Has Dick Cheney Lost His Mind?

When his eight years were up, George W. Bush made a few parting comments, confessed to having made a few mistakes, then retreated to his Crawford, Texas ranch. He has thus far adhered to the tradition of not being openly critical of the new administration. Not so with the former Vice-President. The eerily frosty and reclusive Dick Cheney is hitting the talk show circuit, blasting not only the Obama presidency but former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell. Just what the hell is the newly loquacious ex-Veep trying to accomplish?

Many believe that Dick Cheney was the most influential Vice-President in this nation’s history. In a poll taken earlier this year, he was also ranked as the worst. He rolled into Washington with a President pre-disposed to effect a ‘regime change’ in Iraq, and was caught with his pants down on 9/11 when the US was attacked from a different quarter.

Surrounding himself with like-thinking men like Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, he converted the office of the Vice-President into a war room.

Cheney must have been thrilled when American forces rolled to victory over Saddam Hussein in the second Gulf War. If he was chagrinned by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, or the ensuing civil strife between Shia and Sunni Muslims, or the slow-dawning realization that US military presence might be needed indefinitely to maintain order, he kept it to himself.

What he did do, as evidenced by a pentagon e-mail, was co-ordinate a huge government contract with Halliburton, a company he ran until 2000, for infrastructure rebuilding in Iraq. No other bids were submitted for the multi-billion dollar deal. Guantanamo Bay became a detention center for captives who might have had al Qaeda connections, and rumors surfaced that detainees there and at remote CIA ‘black locations’ might be undergoing torture.

The Bush administration won re-election, though Colin Powell departed (in disgust, no doubt) and Rumsfeld was sacrificed for the manifest foreign policy miscues. Then something happened that, for a man who obviously took himself very seriously, became perhaps the psychological low point of Cheney’s tenure. On February 11, 2006, Cheney shot a companion during a quail hunt, and became an instant stooge on the late night talk circuit. David Letterman commented: “We can’t get Bin Laden, but we nailed a 78-year-old attorney.”

Jon Stewart pointed out that Texas lawyer Harry Whittington was the first man shot by a sitting vice-president since Alexander Hamilton. More recently, President Obama got in on the fun. In a May 9, 2009 speech for the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner he dead-panned that Cheney was writing his memoirs, tentatively to be titled How to Shoot Friends and Interrogate People.

It is the controversy surrounding Bush era interrogation methods that has really gotten under Cheney’s skin. He has risen to the defense of water boarding, asserting that it was necessary to prevent future terror attacks, was not illegal, and was in fact tacitly approved by some high level Democrats. Ron Elving, NPR, 5/13/09. He brazenly asserts that President Obama has exposed America to fresh terrorist threats by promising to close the Guantanamo Bay detainee operation, and banning the use of ’enhanced’ interrogation techniques. AP, 5/13/09.

Water boarding sounds like something the Beach Boys may have penned a song about, but in fact it is a form of torture at least as venerable as the Spanish Inquisition. It involves strapping the ‘witness’ to a wooden board with feet elevated, then pouring water into the breathing passages. The subject begins to suffocate and believes he is drowning. The current Attorney General, at his confirmation hearings, labeled the practice as a form of torture. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs observed on May 12, 2009 that there has been an “agreement across party lines that Guantanamo Bay has not made us a safer country.”

Cheney may be defending the use of Gitmo and water boarding merely because he believes in it. He also may be trying to salvage what he can of the Bush-Cheney legacy. “He sees himself in a position where his legacy is called into question and he wants to get his story out before history gels,” said Jim Riddlesperger, professor of political science at Texas Christian University. Elving concurs, asserting that Cheney wants to defend his war on terror policies “before the drumbeat of condemnation grows deafening.”

The irony here is that Bush-Cheney used then Secretary of State Powell as point man to make the case that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Powell, a life-long Republican and a good soldier did his best, probably at the expense of his political career. Later he would commit a cardinal sin- endorsing Barack Obama in 2008.

Of course, the inimitable Rush Limbaugh jumped all over Powell. Recently, CBS News asked Cheney whether Rush was right in saying that the Republican Party would be better off without Powell.

Cheney responded: “Well, if I had to choose in terms of being a Republican, I’d go with Rush Limbaugh, I think. I think my take on it was Colin had already left the party. I didn’t know he was still a Republican.”

At a time when the Republican Party is still reeling from the clobbering it took in the November, 2008 elections, Cheney’s divisive remarks can only inhibit its rebuilding process. John Baick, history professor at Western New England College, thought Cheney’s comments on Powell were over the top, showing that Cheney is not “an institution builder,” one likely to put the party back together.

Dick Cheney will be remembered as an unctuous little gnome who was given far too much power and prerogative by his ineffectual boss. He will also be recalled as an un-indicted war criminal and a carpetbagger, who would jeopardize the future of the Republican Party in order to salvage what he can of his legacy. This writer, like many, wishes he would follow George W. Bush’s lead and quietly fade away.