The Odious Mr. Cheney

If there is a more despicable public figure than Dick Cheney, it is hard to imagine who it could be. There are lots of right-wing talk-show personalities who deliver vitriol-laced diatribes on a daily basis. And there are political non-entities who are nevertheless able to grab a headline or two by advancing partisan views without attention to either facts or logic in making their arguments. But none of these intellectually-challenged individuals have been Vice President of the United States and conducted foreign policy in our name.

For a person who held high office to suggest that current policy has made the country less safe especially when that person helped engineer the invasion of Iraq, one of the worst foreign-policy blunders in recent history, is outrageous and irresponsible. To say he has "no regrets" about anything that was done during his tenure is astonishing given the terrible human cost and enormous financial strain the war has caused. And his insistence on the obvious nonsense that the dishonorable conduct at Abu Graib was committed by a "few bad apples" is hard for even the dimmest among us to believe, especially after so much information exposing government complicity at the highest levels.

If there were even a modicum of patriotic intent on Mr. Cheney's part, instead of throwing inflammatory rhetorical arrows in public he would request an interview with President Obama and voice his concerns to him privately. The fact that he has chosen to vent through the media is an indication that he seeks to justify behavior that has become ever more suspect over time. To keep repeating that everyone believed there were WMD in Iraq ignores the many dissenters and experts who said there were none and that, in any case, with inspectors on the ground, invasion was surely unwarranted.

And in that perversity that relies on proving a negative Cheney insists that the interrogation methods used revealed "vast quantities of invaluable information" and "saved thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives." His assertion that little was known about Al Qaeda before detainees' forced admissions only reinforces a sense that the people running our government failed to seek out informed Middle East experts and ignored the warning signs that existed before 9/11. There was plenty of information available had anyone in the administration been paying attention.

But the former administration doesn't take any responsibility for the fact that the attacks occurred on their watch and Cheney says they kept us safe for "almost eight years" (that is if we are to assume we're still on the Bush-Cheney time clock in 2009). It remains a mystery why interviewers rarely mention the years between the first Trade Center attack in 1994 and the one in 2001 - - do the math. When claims are made regarding our safety and the fact that many released detainees return to the battlefield, it is hard to fathom why anyone would believe anything Mr. Cheney or other administration apologists say. Whenever they're on screen one wants to shout prove it!

Or, one may simply be struck dumb by stunningly disrespectful and shameful statements. For Cheney to tell Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation that he thinks Rush Limbaugh is a better Republican than Colin Powell is to plumb the depths of ignoble discourse. Powell may not have supported McCain in the last election but he had an illustrious military career in the Army rising to the rank of four-star general. And he served as Secretary of State in the Bush cabinet - - an administration that undercut his authority and sent him off to the United Nations with seriously flawed intelligence to make the case for war in Iraq. Apparently being a good Republican doesn't necessarily include honorable service to one's country.

Like those pleas in criminal court it would be easier to think that Cheney is just mad as a hatter or of such diminished capacity as to be unassailable for that reason. But he isn't crazy; he's just a mean-spirited egotist who seems to lack a moral compass. Halliburton subsidiaries did business with countries on the enemies' list during Cheney's tenure as CEO; his office acquiesced in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame; he embraces interrogation methods that are universally regarded as torture, and he disdains a political process that has sustained our country since its inception.

There was never a good reason for a man like Cheney to set domestic energy policy or dictate foreign policy; there is even less reason to accept his political advice today.