The Depressed Vs. The Demented
The Deciderer
Apparently he’s frightened of Dick Cheney or something.
-Atrios 09:44
Huh? Ohhh:
Cheney challenges Rice on multiple fronts.
“A NEWSWEEK investigation shows that Cheney’s national-security team has been actively challenging Rice’s Iran strategy in recent months. … Officials from the veep’s office have been openly dismissive of the nuclear negotiations in think-tank meetings with Middle East analysts in Washington, according to a high-level administration official.� But it’s not just Iran[.]
Well, yeah.
I think this is where personality matters as much as ideology. Dear Leader knows he’s toast. He’s kind of lost, nursing his resentment, wallowing in self-pity, sulking around the White House and muttering that History will vindicate him. Richard Cheney, on the other hand, has the mentality of a suicide bomber: he knows he’s toast, too, but by God as long as he’s able, he’s going to pursue his violent obsessions; for war’s sake, Dick Cheney will spit his last political breath at thee. Richard Cheney is no Nixonesque crack-up; he’s not paralyzed by unpopularity at all, just mindful of the countdown to 1-20-09 and trying to create as much damage as possible until then. Bush is too demoralized and depressed to exert the force majeure necessary to back up Condi and overrule Dick. But then again Dick will not be overruled by anyone. And besides, Dear Leader is content to chew on (or, rather, chew-up) Iraq, where Dick Cheney has always seen the Middle East as a smorgasbord of goodies.
Coincidentally, I found the following Cheney quote, from 1993, the other night while torturing myself researching the certfiably despicable David Frum. From Frum’s (hah) book Dead Right:
We have turned inward as a nation and signed on to the proposition that the only truly important matters on the public policy agenda are dometic issues….[And] we Republicans bear part of the responsibility for this state of affairs.
We are the ones who acquiesced last fall in the Democrats’ assertion that the 1992 campaign for the Presidency should only address domestic issues. We bought off on the notion that the public didn’t want to hear about foriegn policy and national security issues….
But our first failing was in allowing ourselves and the American people to be lulled into a false sense of security — into believing that all is right with the world and that the end of the Cold War as we’ve known it for the last 40 years meant that it was safe to devote all our time an attention to domestic pursuits.
Aside the strawman argument and the germ of demagoguery, what we have here is Cheney articulating the PNAC line well before that document’s existence. When Cheney finally got the power to make war, foment crises, stamp the Imperial boot, you had to damn well know he was going to do it. And since his personality matches his visage — a stubborn, growling rottweiler type — you had to know that once he got that power, he was never going to waste a moment in using it, or be made to stop.
Traditionally the Vice-Presidency has been home to the dim but able career politician whose regional origin or personal contacts/machinery have been electorally useful to the ticket. We’ve had killers (Burr), criminals (Agnew), generically corrupt politicos (Colfax), energetic bullshit artists (TR), morally abject fucktards (Van Buren), and irrascible old farts (G. Clinton) among many other forgettable losers as Vice-Presidents of the United States, but none in our history have been as single-mindedly demented, even wicked, as Richard Cheney. What an awful excuse for a human being he is.
single-mindedly demented
It’s really magical thinking. American simply cannot do what he thinks it can; he’s moving phantom divisions around on a fantasy map. Can the undisclosed location now be referred to as The Bunker?
Emperor Palpatine wants war with Iran, and he isn’t going to let some notions of government, or diplomacy, or other nonsense like that get in his way.
Too bad the Fred Hiatts of the world can’t figure it out, or just don’t care.
P.S. Speaking of which (pundits figuring it out), Glenn Greenwald mentioned Brad’s imperialism post.
Righteous, well said.
These Guys are really incapable of seeing that the game’s over. It’s absolutely depressingly tragic that they’ve destroyed the body politic in the process. There isn’t an America anymore, have you noticed? just a bunch of mewling puking individualists determined to get their mouths round the tit, while the rest of the world just smirks and gets on with it.
Just a reminder that we’re having a live chat during the Democratic debate. So watch on television as you chat with other progressives.
http://www.thebluestate.com
It kinda reads like, Helter Skelter, in it’s un-ashamed self-fulling-atude, and its palatable undertone of insanity.
