The conservative Dick Cheney: Just doing what comes unnaturally

"[W]ill Schieffer in his comments and questions to Cheney make this point perfectly clear to viewers: that what Cheney is doing with his high-profile attacks on the new administration is unprecedented.... Will Schieffer at least make a passing reference to that, or will he play dumb?"

MM emphasized the historical background to this peculiar state of affairs, noting that "We have simply never seen, in modern American politics, the losing VP belittle a new president, just weeks into his first term.... Why? Because those were the ground rules the press established: if you, or your side, lost the November election (and especially if your side lost in a rout), you went away for a long time and remained silent...."

Then, the repeat punch: "But Cheney mounts a sustained anti-Obama media campaign and the Beltway press doesn't flinch. The press corps acts like it's normal.... It's not. It's unprecedented" [emphasis original].

All perfectly fair observations, excepting perhaps the rather over-harsh generalization about the "unflinching" press. Frankly I've lost count of the critical references I've heard and read in the media with respect to Cheney's post-Election appearances; in fact, from what I've gathered it's been quite the media buzz.

Nevertheless it seems to me that this "Cheney Affair," let's call it, is far less about journalistic rules of the road than Cheney's extended corruption of the very meaning of the word, "conservatism."

It once meant a philosophical adherence to tradition, to accepted standards, to a steady-as-she-goes way of doing things. Deviations from tradition -- a whole body of traditions, many of which endured for ages because they were deemed to have worked reasonably well -- were disfavored by conservatives less because of their superficial bad form than because they rendered the orderly workings of governance and society subject to whim and caprice. In short, a foundation of sand, not rock, which is not good. That, anyway, was the Burkean idea of it all.

But, beginning with the clamorous New Right of the 1970s, modern conservatives changed the rules of the game -- their own rules, their own game. They elbowed their way onto the court of public discourse as bumptious radicals eager to slash and burn their way through the Liberal ancien régime. They did have precedent, which is to say they possessed the dual templates of truculent anti-New Deal and McCarthyite politics to work from. But it was in the 1970s and beyond that "conservatives" increasingly applied that decidedly loud and loutish unconservative behavior on a party-wide basis.

In short, the conservative party of the GOP was neither philosophically nor even temperamentally conservative any longer. Not in any original sense of the word. It became, simply, the party of radicals and radicalism, hotheadedly intent on upending the prevailing order.

It was during this era that Dick Cheney came of political age. And what we saw yesterday on "Face the Nation" was merely an extension of, so to speak, his own conservatism's radicalism -- and what's far more, a radicalism of the most frightening species: a totalitarianism of whatever works on the fly.

Schieffer indeed asked Cheney, first thing, why he was taking this "very unusual tack" of speaking out, in response to which we got the very usual answer from Cheney that President Obama has "moved to take down those policies that kept us safe." This latter point Cheney wishes to prove through the declassification of two memos.

I don't believe this for a minute, but let's assume for the sake of argument that his cherished memos prove just that: that torture kept us safe. What Cheney remains utterly disdainful of, however, is that torture -- and come on, Dick, you know it was torture -- sits in violation, rather logically, of federal anti-torture statutes, as well as our international treaty obligations.

But Cheney just doesn't care. For he is of the radically unconservative attitude of case-by-case governance -- a kind of minute-by-minute pragmatism shorn of any moral or ethical or legal constraints. If it breaks the law it also makes no difference -- as long as it worked. Legal traditions and societal standards be damned: If Cheney's methods can make the trains run on time, then so be it. And he can radically adjust those methods at whim, because whatever is deemed by the state important enough to try must necessarily trump its traditions and standards.

Before leaving the set Cheney told Schieffer that he doesn't mind the presence of a few moderates in the GOP, but what the party really needs is to adhere to "solid conservative principles." Dick, I couldn't agree more.