|
Cheney Fails Again
Iraq, Katrina, Medcare Plan D, Lawyers …
We will work to end lawsuit abuse. (Applause.) We know that it’s a lot easier for America’s businesses to hire new workers if they don’t have to keep hiring lawyers. (Applause.)
Vice President Cheney’s Remarks at a Victory 2004 Rally in Batavia, Ohio, October 11, 2004
Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.
…
Cheney’s spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said the vice president was with Whittington, a lawyer from Austin, Texas, and his wife at the hospital on Sunday afternoon.
Cheney Accidentally Shoots Fellow Hunter, February 12, 2006
—
The plot is made to be funny but fails along the way. The audience not only loses interest in laughing, but the characters as well. By the end of the movie, you hardly care who lives or dies and whether or not the movie ends. The title alone makes it hard for anyone to take this movie serious let alone enjoyable.
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight., 1971
(Lemann is longwinded & likes the sound of his
own print)
From:The New Yorker
The Quiet Man
Dick Cheney’s discreet rise to unprecedented power.
by Nicholas Lemann
Issue of 2001-05-07
Posted 2004-08-31
Cheney:
.It is part of the basis of the cult that Cheney has none of the easy extroversion of the typical politician. Instead, there are those long—to the uninitiated, uncomfortably long, and forbidding—silences. “He’s the coldest fish there is,” one person who has dealt with him says. He typically does not thank subordinates for their work, signalling his approval simply by assigning more work; he does not react when being briefed; and he does not make light conversation. A former aide of Cheney’s told me this story: “When I went to work for him and we were alone in a car for the first time, I tried to chat with him. It was like trying to talk to Gary Cooper. Then I switched to legislation, and he came on. The parts of his brain reserved for small talk and popular culture have been emptied out and refilled with public policy. When he was in the House”—in the nineteen-eighties—”we had to tell him who Madonna was.”
Cheney doesn’t engage in histrionics. His friend Kenneth Adelman, the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Reagan Administration, says, “His personality never gets in the way of solving the problem. You don’t have to deal with Dick and the problem, just the problem. It’s the opposite of Kissinger.” Often, aides to a Washington big shot will conduct a private traffic in negative anecdotes; this is not the case with Cheney. He may not talk to the people who work for him, but he trusts them and gives them authority, he takes the time to master the substance of their work, and, most unusual, he protects them. Once, when Cheney was Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, then an under-secretary and now Deputy Secretary, asked his permission to brief a Times reporter on a change in the Administration’s arms-control policy. Cheney said O.K. The briefing took place on a Friday, and the story came out on Saturday—but the plan had been for President George H. W. Bush himself to announce the change on Monday. Cheney called in Wolfowitz on Monday morning and, according to somebody else who was there, said, “The President is seriously pissed.”
“So what did you tell him?” Wolf-owitz said.
“I said, ‘Mr. President, that was my idea,’ ” Cheney said. Nobody ever does that in Washington.
“Well, in terms of the United States, the fact is that there are still regions of the world that are strategically vital to the U.S., where we care very much about whether or not they’re dominated by a power hostile to our interests. . . . And anything that would threaten their independence or their relationships with the United States would be a threat to us. Also, you’ve still got to worry a bit about North Korea. You’ve got to worry about the Iraqis, what ultimately develops in Iran. But beyond that, in terms of a threat to the U.S., and our security, I think we have to be more concerned than we ever have about so-called homeland defense, the vulnerability of our system to different kinds of attacks. Some of it homegrown, like Oklahoma City. Some inspired by terrorists external to the United States—the World Trade towers bombing, in New York. The threat of terrorist attack against the U.S., eventually, potentially, with weapons of mass destruction—bugs or gas, biological, or chemical agents, potentially even, someday, nuclear weapons. The threat of so-called cyberterrorism attacks on our infrastructure, obviously very sophisticated in terms of being based on our intelligence infrastructure.”
Cheney contrasted the Clinton Administration’s missile-defense policy, which involved developing the means of defending only against attacks on the United States, with the Bush Administration’s much more hawkish approach, in which we would place missile-defense equipment all over the world. “I think it’s important not just to be able to defend the United States against a missile launch from a rogue state,” he said. “I think it’s important for us to be able to deal with that threat that would be directed at our allies, as well as us. Just ask yourself how successful we would have been in 1990 and ’91, putting together a coalition of thirty nations to roll back Iraqi aggression in the Gulf, if Iraq had been in possession of a handful of ballistic missiles with nuclear weapons on board, and been willing to threaten to use those against any nation that sent troops to liberate Kuwait. I think you’re going to have a very different response than we had. You’re going to have to deal with that kind of threat in the future.”
