Un-Cheney My Heart

August 30, 2011 | Posted in Miscellany | | 21 Comments ↓

Remembering Why We Loathe Dick Cheney – Conor Friedersdorf – Politics – The Atlantic

 

CONCLUSION

Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decisionmaking, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush.

After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail.

Thus his unpopularity [13% Approval] circa 2008, when he left office.

Good riddance.

 

21 comments on “Un-Cheney My Heart”

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  1. It amuses me that Conor is so verklempt, at real ‘gutsy calls’ like setting up the structure for the unit, they regarded as Cheney’s Death Squad, Seal Team 6

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  4. Remember the part in “Gone with the Wind” when Rhett makes Scarlett wear the red dress as a symbol of what she has done? I think Cheney was forced by his own conscious to wear that crazy black hat and outfit at Obama’s inauguration as a symbol of what he did.

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  10. @ fuster:
    You would have liked the Lawrence O’Donnell show tonight.

    LOD had Wilkerson, Powell’s former chief of staff, on, skewering Cheney’s operation, including something – a revelation to me – about how the supposed Saddam connection to AQ, a Cheney hobby horse, was thrown out by the intel professionals, but recuperated as part of the pro-war propaganda after the Cheney-ites brought forward testimony from a captive tortured in Egypt. The testimony later turned out to be false.

    Then, Bart Gelman, Cheney biographer and multi-Pulitzer winner, went through Cheney’s apparent gross fabrications regarding events, like the Ashcroft hospital visit, that have been described by other witness in completely divergent ways.

    Then, as a bonus, LOD did one of his “re-writes” on Giuliani, whom he called the most fraudulent figure in American politics, recounting among other things the tale of the “9/11 hero”‘s grossly negligent personal decision, against expert advice, to locate the NYC command and control center within a known terrorist target – the WTC.

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  11. yeah, I might have liked the show.

    interesting about Gelman. was reading about him yesterday

    long ago, a young reporter at TNR was doing a story about things happening in the DoD’s mishandling of Iraq, centered on the idiot Doug Feith. prior to publication, the story was shown to Feith and others in the admin.

    Peretz, owner/publisher at that time gets a call from Cheney’s aide telling him that Cheney says the story is inaccurate for x,y, z reasons and that it’ll harm Feith and therefore Cheney tells Peretz to kill the story altogether and to fire the reporter.

    Peretz agrees, in large measure because he teaches at Harvard and Feith was one of his “boys” when he was an undergrad.
    Marty the Gerbil calls the editor and relays the instructions. The editor refuses and, after a nasty little meeting where the reporter produces rock-solid backing for the accuracy of x,y,z …the story runs, Peretz remains furious, Feith’s rep starts to unravel…the editor and Peretz remain enemies with the editor no longer printing Peretz’s stories! (that’s how and why Peretz started his own mini-blog The Spine within TNR.

    Eventually though, the editor takes a leave of absence and departs…and Marty the Gerbil gets to install another one of his boys as the new editor.

    which is a large part of why I loathe that Dick.

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  13. Btw, this is the same TSP that we used ot track Sheik Ahmed to Abbotabad, luckily they had forgotten the lesson of Mr. B.J. Smegma,
    ‘of not being seen’

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  14. @ miguel cervante:
    Standard Standard piece, asserting the writer’s own opinions as facts – threat posed by AQ, nature of Wilkerson’s likely involvement and knowledge, etc. – then selectively testing the adversary’s statements against the new alternative reality. It’s a lot easier to get the other guy “out” when the pitcher gets to call balls and strikes. Joscelyn and the Standard were at the time of that article – I’m not sure whether this is still the case – committed to the idea of a Saddam + AQ threat, which would be something different from possible contacts. I’m not sure there’s anyone outside the fever swamps and Dick Cheney’s entourage who still stands by that.

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  18. @ miguel cervante:
    So what? Did one of the regulars at the blog write a 1,000 page manifesto full of quotations from Wilkerson, then head out and murder a large number of young people? Even if one did, would that prevent you from remaining a fan if you had already been so inclined? If so, that would be news to me.

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  19. Wilkerson from Frontline interview

    – and George Tenet assuring Colin Powell that the information he was presenting at the U.N. was ironclad, only to have that same individual call the secretary on more than one occasion in the ensuing months after the presentation and tell him that central pillars of his presentation were indeed false.

    Now, do I believe George Tenet knew they were false when he told him that? Absolutely not. I just don’t believe it. I refuse to believe it. How did we get to that point? How did our intelligence community get us to that point? How did [Undersecretary of Defense for Policy] Douglas Feith, who clearly politicized intelligence, clearly cherry-picked intelligence, clearly provided some of that cherry-picked intelligence to the vice president of the United States — how did we combine all of that, plus a good dose of psychological groupthink, to come up with such an abysmal failure in regards to WMD in Iraq? It’s a mystery to me, and I will never know the answer.

    miggs, on that grain of salt about that TNR reporter……one of those “inaccurate” things that Cheney informed Peretz was cause for killing Ackerman’s story was that it said that Feith twice (or three times) returned the CIA report on Iraqi WMD with instruction that the report be amended to be more positive in asserting that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program…..

    turns out that the story was sufficiently salty.

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  20. BTW, Wilkerson was pulling the punch about Tenet….George may not have been able to say that the assertions were definitely false, but Tenet and about all the senior management of CIA knew that the report was repeatedly rejected until the original conclusion that there was no real proof that Iraq had an active nuke weapons program was changed to say that there was evidence sufficient to conclude that they probably had one.

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  21. Much like the 2007 NIE right, that left out any contradictory evidence including the Mousavian message to Khameni

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