are two meanings to the word authority: Power, as in delegated authority, as is "I’m the Seargant and you’re to Private, so do what I say." And Expertise – as in the authority of expertise, as in "He’s an authority in Astrophysics." Neither Bush nor Cheney can claim the latter. And both Bush and Cheney abused the former [throw in Wolfie and Rummy as long as your at it].
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