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The Latest News
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PUBLISHED
ON SEPTEMBER 25
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Natural Law
Was Born in Conn.
Lieberman
and
Gore Impressed
by Thomas' Intellect and Character
"No Hint
of Moral
Impropriety"
Good News:
You Think
the
New York Times'
Tom Friedman is
Arrogant, Vulgar, Conceited, Boring, Servile to Power, and, Bottom
Line,
Truly Stupid?
You Are
Not Alone!
Fresno Calling:
Fuck Berkeley!
PUBLISHED
ON SEPTEMBER 6
PANAM 103
TRIAL:
The Case Falls
Apart; Inside Story of How the US and the UK Tried for Years
to Insure the
PanAm 103 Case Would Never Come to Trial in a Fair Courtroom
Because They Knew They Couldn't Make the Case Stick
How Qaddafi,
Helped by Mandela and a Canny Scots Lawyer, Called the West's
Bluff
How the Western
Press Covered Up
NADER'S CAMPAIGN:
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a Movement?
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September 25, 2000
The Trouble With Cheney:
He's Dumb
Newt Gingrich
had the first take on George W.'s pick for veep: "Dick Cheney
is even more conservative than me." Leave it to the Bush
crowd to allow the Democrats to resurrect Gingrich once more
in their campaign ads. Of course, Newt has always been misclassified
by the political taxonimists as a conservative. Underneath the
bluster, Gingrich is a closet neo-liberal and a technophile,
fully marinated in the argot of third-wavism and cyberspeak.
It's not surprising that he and Al Gore (frequent dining companions
during their days in the House) are both disciples of Alvin Toffler
and Carl Sagan and share the belief that getting urban America
wired up to the Internet is a fast-track out of poverty.
Dick Cheney comes from more archaic
stock. Though he is only 59, Cheney has been around the national
political scene for more than 30 years. He was a Nixon man, serving
his apprenticeship with Donald Rumsfeld, one of the dullest members
of the permanent government, where he helped run the Office of
Economic Policy. In 1974, Cheney was called upon to serve as
Gerald Ford's political eye-seeing dog, leading the clueless
president through his uneventful tenure. Cheney was the youngest
chief of staff ever, but always seemed more mature and sure-footed
than Ford. Then, after Carter chased Ford out of the White House,
Cheney fled back to Wyoming, surprising many there with his return
to the very state that as a youth he couldn't wait to leave.
He wasn't there long. Cheney ran for Congress, overcame charges
of carpetbaggerhood and became part of a nasty triumverate of
Wyoming legislators that ran rampant across the West through
the 1980s, including the cruel-tongued Alan Simpson and Malcolm
Wallop, a political narcoleptic, who was long considered by staffers
the second dumbest member of the senate, an eyelash behind Idaho's
Steve Symms.
Cheney
rose rapidly up the ranks of the Republican leadership. In his
second term, he became leader of the party's influential policy
committee and later Minority Whip. As a congressman his record
was unremittingly rightwing, voting against abortion at every
turn, against the ERA, for funding the contras, the Muj and UNITA,
against affirmative action and Head Start, against the Endangered
Species Act and for selling off public lands and oil reserves.
He even went so far as to accuse Ronald Reagan of "selling
out to Rostenkowsi" on the 1986 tax bill.
Cheney was briefly considered as
a replacement for James Watt as secretary of interior. But Cheney
rightly thought he could do more damage in the House. And, as
a member of the House Interior Committee, he did--pushing for
increased oil and gas development in wilderness areas, securing
private water rights over public lands and blocking several wilderness
proposals in the northern Rockies.
The big prize in those days was
the shale-oil deposits along the Rocky Mountain front, much of
it in Wyoming, which Cheney endeavored to open up for development
backed by billions in federal handouts--but when oil prices stabilized
in the mid-80s the scheme largely fell apart. Cheney and Simpson
also tried to micro-manage Yellowstone Park and succeeded in
forcing the Park Service to build the Grant Village resort complex
on Yellowstone Lake in habitat park biologists considered vital
for the survival of the park's dwindling population of grizzlies.
Cheney
was briefly considered as a replacement for James Watt as secretary
of interior. But Cheney rightly thought he could do more damage
to the environment in the House of Representatives.
If Plutarch were around to write
a contemporary version of his Parallel Lives, he could do much
worse than to pair Cheney with Al Gore. There are striking constrasts,
of course. Gore was born into political royalty and Cheney came
from working class stock. Cheney dodged the draft, saying "I
had better things to do in the 60s than fight in Vietnam,"
while Gore went to Vietnam (although practically under a Praetorian
guard to insure his safety) in order to butteress his political
resume. Like Gore, Cheney was captain of his football team and
president of his high school class. Like Gore, he married his
high school sweetheart, Lynne, who, like Tipper, went on to wage
a war against pop culture. Despite their reputations as eggheads,
Cheney and Gore both had mediocre academic careers. Cheney won
a scholarship to Yale, but flunked out after his first year,
later saying "I didn't like the East and I wasn't a good
student." Al nearly flunked out of the Harvard English department
(defeated by Chaucer) and fled to the more accomdating political
science program. In 1981, Gore and Cheney both used their political
connections to land seats on the House Intelligence Committee
and have remained CIA loyalists ever since. In 1984, Gore and
Cheney worked side-by-side to save the MX missile, the imperilled
mega-MIRV that carried 10 big nuclear warheads each. Gore offered
up his plan to build both the MX and the Midgetman (a single
warhead nuke designed to rove around the Western deserts on the
back of a truck). In 1990, as secretary of defense, Cheney, who
never cared for the costly (less bang for more bucks) Midgetman,
convinced Bush to cancel the program.
