- In Washington, political identities cultivated over decades
can crumble in a minute. Vice President Dick Cheney presides under the
constitution as president of the Senate and is addressed as "Mr President",
but former representative Cheney is not a man of the Senate. (The Senate
regards itself as distant from the House of Representatives as the Metropolitan
Club is from the Horsefeathers saloon near the House side of Capitol Hill.)
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- Cheney's executive branch credentials were as President
Ford's wunderkind chief of staff and elder Bush's secretary of defence,
but on the Hill he is remembered as the former house Republican whip during
the Reagan period, his only previous elected position. In the house, the
Republicans were then in the minority, and Cheney was the driver behind
the scenes of the hard right, protector of obstreperous young reactionaries
like Newt Gingrich, yet still presentable to the broader establishment
as a respectable saturnine figure. Those who observed him operate in the
house saw through his veneer, but he elevated himself by advancing the
persona of the statesman.
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- The self-control that had served him so long broke down
in public on June 22 on the floor of the Senate during a photo session.
As Cheney was posing with members, Senator Patrick Leahy ambled over. Leahy,
the ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee, had recently been critical,
along with other Democrats, of no-bid contracts in Iraq granted to Halliburton,
the company Cheney had run and in which he still holds stock options and
receives deferred compensation (despite his prior claims to the contrary).
"Go fuck yourself," the vice president greeted him.
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- Cheney's spokesman appeared to deny that those words
had been spoken: "That doesn't sound like language the vice president
would use." But Cheney raced onto Fox News to hail himself as courageous
for emotional authenticity. "I expressed myself rather forcefully,
felt better after I had done it." Then he elaborated that his ejaculation
was an administration policy: "I think that a lot of my colleagues
felt that what I had said badly needed to be said, that it was long overdue."
Leahy's seeming civility, he explained, was just a charade: "I didn't
like the fact that ... he wanted to act like, you know, everything's peaches
and cream."
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- A main source of Cheney's effectiveness and image of
competence has been his ability to avoid putting his cards on the table.
But in a moment of pique, he dropped the entire deck. His game face fell
and his malicious streak broke through. Cheney's blandness had suggested
he was deliberate, experienced and imperturbable. In the first Bush administration,
victory in the Gulf war solidified that reputation. When the president
was defeated, Cheney was not. He emerged from those ashes unscathed.
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- Just as the elder Bush picked someone who might have
been one of his sons, younger Bush chose a version of his father. Dan Quayle
was light as a feather, another scion from a wealthy Republican family,
the vice president as understudy. Cheney was to be the mentor of the Bush
family's Prince Hal and widely believed to represent the old man's realism.
In 2000, he was put in charge of selecting George W Bush's running mate,
collected the private dossiers of potential candidates and chose himself.
Asked who vetted Cheney's financial records, Karen Hughes, Bush's communications
aide, replied: "Just as with other candidates, Secretary Cheney is
the one who handled that."
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- Bush's executive branch has been concentrated in Cheney.
He has been as powerful as Quayle was irrelevant. It was Cheney who said
to UN weapons inspector Hans Blix as he embarked on his mission to Iraq:
"We will not hesitate to discredit you"; Cheney who personally
tried to force the CIA to give credence to Ahmed Chalabi's fabricated and
false evidence on WMD; Cheney who, along with Secretary of Defence Donald
Rumsfeld (to whom he was deputy in the Nixon White House), undermined Secretary
of State Colin Powell at every turn; and it is Cheney who is the neo-conservatives'
godfather.
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- It is worth remembering that Cheney's link to the neo-cons
largely developed after the last Bush administration and was arranged by
his wife, Lynne Cheney, cultural warrior on the right, former chairperson
of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and resident scholar at the
American Enterprise Institute, the principal neo-con thinktank. Even before
his outburst, Cheney had come to stand for special interests, secrecy and
political coercion. Under the stress of Bush's falling polls, he cracked.
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- Bush still strains to project optimism and cast the Democrats
as demagogic pessimists. His campaign this week produced a commercial,
"John Kerry's coalition of the wild-eyed", that featured snippets
of Al Gore, Howard Dean, Michael Moore and Kerry criticising Bush. Interspersed
among the Democrats was a frothing and saluting Adolf Hitler. Bush's apparent
remake of the Springtime for Hitler number from Mel Brooks' The Producers
is partly an attempt to counter the box office success of Michael Moore's
Fahrenheit 9/11. Running against Hitler is also an effort to transform
the sober Kerry, not Cheney, into the "wild-eyed" threat.
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- Perhaps the grandest political gesture Bush could make
would be dropping Cheney. When Cheney bursts through his mask, he reveals
not only his own face, but Bush's. "The idea of dumping Cheney is
nuts, makes no sense," one of Cheney's political advisers told me.
"One of the reasons he's there is they don't have someone to anoint
as a successor." After all, where would it leave Jeb Bush in 2008?
"Dumping Cheney would be seen as a sign of weakness. Cheney is very
popular in the party." The Bush campaign's premise depends on turning
out the maximum Republican vote. Bush can no more repudiate Cheney than
he can repudiate himself. Cheney will never hear from Bush the words he
hurled at Leahy.
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- - Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President
Clinton and Washington bureau chief of salon.com
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1250978,00.html
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