Conor Friedersdorf does a great job of explaining why Americans loathe Dick Cheney. He touches all the obvious bases: the lies about Saddam, al-Qaeda, and WMD, Gitmo and indefinite detention, warrantless surveillance, authorizing torture, corrupt and unethical business practices, his theory of the Unitary Executive, and his treasonous relationship with Iranian-agent Ahmed Chalabi. Those are all good reasons to hate Dick Cheney, but it only really scratches the surface.
Dick Cheney might be the most aggressive politician this country has seen since Lyndon Johnson. That’s irritating in itself, but Cheney is wrong about every single issue facing the country. His record is as bad as any politician I have ever seen. It doesn’t matter that he lies as easily as he breathes, because even his lies only serve misguided goals. No human being in my lifetime has been as aggressively and consequentially wrong as Dick Cheney.
It’s this unmitigated track-record of non-stop failure that is the true cause of Cheney’s poor standing with the public. Even Bush eventually realized that he needed to stop following Cheney’s advice. The moment Dick’s ally Donald Rumsfeld was replaced by Robert Gates, everything began to improve in our foreign affairs and relations. In retrospect, the change represented the sidelining of Cheney and his neo-con confederates in favor of the realist school of Bush’s father. This didn’t prevent Bush from leaving a smoldering husk of a country to his successor, but it could definitely have been worse if Cheney’s influence had persisted.
Cheney lacks charm or warmth or any real sense of humor. He was willing to let his good friend and top assistant, Scooter Libby, go to prison for a crime he himself committed. Even his reputation for loyalty to Bush has been shattered by his new book, which makes Bush look bad on several occasions.
About the only thing there is to like about Cheney is his sheer aggression, if you’re into that kind of thing.
I think his contempt for the rule of law and the truth and the people far exceeds anything ever displayed by Richard Nixon. And Nixon was an able and competent president in both foreign and domestic affairs. Cheney was anything but able and competent.
Shorter BooMan: Cheney even made SHRUB look good by comparison! What more can you say?
After watching his interview last night on NBC, I have become convinced that he really is capable of shooting one of his best friends in the face, on purpose, and not feeling regret.
He is, truly, The Iceman.
What took you so long?
I knew that he was just that kind of guy. AND he’s walking around with a pacemaker?
Smiles like a switchblade in a back alley.
the pacemaker’s for show. He’s the Undead.
Well yeah, I knew. But last night I got a non-stop dose of him for an extended period of time. And I don’t think I had ever really sat and absorbed what he had to say in a situation like that, especially with the luxury of hindsight.
I watched a program recently where they showed interviews with Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. I almost got the same feeling as when I watched that. The perpetrator talks so dispassionately about what they have done that you become almost numbed to the actual horror of their acts. It’s like they’re talking about something that can’t possibly be real. But then they recount a real experience of an actual victim and talk to their family or a cop and you hear them describe the real horror of what happened, it jars you back to reality. And it is jarring to your senses to imagine that this guy was on one pretzel choke away from running the whole show. How frightening is that?
The word you’re looking for is “psychopath.” And yes, Cheney is one.
What Psychopath Means
….
Hmmmm….interesting.
Maybe I missed it, but have not seen, now or in the past, any real love or defense of Cheney from the Right.
Sure, Will et al will defend many of his policies in their mistaken defense of party and nation, but the regular dipshits on conservative forums and such will unhesitatingly defend W — except maybe when his fiscal policies weren’t conservative enough — but there isn’t a whole lot of energy for the Dick man.
No worries. Dick doesn’t care if he is loved or even defended.
I routinely see defense, even praise, of Cheney on the right. Many would like to see him as president.
I’m not saying public figures, I’m saying the rabble.
I don’t mix with that crowd.
Nor do I, but am exposed on occasion. They clearly see Cheney as a strong leader worthy of respect by all. And are flummoxed if that is challenged.
“He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.” And all that.
Something like that. If attacked they will defend him. If his policies are attacked they are defended as strong, equivocating action. But there isn’t same energy and passion IMO as there is for Bush. And no one wants to sit and have a beer (or near beer) with Cheney as they say they would with W.
n/t
Actually, it’s long been my assessment that he feeds off of hatred and anger. Like a dark Jedi.
If only we could ignore him, he’d eventually die off from the lack of hate, like some kind of twisted fairy.
Of course that’s not really possible, but looking at it that way makes some sense of the man.
…an old episode of “Star Trek.”
You remember? It was about some entity that made the Klingons and the Enterprise crew fight each other perpetually, until they figured out the entity was grooving off their negative vibes, and laughed it off the ship.