Cheney was facing me, an even look on his face. His legs were crossed in the Western-male manner, with the ankle of one leg resting on the knee of the other. His voice was deep, low, and clear—strong but not loud. The way the lower-right corner of his mouth pulls downward when he speaks connotes an ordinary man’s matter-of-fact pessimism—or, in rare flashes, when it pulls upward, an urge to mirth so deeply suppressed that it could never make it all the way to the surface, only near. Afterward, when I listened to our conversation on tape, I was struck by how strong the theme of peril to the United States had been—struck because, as Cheney was talking, my main sensation had been one of immense reassurance. His presence had an effect like that of being hooked up to an intravenous line that delivers a powerful timed dosage of serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Everything felt kind of evened out, no highs, no lows. He wasn’t going to be flaky or half-baked, he wasn’t going to let his emotions distort his views, and he certainly wasn’t going to be soft or naïve. But whenever he suggested something that, coming from somebody with a more animated manner, might be taken to indicate a swashbuckling inclination, like that “very robust intelligence capability,” his rocklike manner made it sound like the very least we could do, unless we wanted to be foolhardy.
All the time Cheney was talking, I was imagining what it must be like for President Bush to get hooked up to the I.V. several times each day, the first dose coming at eight in the morning. The power of that reassurance fix surely outweighs the political disadvantage of having had a running mate who brought with him only three electoral votes, which would have gone Republican anyway. “Not many people go into this business without having a sizable ego of their own,” says Vin Weber, who served in Congress with Cheney in the eighties. “And then they have to make investments in other people. Cheney has an almost unique ability to make powerful people feel comfortable investing in him.” It is hard to say where this ability of Cheney’s comes from, but what is clear from the story of his life is that it became evident at a remarkably young age.
Richard Bruce Cheney was born in 1941 in Nebraska, the descendant of high-plains homesteaders out of a Willa Cather novel. One grandfather was a cook on the Union Pacific railroad, the other a cashier in a bank that went under during the Depression. His father, who supposedly made Cheney look like Kathie Lee Gifford in the volubility department, was a federal bureaucrat—decades with the Soil Conservation Service, winding up as a GS-13—and both parents were loyal Democrats, proud to say that their son Dick had been born on Franklin Roosevelt’s birthday. When Cheney was thirteen years old, his father was transferred from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Casper, Wyoming.
Casper back then, at least as described by Cheney and his high-school friends, was an exact version of the idea we have of America in the fifties. It was a rural town where everybody knew everybody else, where doors were never locked, where people liked Ike and loved cars. People weren’t especially concerned with politics, and, if they were, they weren’t especially ideological—it wasn’t the hard-conservative West of today. The Natrona County High School yearbook from Cheney’s senior year lists the winners of the Homemaker of Tomorrow Award, sponsored by Betty Crocker, and the Daughters of the American Revolution Good Citizen award. All the boys had to serve in R.O.T.C., and all the girls wore uniforms. Lynne Vincent, soon to become Lynne Cheney, was the obvious star of the school (and perhaps the first powerful person with whom Dick Cheney formed a bond): she was a state-champion baton twirler, specializing in flaming equipment, and won the high school’s most glorious position, Mustang Queen; Dick promoted her campaign. She, too, was the daughter of a Democratic civil servant (GS-13, Bureau of Reclamation). Cheney’s younger brother, Bob, is a civil servant, too, now retired from the Bureau of Land Management.
One atypical point about Casper was that it was an oil town. It attracted people who wanted to make a lot of money; some were scions of respectable Eastern families who had an adventurous streak. In that sense, Casper was like Midland, Texas, where George W. Bush grew up in a small colony of preppie expats. The Casper version of George H. W. Bush was a man named Thomas Stroock, whose great-great-uncle helped found the venerable New York law firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan and who operated an independent oil company called Alpha Exploration. In fact, Tom Stroock was (and still is) a friend of George Bush’s—they were both Yale ’48—and, like Bush, spent his spare time on Republican politics.
Posted by: hanshan | Feb 14 2006 17:20 utc | 22
|
