The Truth About Cheney
6/15/2004
Vice President Cheney's wild and wacky misadventures with the truth continue, much to the consternation of everyone who values transparency and accountability in government. What will it take for him to come clean?
Remember during the 2000 campaign when the idea of Dick Cheney as George W. Bush's running mate was a comforting thought? Bush's glaringly thin professional resume was somehow easier to overlook because his running mate had a proven track record of operating in the nation's capital.
Three years later, it's obvious that Cheney is the very embodiment of "typical" Washington behavior that Bush so often claims to despise. The vice president is the ultimate insider, with the survival skills of a Navy SEAL (which, perhaps, could have been another career calling for Cheney, were it not for those student deferments he used during Vietnam). Ironically, Cheney's behavior would make an easy target for the president in one of his anti-Washington campaign speeches as an example of all that's wrong with traditional government-types. Let's see what he's done.
Help the people that help you.
This type of political backscratching can manifest itself in a number of ways. It could take the form of a private hunting trip with a Supreme Court justice while a case regarding the Energy Task Force is still pending, for example. Or, it could be huge corporate tax breaks to benefit campaign donors. Or, it could be a giant no-bid government contract to Halliburton to supply troops over in Iraq. Sadly, none of these examples is even remotely hypothetical.
What's even more galling about this behavior is that Cheney and others made only the laziest attempts to cover their tracks. (Remember Justice Antonin Scalia's defense of his impartiality, followed by a snide, "Quack, quack"?)
Cheney attempted to shrug off the Halliburton war contracts as mere coincidences, in no way connected to his tenure as CEO. Last September, he appeared on "Meet the Press," and tried to put the ongoing controversy to bed by stating, "As vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."
Leading conservatives were quick to defend the vice president – and label all those who didn't believe his riff as heartless cynics. In a piece entitled "Cynics Without a Cause," published in The New York Times last November, David Brooks concluded, "The lesson of this Halliburton business is that some parts of our government really do make their decisions on the merits."
Actually, the lesson is this: In the Bush administration, where there's smoke, there's fire.
Pentagon officials have recently acknowledged that a political appointee ultimately made the decision on Halliburton's role, not career civil service members, as Cheney and Brooks tried to claim. Michael Mobbs, an assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, gave Halliburton the nod – and gave the vice president's office a heads up in the process. Mobbs met with Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and other White House staff members before making the final decision.
The circumstances "seem to contradict the [a]dministration's repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of contracts to Halliburton," Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote in a letter to the vice president.
Say one thing and do another – just the type of behavior President Bush claims to hate the most. Read more here.
And, while you're at it, read what Halliburton did with the contracts here: "Halliburton 'Mismanaged $8 billion in Iraq,"' Financial Times.
Damn the facts, stick to the spin.
Cheney has been around government for so long that he is notoriously difficult to rattle or throw off script. But even this is getting ridiculous. President Bush has already been forced to repudiate Cheney's repeated claims about ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. And again last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that he saw no "smoking gun" that linked Hussein with the terrorist organization.
That didn't stop Cheney.
On Monday, during a speech before the James Madison Institute, Cheney had this to say about Hussein: "He was a patron of terrorism. He had long established ties with al Qaeda."
Now, at this point, it seems obvious that Cheney is willfully perpetuating unsubstantiated claims (read: lies). Either that, or he truly believes – despite absolutely no evidence to back up his claims – that Powell and Bush are lying and he's the lone truth-teller in the Bush administration.
What's more likely is that Cheney was simply pandering to his audience. The James Madison Institute is a right-wing think tank in Florida, and Cheney likely saw no problem in trafficking in false claims to rally his base. Some might say this is the work of the ultimate "say anything" politician. It isn't. It's far worse. This isn't even a case of political promises that the administration has no intention of ever fulfilling – the Hussein/al Qaeda connection has already been proven demonstrably false. But that didn't stop Cheney.
http://www.americanfamilyvoices.org/projects/DailyRealityCheck.asp?ID=164
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6/15/2004
Vice President Cheney's wild and wacky misadventures with the truth continue, much to the consternation of everyone who values transparency and accountability in government. What will it take for him to come clean?
