The Dick Cheney express may be pulling back into the station for now, but what will go on are the following more or less permanent impressions that have been left by what we might call the "incident" at the Armstrong Ranch...:
- Dick Cheney has far too much power, and way too much autonomy for a vice president. No one in the White House can control this guy, and that just doesn't sound right since Contitutionally, the vice president has no actual power...
- Cheney clearly doesn't feel he has to answer to the press, American people, or even to the president. His declarations, including the latest one: that he has the authority to declassify top secret inforamtion at will, are alarming and have a nefarious taint that only draws more scrutiny from a skeptical press and public...
- Cheney's contempt for the press is clearly helpful with the GOP base, but it is a net negative for the Bush administration, which has to try and govern beyond the base if Bush is to have any hope of getting anything resembling an agenda through before he's a complete lame duck ... oh, wait, too late, he already is ...
- Cheney's extreme secretiveness, which borders on paranoia, and his poor decision-making, which also results in really bad advice to the president -- on Iraq, on energy or in this incident, makes him more of a liability than an asset to George W. Bush...
Which leads me to two parallel articles in the Wall Street Journal this week. On the one hand, Daniel Henninger tries to defend Cheney, but in doing so only points out the painfully obvious:
There was a time when what's been called news judgment would deem some stories a five or six and run them on page 14, or deeper in the newscast. Back then the Senate minority leader wouldn't bother to look up from his desk. Not with this presidency. Every downside event--large, small, in between--plays above the fold on the front page now. And when Dick Cheney accidentally pops Harry Whittington, old Harry Reid jumps up from his Senate leader's desk faster than a Nevada jack rabbit to announce, one more time, that this "is part of the secretive nature of this administration."
Here are some of the political and media bonfires that have been lit on the White House lawn, stoked and reignited the past five years: the "stolen" 2000 election, Halliburton, "Fahrenheit 9/11," Cheney lives in an "undisclosed location," Abu Ghraib, torture at Guantanamo, Bush lied about WMD, secret CIA prison sites, Valerie Plame, the neocons, Rumsfeld, Cheney's "secret" energy task force, Cindy Sheehan, Bush is destroying Social Security, Hurricane Katrina, Jack Abramoff, illegal wiretaps, Bill Frist's stock sales, what else?
That's precisely the point. There are simply too many stories, too many screw-ups with Dick Cheney right at the center. Everything I bolded above is a Cheney, or Cheneyesque, story. But for him, all the Bush administration would be about for its critics would be despoiling the environment, pandering to the religious right, incompetance and cronyism -- bad things, to be sure, but not as bad as, say, starting unnecessary wars costing $400 billion and counting, and turning the presidency into a sinister institution reminiscent of an Orwellian version of Dick Nixon. Let's not forget:
- It was Cheney who pushed for the invasion of Iraq, and who brought the neocon cult into the administration in the first place, placing them in every possible agency remotely touching on the nation's defense, as well as the State Department...
- It is Cheney's secret energy task force that is the lightning rod for criticism of the administration's energy policy, and which provided the first window into the extreme secrecy with which the Bush team operates...
- It was Cheney who said Iraq definitely had WMD, that Saddam was connected to 9/11 via Mohammad Atta, and that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons...
- Cheney is the one who declared the insurgency to be "in its last throes..."
- Cheney is at the center of the Plame leak which outed a covert CIA agent ...
- Cheney could yet be sucked into the trial of his deputy, Scooter Libby, the first White House staffer to be indicted in 137 years. And that scandal also includes allegations of destroyed emails, something patently illegal ...
The bottom line: Dick Cheney is a palpably paranoid, dour and creepy man whom very few people would feel comfortable with were he to step into the office of president -- his lone constitutional function. If anything, Cheney's only positive contribution is to make people like me dread the very idea of impeaching George W. Bush, unless of course he could take his self-selected veep with him...
Which brings me to my second WSJ article, by Reaganophilic columnist Peggy Noonan, who this week called Cheney the "hate magnet" for the administration. Ms. Noonan predicts that people inside the administration have got to be wondering out loud if its time to put Mr. Cheney out to pasture, and thus relieve Mr. Bush of one of his biggest liabilities.
It's a thought.
But the trouble is, whom would George Bush replace Cheney with? He too has his paranoid traits, mainly centering around the issue of personal loyalty ... to him. Cheney comes across as loyal because he has no political ambitions competitive with Bush's. But he is clearly having his presidency through the weakness of George W. Bush, and so it hardly matters that he's loyal. What matters is that he has been in such clear control of the Bush agenda, that having accepted it -- including things arguably that Bush would never have cooked up on his own, like Iraq -- the president is having a hell of a time taking back the reigns of his office. He's trying to push healthcare, taxes, Social Security, hell, anything but Iraq, but he can't get out from under.
So he in a sense is stuck with Cheney. In addition, if he were to dump Cheney, he would have to replace him with someone equally loyal but more politically ambitious -- meaning that they would have an interest other than him (i.e., running for president, to continue the Bush legacy, such as it is.) Condi would fit the bill, but let's face it, that sista is not getting elected president. McCain seems to fit, but he has a mind and an ego of his own, which makes it doubtful he'd play the good lieutenant that Bush seems to need to have around. Giuliani? Please. He's even more of a bull in the china shop than Cheney. So who? ... who indeed...
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%>
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%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
