American Views Abroad


Friday, October 06, 2006
 
Joan Didion connects the dots in Cheney: The Fatal Touch in The New York Review of Books' October 8 issue. Generations of citizens sat through social science/history/civic lessons, town hall meetings, student government trial runs, so why since the 70's could two individuals, Cheney and Rumsfeld, hijack all of it, most notably any notion of checks and balances and total disregard to truth and given facts and get away with it?

Didion writes:

It was in some ways predictable that the central player in the system of willed errors and reversals that is the Bush administration would turn out to be its vice-president, Richard B. Cheney. Here was a man with considerable practice in the reversal of his own errors. He was never a star. No one ever called him a natural. He reached public life with every reason to believe that he would continue to both court failure and overcome it, take the lemons he seemed determined to pick for himself and make lemonade, then spill it, let someone else clean up......

.....In the Ford White House, where he and Rumsfeld were known as 'the little Praetorians,' Cheney cultivated a control of detail that extended even to questioning the use in the residence of 'little dishes of salt with funny little spoons' rather than 'regular salt shakers.'......

......This was not a slip of memory in the heat of debate. (Cheney vs Edwards on Atta in Prague with senior Iraqi intelligence) This was dishonest, a repeated misrepresentation, in the interests of claiming power, so bald and so systematic that the only instinctive response (Did too!) was that of the schoolyard......

(On Saddam Hussein seeking significant quantities of uranium) .....What the Vice President was doing, then, was not cherry-picking the intelligence but rejecting it, replacing it with whatever self-interested rumor better advanced his narrative line. .....The Vice President would not then or later tolerate any suggestion that the story he was building might rest on cooked evidence. (He is reported to have said in November 2001)....... If there was 'one percent chance' of truth in any suspicion or allegation, it must be considered true. 'It's about our response.'
www.nybooks.com/articles/19376

Our response which meant war and untold suffering and misery based on a 'one percent chance'
of finding truth in a suspicion or allegation. Stunning.

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