Just As No One Foresaw 9\/11<\/a><\/strong> \t\t\t\t\t <\/div>\n
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I haven’t read the book about Cheney, Angler<\/strong> – just the part that was in the Washington Post. I’m saving that book for a time when I’m not so angry at him [if that time ever comes]. Whatever makes him tick, all I know right now is that I don’t like it. He’s very effective at getting things done, but the things he does are usually misguided, including picking himself as a Vice President. I don’t much know what he stands for, only what he opposes. In fact, I doubt that he is driven by anything more than his intense oppositionalism and his emotions [see below].<\/p>\n He came into being in the salad days of the Nixon era – landing a job with Donald Rumsfeld in 1969 at the Office of Economic Opportunity<\/strong> where their task was to undermine the purpose of the Agency. He was good at wheeling and dealing, ending up as Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff, where he tried to keep the power mongering of Nixon alive. After Ford’s failed campaign [which he managed], he returned to Wyoming and got himself elected to Congress. In his ten years in Congress, he was an effective wheeler dealer, but his voting record<\/strong><\/a> was monocular. He opposed anything "liberal" – Civil Rights, Education, Environment, Gun Control, increasing soldiers pay, AIDS testing, Abortion, etc. He only voted for things Conservative – Military Spending, Iran-Contra, etc. He had the most Conservative voting record in Congress.<\/p>\n When he became Secretary of Defense, he set about downsizing the military. While that seems like a paradox, it is consistent with his oppositionalism – he opposed everything Congress wanted to do just as he had done when he was in Congress himself. I can’t tell whether the decision to limit our First Gulf War was his and Bush agreed, or vica versa, but I suspect the former. I have a hunch that he is actually a very frightened guy, something of what’s called a "coward," and that his persona is a defense against an excessive fearfulness.<\/p>\n Cheney: No One Could Have Predicted The Financial Crisis, Just As No One Foresaw 9\/11 Yesterday in an interview with the Associated Press’s Deb Reichmann, Vice President Cheney repeatedly insisted that no one anticipated the looming U.S. financial crisis. “I don’t think anybody saw it coming,” he said. He then compared the financial crisis to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/tbn2.google.com\/images?q=tbn:4SKyHhr-wsuKCM:http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/huff-wires\/20080521\/cheney-coast-guard\/images\/fb602114-af6e-4e12-87c8-6e27961e9417.jpg\")
While he’s obviously an ambitious guy, he flunked out of Yale quickly. He became a draft dodger and stayed in the shade of a host of deferments until he was old enough to avoid the military altogether. He remained rigidly bound to the anticommunist, antiliberal, hawk position while being drawn to anything that had to do with acquiring power. His ascendency to Secretary of Defense seems odd [except that he "followed the leader" – Rumsfeld – just as he had done throughout his career]. He became a Sportsman, shooting pheasants [and old men] on game preserves [where the birds are raised in cages], and fishing in [stocked] trout streams.<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/2.bp.blogspot.com\/_rFs0uVY_4rE\/RihIEWkKPjI\/AAAAAAAAAJk\/xoTXj70LS5w\/s320\/bush+cheney+rose+garden+presser.jpg\")
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