"Cheney's often mistaken for
a deep-thinker," says a longtime Republican staffer on the
Hill. "He's not. He's just a plodding thinker. His long
pauses and deliberate mannerisms disquise the paucity of his
political philosophy. It wasn't that Cheney concocted reasons
to vote against the ERA or the South African sanctions. He actually
bought into the pr. He truly believed that the ERA was going
to force women into combat and men's bathrooms. He really believed
that Nelson Mandela was a programmed tool of the Kremlin who
would turn Johannesburg into a black Havana, after purging the
country of all whites, if he ever got out. We called him Cheney
the Credulous. But always behind his back. He had an explosive
temper."
Cheney was on the verge of becoming
the minority leader of the House in 1989, when Bush tapped him
to become his secretary of defense. An internal Pentagon profile
of Cheney prepared after the 1992 election describes Cheney as
always preferring weapons acquisition over military personnel
and backing big ticket strategical systems over conventional
weapons.
"Cheney's
often mistaken for a deep-thinker," says a longtime Republican
staffer on the Hill. "He's not. He's just a plodding thinker.
His long pauses and deliberate mannerisms disquise the paucity
of his political philosophy."
Cheney presided over an open-door
policy at the Pentagon--for defense contractors and big contributors.
"Clinton rented out the Lincoln Bedroom to Hollywood starlets,"
quipped one House staffer. "But Cheney let Lockheed execs
play around in the war room."
There is a caveat to this. Cheney
took a principled stand against the V-22 Osprey helicopter, a
flying deathtrap of no known military function. When Congress
appropriated tk billion for the machine, Cheney instructed the
Pentagon not to spend the money. Several congressmen threatened
to haul Cheney into court on contempt of congress charges. Eventually,
Cheney released some of the funds in 1992 at the request of Bush,
who thought it might help him win Pennsylvania where much of
work on the Osprey was to be done. It didn't.
Cheney
is given credit for running the Gulf War. But his skills as a
military strategist haven't inspired comparisons to General Ney
at the Pentagon, where during the war he turned over much of
the responsibility to his assistant secretary of defense, Instead,
Cheney devoted most of his time to frequent briefings of congress,
sessions that one staffer described as being "largely a
horrorshow. Cheney tended to dwell on the gruesome efficiency
of the bombing campaign and hyping the smart-bomb technology
with piles of data that later proved bogus."
Cheney's most decisive action in
the Gulf War had little to do with mustering support and everything
to do with covering up the fact that Iraq's army of conscripts
posed little threat to US forces. The cat was let out of the
bag by Gen. Tk Dugan, chief of the Air Force, who, on the eve
of the war, told a Pentagon reporter that the Iraqis posed little
threat and that US was basically doing the bidding of the Israelis.
Cheney fired Dugan immediately.
Cheney is a member of that club
of Republican men who find themselves in the intellectual shadow
of their hard-driving wives: Quayle, Ford, Dole, Phil Gramm.
Cheney's wife, Lynne, is one of Washington's top talking heads
and a cohost of CNN's Sunday edition of Crossfire. She's a formidible
intellect, who wrote a Phd dissertation at the University of
Wisconsin on the influences of Kant on the poetry of Matthew
Arnold. After Cheney left public office, Lynne kept the family
name in the political spotlight, primarily as a crusader against
any attempt by public schools to reach out to black and Hispanic
children. As Bill Bennett (apparently oblivious to how it echoed
Bob Haldeman's sentiments about Martha Mitchell) put it: "she's
hard to muzzle."
For the
past five years, Cheney has been pulling down more than $1.3
million a year as CEO of Halliburton, the Bechtel of the oil
services industry, a company that builds drilling rigs and pipelines
for the big oil companies. Halliburton made a killing directing
much of the cleanup of the mess in Kuwait left over from the
Gulf War and rebuilding the infrastructure of the its petroleum
industry. When Cheney came on board in 1995, he immediately began
a cost-cutting regime that ending with more than 9,000 workers
thrown on the streets.
Cheney's nomination effectively
mooted any RNC plans to attack Gore on playing footsie with the
Chinese. In 1993, Halliburton secured a mutlibillion dollar joint
services contract with the Chinese National Petroleum Company
to develop and operation oil and gas fields and pipelines in
the PRC. The deal was greased by the late Ron Brown and former
Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary. CP
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