1 Boring Old Man

What’s your reaction to Vice President Cheney’s ongoing [criticism]? He’s not quite twittering your administration [ laughter ] but he’s coming fairly close.

You know, Dick Cheney had a strong perspective about national security. It was tested in the early years of the Bush administration, and I think it resulted in a series of very bad decisions. I think what’s interesting is that, in some ways, Dick Cheney actually lost these arguments inside the Bush administration.

And so he may have won early with Colin Powell and Condi Rice, but over the last two or three years of the Bush administration, I think there was a recognition among Republicans and Bush administration officials that these enhanced interrogation techniques that were being applied — that they had applied early on — were potentially counterproductive; that a posture of never talking to our enemies, of unilateral action, of framing national security only in terms of the application of force, often unilateral — that that wasn’t producing.

And so it’s interesting to me to see the vice president spending so much time trying to vindicate himself and relitigate the last eight years when, as I said, I think, actually, a lot of these arguments were settled even before we took over the White House.

We bloggers get tangled in the contraversies of the day. Most of us didn’t support the invasion of Iraq in the first place. But even if we did, we didn’t support playing it out in this way. Most of us would’ve said "no" to torture back then. Many of us would’ve questioned domestic surveillence with no oversight. But those huge issues aside, we forget to mention that Dick Cheney was a global failure. Dick Cheney loaded us up on our mighty elephants and marched us over the Alps — and came home empty handed, leaving a lot of elephants behind. Dick Cheney took us on a walk on the "Dark Side," and what we came out of it with is a feeling of empathy for the poor souls we abased and abused for no obvious gain. Dick Cheney masterminded an internal coups d’etat for the Executive Branch of our government that left us with the task of rediscovering our own Constitution. Dick Cheney and his friends took a viable Conservative Movement in America and reduced it to the Worst and the Loudest, resembling a Klan Rally on the levee during Freedom Summer. Dick Cheney was a failure.

I feel sorry for the Conservatives of Conscience, people who don’t think like I do but are solid, upstanding human beings whose convictions are strong and well-thought. I know a lot of those people, and I respect them. I hope that goes both ways. Right now, they’re reduced to making a choice between a very sick version of their position and a very healthy version of ours. They can only be quiet or side with the Crazy Contemptuous Conservatives – Cheney, Limbaugh, even Boehner. That’s not really a choice. They worked hard to finally find a winner. What they got was a loser of Napoleonic proportions. At least Napoleon had his moments in the sun before his fall[s]. Napoleon lost big time and was exiled, but he made a comeback, and got beaten again at Waterloo. The second exile took. Let’s hope Cheney’s "comeback" is not so successful as Napoleon.

I, for one, don’t like feeling the way I do about him. It doesn’t feel like me inside. Even with Nixon, I had a sympathy for his afflictions. I didn’t think of Nixon so much as evil, I thought of him as sick – that tragic character flaw that Aristotle wrote about, the one I’m always quoting. I don’t feel that for Dick Cheney. He fills me with the feelings of Cheney’s World — hate, evil, revenge, suspicion, dispair. I once went to a favorite sitting place and tried to find some part of myself that could see things Cheney’s way. No luck. I can do it with George Bush, but not with Cheney. Recently, I tried another exercise. I thought back over the times in my life when I’ve felt passion about something, and lost [no, not that kind of passion]. I think in the after-time, the wounds were ultimately replaced by a reflective curiosity, and I learned something surprising about myself and my own convictions.

That’s not going to happen with Dick Cheney. There’s an equation that most old psychotherapists hold, whether they know it or not. When you have a patient with whom you can feel absolutely no empathy, no matter how hard you try, you’re dealing with a person who does not have the capacity for empathy himself. If you’ve never felt what I’m talking about, you can go to one of those places that collects such people – like a Prison. There are a lot of such people there. Certainly not all, but enough to get the point. They are untreatable, or at the least they are only heroic attempts at psychotherapy. I’ve both seen and had a few limited successes, but they were very hard won exceptions.