I wish that we could laugh off Darth Cheney, if he wasn’t so dangerous and wrong at the same time.
Dick Cheney is realizing this week that he has no friends and he never did.
Normally I absolutely hate Maureen Dowd, but her column this weekend was about his book. She gave him (and his co-author daughter) the treatment. That was enjoyable.
I’ve seen many people interviewed about his book and none have any respect for him, even the foundation-paid party-hack-Flaks that should never speak ill of any Republican. They just basically say nothing and refuse to defend him in any way because he is just an awful human being, everyone knows it and they don’t want to even waste their energy on him.
When will this guy just kick the bucket? He really is Darth Vader.
I think you might be misreading things just a bit. Because if Cheney or his family had any real pull on the Republican establishment anymore then, despite the fact that he’s a horrible human being, people would be leaping to his defense.
I think what you’re seeing is that the Republican establishment knows that Cheney is done. He is, as they say, less popular than herpes with the voters, so he’s not getting re-elected anywhere. The Bush Family despises the man – mostly because he was supposed to be the grown-up in the room with W and instead he spent 6 years driving a wedge between W and his father and his father’s advisers. And since the Bush family remain tight with the elite establishment of the party, Cheney has been pushed out and the word is out that he should be “shunned”. And since he’s never been much for the evangelical side of the party nor has he ever been all that sympathetic to the John Birch Society wing that is clawing its way to ascendance now, he’s got no constituency in the GOP anymore.
I’d feel bad for the man who now has no friends except that on top of everything else he really is a terrible human being. Just terrible. And he seems to have raised his children to be just as bad as he was (I have no idea what his wife is like – she must be much like him to have raised children like they’ve got).
His wife is exactly like him. Evil, vindictive, venomous. And his daughter is definitely their child. No doubt about that.
What I am learning from excerpts of his book is that he thought he was the Lead in every Act of the Play. He seemed to think that everyone came to him to make all of the decisions because they didn’t have the courage or the brilliance that he did. But in reality, he forced his views on everyone, refusing to hear their arguments, and they resent him for it. Deeply.
He has apparently always confused “respect” for “fear.” And no one has to take his shit anymore and he’s now powerless so there’s no reason to fear him anymore.
someone at daily kos remarked last week that Cheney is quite literally a vampire, arguing that the man-sized safes in his office weren’t for paperwork but for HIM.
also, too, the creature has no pulse. I wonder what happens if you slip him some garlic?
Something about covering them in silver chains too, right? That disables them and burns their skin or something. (From my vague recollection of True Blood, Season 1.)
Do you mean his “choots paw”? That’s what the pork rind keyboarders around here seem to like.
Ho hum. Yet another example of the edge that American culture gives to sociopaths. What else is new?
he’s walking EVIL
that’s why I hate him.
Totally agreed with you until I read this sentence: “And Nixon was an able and competent president in both foreign and domestic affairs.” Nixon had a secret plan on Vietnam: keep the war going for four more years and lie about “Vietnamization of the war” and let 25,000 more American GIs die over there and throw in the Christmas bombings and some more atrocities.
Able? Competent? “Barbaric” is a more accurate word.
His plan for Vietnam was to create the conditions for a “decent interval” between the time we withdrew and when Saigon fell to the communists. It was an effort at face-saving that cost a lot of people their lives, and it deserves to be harshly criticized. I think there are many other areas of Nixon and Kissinger’s foreign policies that deserve extremely harsh criticism. But they were not incompetent. They operated at a high level in their dealings with the Arab-Israeli conflict, Pakistan and India, the opening to China, and in Soviet detente. While I would have done things differently and can easily critique their decision in every area, I cannot claim that they lacked competence. Evidence for this is that every National Security Adviser since Kissinger has some ties to Kissinger’s staff. Actually, that might be true for Obama, but it was true up until Obama.
There’s a difference between making immoral decisions and being a flailing hack. Kissinger was not incompetent despite being morally deficient to a very high degree.
Bush and Cheney were bumbling idiots in addition to being moral lepers. That’s the difference.
By that standard, Hitler was competent too.
Well, not the least problem I have with Cheney, is that
he did not even make the trains run on time.
Among the politicians in D.C. over the past 100 years who should be in prison for crimes against humanity, not to mention the American people, Dick Cheney stands near the top of the list. Vile, despicable, those words don’t even come close to this loathsome creature. A new novel — Nuke em in Je$u$’ name — is a book I came across the other day that portrays Cheney’s alter-ego to the max. May he and Bush rot in hell. Too bad I don’t believe in it, but if hell existed, these two belong there.