{"id":2816,"date":"2009-01-14T22:06:48","date_gmt":"2009-01-15T03:06:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2009\/01\/14\/2816\/"},"modified":"2009-01-14T22:10:55","modified_gmt":"2009-01-15T03:10:55","slug":"2816","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2009\/01\/14\/2816\/","title":{"rendered":"folie \u00c3\u00a0 deux<\/em>…"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cheney Tells Jim Lehrer Tonight: <\/b><\/a><\/div>\n
No Torture, Few Mistakes, Economy Not Our Fault<\/b><\/a>
By Greg Mitchell
January 14, 2009<\/div>\n

In an exit interview with PBS’s Jim Lehrer for the “NewsHour” airing tonight, Vice President Cheney repeats claims that Saddam Hussein worked with al-Qaeda. Asked if he made any mistakes in his eight years as V.P., Cheney only mentions underestimating the psychological harm Saddam had done to his own people. He said his administration bore no blame for the economic problem: “I think we had good economic policies, especially in the early years.” And the terror threat was inherited because of the poor handling by previous presidents.<\/p>\n

On polls showing he is overwhelmingly unpopular among the American people: “I don’t buy that.”<\/p>\n

And he shrugged off a critical statement today by a key figure, who used to work under him – she called the handling of one terror suspect as clear “torture”…<\/div>\n
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    MR. LEHRER:<\/b> But just, for a general premise here, looking back, you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t \u00e2\u20ac\u201c nothing happened that you feel was over the line or that you feel that was a miscalculation or mistake of some kind?<\/div>\n
    VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY<\/b>: Well, in terms of the treatment of a specific individual, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say that. We had Abu Ghraib, for example. In that case, I believe, based on what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen, that that was the result of some military personnel who were improperly supervised \u00e2\u20ac\u201c weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t given the right kind of guidance, weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t managed properly. As we dig in and look at hundreds of cases, we may well find a few people who were not properly treated. You know, I ran the Pentagon. I know that you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t absolutely guarantee, at all times, that everybody\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s doing it the way they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re supposed to be doing it. <\/div>\n
    VICE <\/b>PRESIDENT<\/b> CHENEY<\/b>: I can tell you what the policy was; I can tell you that we had all the legal authorization to do it, including the sign-off of the Justice Department. I can tell you it produced phenomenal results for us, and that a great many Americans are alive today because we did all that. And I think those are the important considerations.<\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n
    We’ve all written and written about Vice President Cheney. For eight years, he’s given these absolutely absurd interviews to good interviewers and walked away unscathed. Then bloggers write and write about the mis-statements and logical fallacies. Then, he does it again. One factor in his getting away with it is his deep voice and authoritative demeanor – that “not quite sneered sneer.” The other is his uniquely intimidating style. But that’s not all. He’s a master of prepackaged counters that he delivers perseveratively [over and over]. After 911, he kept up the Al Qaeda\/Iraq connection story for years, as well as the WMD meme. With Torture or the NSA wiretapping, he sticks with this litany:<\/div>\n
      \n
    1. \n
      Good policy.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
    2. \n
      Legal backup from the DoJ.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n
    3. \n
      Great results.<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
      None of those things are actually true except number 2. And that backup is from John Yoo’s memos, written under the tuteladge of Cheney’s side-kick, David Addington. None of these policies have been “good” by any parameter I know of. The Legal backup has been so discredited that it’s hard to even call it “legal” anymore. And his assertions of great results is hearsay evidence, primarily from Cheney himself.<\/div>\n

      These are premeditated answers, constructed at the time the policy was instituted. It goes like this. “We need to use torture to find Bin Laden. Let’s do it. Research the legal blockades and let’s find a way around them.” And that’s exactly what they did. It was the same with the Domestic wiretaps. “We can’t have the Courts interfering with this program. Research the legal blockades and let’s find a way around them.” So the rationalizations were in place from the very start. He was primed for these questions in 2001 when these programs were instituted. <\/p>\n

      So Lehrer says: “… nothing happened that you feel was over the line or that you feel that was a miscalculation or mistake of some kind?” Cheney doesn’t answer the question.<\/b> Instead he rolls out the formulaic answer: “I can tell you what the policy was; I can tell you that we had all the legal authorization to do it, including the sign-off of the Justice Department. I can tell you it produced phenomenal results for us.” What about Abu Ghraib? He says, “… some military personnel who were improperly supervised \u00e2\u20ac\u201c weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t given the right kind of guidance, weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t managed properly.” He just doesn’t respond to the obvious implications in Lehrer’s question<\/b> – Cheney’s policy lead to Abu Ghraib<\/b>.<\/p>\n

      Another of his techniques is flat out denial. This interview has a classic example. Lehrer asks about his unpopularity in the polls. Cheneys says, “I don’t buy that.”<\/b> I’m not even sure what he doesn’t buy.<\/div>\n
        \n
      • that the polls were done <\/li>\n
      • that polls have meaning <\/li>\n
      • that people actually don’t like him <\/li>\n
      • that it’s even possible that people might not like him<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
        Who knows what he means? But it’s clear that there’s not going to be much dialog on this topic.<\/div>\n
        <\/div>\n
        I’ve finally made some peace with Richard Cheney and his shadow, David Addington. They’ve been very hard for me personally. I’ve been intimidated by their stern, self assured patriachal delivery. It catches me off guard and disarms me, like maybe they’re right – some kind of big father figures, even though we’re the same age. The whole problem for me is that I believe that they think<\/u> what they are saying is correct. I never feel that myself. – correct While I would argue that always questioning things is a good idea, it’s not much of an ego booster. Cheney’s enormous ego comes across as confidence – the voice of truth. Same with Addington though his arrogance is more obvious [and obnoxious].<\/div>\n

        And that’s why Cheney’s been such a terrible leader. He believes what he thinks, he and arch-Narcissist<\/i> David Addington. In their folie \u00c3\u00a0 deux<\/b><\/i>, they just “know” what’s right and they just “know” that others are wrong. They’re both smart as hell, and when confronted with evidence that they’re way off base, they automatically counter because it simply can’t be true that they are wrong. Bush does the same thing, but he’s so bad at it that it’s laughable. Cheney and Addington aren’t lightweights like their boss.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

        It’s time for the two of them to leave. They have done us irreparable harm – irreparable damage.  It’s too late to do anything about it. At least it’s time for them to go away. Psycho-historians will pore over and over their tenure in office, but I doubt there will ever come a deeper formulation of their personal flaws than this – people who believe their own thoughts are lethal. If you put two of them together, the combination is much worse than the simple sum of the parts. They feed off of each other. Patrick Fitzgerald said that there was a cloud over the Office of the Vice Presidency. I would revise that. The Office of the Vice Presidency was a cancer in the White House. Of couse, if Dick Cheney were to read this, he’d say simply, “I don’t buy that”… <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

        Cheney Tells Jim Lehrer Tonight: No Torture, Few Mistakes, Economy Not Our Fault By Greg Mitchell January 14, 2009 In an exit interview with PBS’s Jim Lehrer for the “NewsHour” airing tonight, Vice President Cheney repeats claims that Saddam Hussein worked with al-Qaeda. Asked if he made any mistakes in his eight years as V.P., […]<\/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-2816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2816","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=2816"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2816\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}