Remember during the 2000 campaign when the idea of Dick Cheney as George W. Bush's running mate was a comforting thought? Bush's glaringly thin professional resume was somehow easier to overlook because his running mate had a proven track record of operating in the nation's capital.
Three years later, it's obvious that Cheney is the very embodiment of "typical" Washington behavior that Bush so often claims to despise. The vice president is the ultimate insider, with the survival skills of a Navy SEAL (which, perhaps, could have been another career calling for Cheney, were it not for those student deferments he used during Vietnam). Ironically, Cheney's behavior would make an easy target for the president in one of his anti-Washington campaign speeches as an example of all that's wrong with traditional government-types. Let's see what he's done.
Help the people that help you.
This type of political backscratching can manifest itself in a number of ways. It could take the form of a private hunting trip with a Supreme Court justice while a case regarding the Energy Task Force is still pending, for example. Or, it could be huge corporate tax breaks to benefit campaign donors. Or, it could be a giant no-bid government contract to Halliburton to supply troops over in Iraq. Sadly, none of these examples is even remotely hypothetical.
What's even more galling about this behavior is that Cheney and others made only the laziest attempts to cover their tracks. (Remember Justice Antonin Scalia's defense of his impartiality, followed by a snide, "Quack, quack"?)
Cheney attempted to shrug off the Halliburton war contracts as mere coincidences, in no way connected to his tenure as CEO. Last September, he appeared on "Meet the Press," and tried to put the ongoing controversy to bed by stating, "As vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts led by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government."
Leading conservatives were quick to defend the vice president – and label all those who didn't believe his riff as heartless cynics. In a piece entitled "Cynics Without a Cause," published in The New York Times last November, David Brooks concluded, "The lesson of this Halliburton business is that some parts of our government really do make their decisions on the merits."
Actually, the lesson is this: In the Bush administration, where there's smoke, there's fire.
Pentagon officials have recently acknowledged that a political appointee ultimately made the decision on Halliburton's role, not career civil service members, as Cheney and Brooks tried to claim. Michael Mobbs, an assistant to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, gave Halliburton the nod – and gave the vice president's office a heads up in the process. Mobbs met with Cheney's Chief of Staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby and other White House staff members before making the final decision.
The circumstances "seem to contradict the [a]dministration's repeated assertions that political appointees were not involved in the award of contracts to Halliburton," Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote in a letter to the vice president.
Say one thing and do another – just the type of behavior President Bush claims to hate the most. Read more here.
And, while you're at it, read what Halliburton did with the contracts here: "Halliburton 'Mismanaged $8 billion in Iraq,"' Financial Times.
Damn the facts, stick to the spin.
Cheney has been around government for so long that he is notoriously difficult to rattle or throw off script. But even this is getting ridiculous. President Bush has already been forced to repudiate Cheney's repeated claims about ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. And again last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted that he saw no "smoking gun" that linked Hussein with the terrorist organization.
That didn't stop Cheney.
On Monday, during a speech before the James Madison Institute, Cheney had this to say about Hussein: "He was a patron of terrorism. He had long established ties with al Qaeda."
Now, at this point, it seems obvious that Cheney is willfully perpetuating unsubstantiated claims (read: lies). Either that, or he truly believes – despite absolutely no evidence to back up his claims – that Powell and Bush are lying and he's the lone truth-teller in the Bush administration.
What's more likely is that Cheney was simply pandering to his audience. The James Madison Institute is a right-wing think tank in Florida, and Cheney likely saw no problem in trafficking in false claims to rally his base. Some might say this is the work of the ultimate "say anything" politician. It isn't. It's far worse. This isn't even a case of political promises that the administration has no intention of ever fulfilling – the Hussein/al Qaeda connection has already been proven demonstrably false. But that didn't stop Cheney.
http://www.americanfamilyvoices.org/projects/DailyRealityCheck.asp?ID=164
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