“But our first failing was in allowing ourselves and the American people to be lulled into a false sense of security — into believing that all is right with the world and that the end of the Cold War as we’ve known it for the last 40 years meant that it was safe to devote all our time an attention to domestic pursuits.”
Instead of building more aircraft carriers, just in case Briton decides to “take back” Massachusetts.
Hey, maybe the reason why ’92 was so focused domestic issues instead of “nation security” was that there were no threats to our nation.
Cheney Methodology Explained in Hyperbole: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEf19ro8zx4
But our first failing was in allowing ourselves and the American people to be lulled into a false sense of security — into believing that all is right with the world…
Well, that’s something I can give Cheney credit for – he’s done a fantastic job of destroying any sense of security I had, and any belief that all’s right with the world. Hyper-belligerent loons with vast political power tend to undermine my sense of well-being.
“Traditionally the Vice-Presidency has been home to the dim but able career politician . . .” Well, prior to Walter Mondale. But with the exception of Dan Quayle, every VP since the Ford administration has been something like a “deputy president”. Then Cheney flipped the script.
For hate’s sake, indeed. For some reason, I find our twisted Co-Decider infinitely interesting. He, more than any other, seems to hold the secret of what truly motivates our domestic enemies. Does he think he is doing what is best for “America”? Is he simply motivated by a thirst for power and wealth? What goes on in his mind? He is no fool. He must know that global warming is a serious problem, that there is no god, that his chosen road leads to disaster. What does he get out of it? Was he abused as a child? Why is he so objectively evil? I just can’t believe that those who are intelligent on the right don’t know what they are doing; they must desire those ends. Why? Why?
Allienne:
Perhaps he simply follows the essential neoconservative belief: that liberal democracy, as it is defined in the USA at this time, cannot work. That what is needed is an autocracy of ‘right thinking’, ‘wise’ people, who keep everyone else in check with a mixture of continual war, relentless propaganda, and popular mythology.
I tend to think that atheist is at least in the same zip code as the truth. Although it does nothing to change my opinion, I believe cheney and his friends believe they are doing the “right” thing. They believe that, unlike you and I, they are right-thinking, clear-eyed Americans who will spend the capital and lives necessary to protect the nation.
Where they are certainly wrong is that they believe America must dominate the other nations of the world, rather than live among them. They also believe, religiously, in american exceptionalism. They think, that since the end of the second world war, anything america does is in the best interests of world peace, and more importantly, stability, one of their keywords.
This is why “True Believers” are dangerous. They KNOW they are doing the right thing, and any cost is worth spending to do said thing. They will lie, steal, propagandize, start wars, abrogate treaties, and they will KILL or IMPRISON you if you become a problem. Because the ends, you know, justify all means…
mikey
Not to mention torture people, mikey. These people are truly evil.
…what is needed is an autocracy of ‘right thinking’, ‘wise’ people, who keep everyone else in check with a mixture of continual war, relentless propaganda, and popular mythology.
Sounds ultra-groovy!
I think you’re largely right, but what strikes me as odd is that that sort of bleak outlook usually takes hold among elites after some sort of national catastrophe; post-WWI Germany, for example. The neocons brewed up their nasty world-view in the 1990s, when America was at the height of its power. It’s as if they conjured up a sort of pre-emptive paranoia, preparation for a disaster that hadn’t happened yet… a disaster which they are now creating themselves.
Mikey is right but there’s more to it than that. Of course the Cheneys want imperialism for its own sake. But another goal is the militarization of society, because they believe such a society inculcates good character traits in its people. These people are moralists of sorts, but they’re evil ones.
A war, any war but especially those that are supposedly a part of a larger ‘existential crisis’ is what it takes not just for war’s and imperialism’s own sake, but to put society on its (from their point of view) proper footing. This is why the neocons wanted to start a Cold War with China in the 90s and why after 9/11 suprised them, they embraced the idea not of attacking al qaeda, but making a crusade against the Muslim world.
Also, and again for the millionth time, neocons were *never* about democracy. They only wanted a democratic veneer on a new puppet in Iraq, and employed the phrase for its PR value (invaluable in recruiting Sensible Liberals to the Imperial cause). Read anything by the neocon theorists and you will see an outright contempt for the concept of (other peoples’) self-determination. Without self-determination, no true democracy can exist because by nature it is not free and soveriegn.
