I read the following article from the Economist the other day about our lovely Vice President. It shows how screwed up this country and our political system is. Enjoy! BEFORE the first American war against Saddam Hussein, when Dick Cheney was secretary of defence, he had to brief King Hassan of Morocco about the brewing Operation Desert Storm. As the meeting was about to start, the king placed a small silver box in his translator's hand and briefly spoke with him in Arabic. Mr Cheney asked what the ritual meant. The king replied that the box contained a fragment of the Koran and he was swearing his translator to secrecy on pain of death. Mr Cheney says he thought: “Damn, I need one of those.”
The vice-president is famously fond of secrecy. He stores his papers in man-sized safes and labels even unclassified memos “Treated As: Top Secret”, a designation his office appears to have invented, according to a recent Washington Post series for which Mr Cheney refused to be interviewed. Even with friendly journalists, such as Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, he is clam-like. Mr Hayes spent nearly 30 hours in one-on-one interviews with Mr Cheney for his new book, “Cheney: the Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice-President”, yet many of his queries were rebuffed. Mr Hayes asked: “Can you briefly describe what kinds of qualities you are looking for [in a new CIA director]?” Mr Cheney replied: “Probably not.” “I waited for him to continue,” writes Mr Hayes, “but he said nothing.”
Despite the difficulty of prising information out of its subject, the book is worth a read. It breezes through Mr Cheney's early life. He grew up in a Wyoming town so remote that he sometimes travelled nearly 400 miles (640km) to play high-school football. He rode a bicycle drunkenly down the stairs at Yale, and was kicked out for poor grades. He found himself, in his early 20s, alone in a cell after his second arrest for drunk driving, wondering what to do with his life. Then, after a brief academic career, he moved to Washington, DC, and found that he was really good at bureaucratic infighting. By his mid-30s he was chief of staff to President Gerald Ford. Few men have risen so high with so much anonymity, noted the New York Times. Revealingly, he refused to accept the cabinet status that had previously come with the job. His Secret Service codename was Backseat.
By the time George Bush junior came to pick him as his running mate, Mr Cheney had been the Republican whip in the House of Representatives, secretary of defence under Mr Bush's father and CEO of a large oil-services firm, Halliburton. His gravitas and long experience inside the Beltway neatly complemented Mr Bush's shortcomings in both areas. It was only two days after the Supreme Court declared that Mr Bush had won the election of 2000 that late-night comedians started joking that the vice-president would be his nominal boss's boss. This remains a popular view. The Guardian, a British newspaper, wrote this week that there is a growing consensus in America that it is Mr Cheney who calls the shots in the White House.
Yet it is an exaggeration. As the Post put it, Mr “Cheney is not, by nearly every inside account, the shadow president of popular lore.” (He did, though, take charge for two hours on July 21st when Mr Bush was sedated for a colonoscopy.) Where the two disagree, Mr Bush's views prevail, as they have on issues from gay marriage (Mr Cheney opposed Mr Bush's support for a constitutional amendment banning it) to sacking Donald Rumsfeld (Mr Cheney wanted his old mentor kept on at the Pentagon).
Working the levers
What makes Mr Cheney so powerful is that Mr Bush usually heeds his advice. Unlike most vice-presidents, he has no further political ambitions, so Mr Bush trusts him to say what he thinks, not what will appeal to future voters. Unlike his boss, Mr Cheney has a love of detail and a deep understanding of how the levers of power work, so he is adept, as the Post puts it, at serving up Mr Bush's menu of choices. Some critics think there is something inherently sinister about a vice-president wielding such influence. It is certainly unusual: countless former veeps have complained of the utter uselessness and frivolity of the position, or that it is not worth a bucket of warm spit (a remark ascribed to John Garner, Franklin Roosevelt's first vice-president.) But there is no obvious reason why it is worse for a president to take advice from his deputy than, for example, from his wife.
The real beef with Mr Cheney is that so much of his advice has turned out badly. Toppling the Iraqi regime with only a vague plan as to what to put in its place has been the defining foul-up of the presidency. To Mr Hayes, Mr Cheney admits that it was a mistake to install a proconsul rather than putting Iraqis in charge of their own country from the very outset. But he makes no such concession about holding terrorist suspects in legal limbo at Guantánamo Bay or sanctioning torture to extract potentially life-saving information. Such things repel even America's allies, and Mr Cheney's quiet hand in them helps explain why his approval rating is even lower than Mr Bush's.
To some, the vice-president has become a caricature: a cartoon recently depicted him showing the Devil how to wield his pitchfork. More seriously, the Democrats' most-cited reason for not impeaching Mr Bush (as anti-war protesters on Capitol Hill this week were demanding) is that Mr Cheney would then become president. Mr Cheney, though, appears to care little about his critics. “Don't you think your book will have to be a hatchet job in order to have any credibility?” he asked Mr Hayes. What worries him much more is that Americans do not understand that “the alternative [to fighting in Iraq] is not peace.” The war on terror, he says, will go on “for decades”, and “the terrorists are betting that they can run out the clock on the Bush-Cheney administration and that it will be easier for them in the future.” A precipitate withdrawal might make that true, but Mr Cheney deserves his share of the blame for the state of Iraq today.
Well, if you haven't heard yet you need to crawl out from under that rock and read a newspaper or turn on the television, preferably not Fox News because the time has come, Gonzales has resigned!