Cheney pursues American hegemony abroad and Republican hegemony at home. I think that he (like pretty much all neoconservatives) are convinced, like Mikey said, of American exceptionalism and that American hegemony is the best that the world can hope for.
While the neoconservatives seem alarmingly ignorant of a lot of history, I think they have studied the fall of great empires (particularly the Roman and British) and are deathly afraid of the US growing decadent and “weak.”
What Cheney fears most is the end of American hegemony. There is a certain bizarre logic to it. He doesn’t want the world to think that it can defy the US. Were the insurgency able to claim even rhetorically, that it ran the US out of Iraq… that is more threatening to the long term security of the US than say turning Iraq into a failed nation state.
Not sure of the point here. A rant is a rant is a rant. You’re surprised by Herr Cheney’s response?
… another goal is the militarization of society, because they believe such a society inculcates good character traits in its people.
Yep. They were pretty explicit about that. Eleven years ago, William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote a paper that dealt with finding “ways to lower the barriers between civilian and military life,” partly because they seemed to think it was desirable to permeate US society with “military virtues” and partly because they assumed a militarized America would eagerly support a militarized foreign policy.
What Cheney fears most is the end of American hegemony.
Yep again. But the brutal irony is that in trying to prevent it he’s hastening it.
Eleven years ago, William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote a paper that dealt with finding “ways to lower the barriers between civilian and military life…”
Witness the recent attempt to install an active-duty, three-star general in the position of “War Czar.” You do the math.
Scene in Bushie’s bedroom…time 9:30 at nite.
Bushie is curled in the big crib in his jet pilot codpiece jammies crushing his dog Barney against his tear-stained cheeks. Barney is clearly uncomfortable and looks anxious to escape.
As hot angry tears course down his reddened cheeks Bushie screams “Nobody wuves me no more mommy—the whole world hates me—they made Danny leave and I think they’re gonna take down Gonzo. Why don’t they realize I’m The Commander Guy?”
Laura stands by the presidential crib—and as she puts on her most comforting mommy look, she holds out a glass of warm milk spiked with Bourbon and Qualudes.
“Drink this Georgie, and go to sleep…History will recognize you for the political genius you are…even if everyone in the world loathes you now” (including me she thinks wistfully).
Georgie drinks down his spiked milk, sniffles, and goes to sleep as Laura sneaks out of the room, leaving the Fox Noise Channel on low to comfort a frightened Shrubbie.
“Eleven years ago, William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote a paper that dealt with finding “ways to lower the barriers between civilian and military life,”
I’d very much like to see this paper. Got a link?
I’d very much like to see this paper. Got a link?
It’s ‘Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.’ You can find it here:
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=276
The part about “educating the citizenry to the responsibilities of global hegemony” and closing the “separation of civilian and military cultures” is about halfway through. The whole thing’s a 1990s neo-con classic.
But another goal is the militarization of society, because they believe such a society inculcates good character traits in its people. These people are moralists of sorts, but they’re evil ones.
And to put a finer point on it, the goal is for the militarization of those parts of society that don’t include them.
“Eleven years ago, William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote a paper that dealt with finding “ways to lower the barriers between civilian and military life.�
I’ll go back farther than that.
Team B imagined that Soviet leaders liked their odds of success when they looked at American society. “A population addicted to the pursuit of consumer goods rapidly loses its sense of patriotism, sinking into a mood of self-indulgence that makes it extremely poor material for national mobilization”.
Sad that these fuckers have been so completely wrong for so long, but they keep getting paid. War is good for business, apparently.
I dunno… I think you may be giving Cheney too much credit. Sure, he’s not bone-stupid or stuck at the emotional age of five (unlike some of the other people now occupying the White House), but I don’t get the impression he has much of a grand ideological theory or plan of action that goes beyond “I got mine, and screw the rest of the world”. He was a thoroughly mediocre mid-level staffer who managed to attach himself like a tick to the genuinely ideological types who ran Nixon’s White House — people like Rumsfeld and Haldeman. He didn’t come up with anything more ambitious than making really comprehensive lists of whichever “enemies” caught Tricky Dick’s paranoid attention during a particular week, or proposing new rules to ensure that all purges would be adequately documented for future reference. He married a fellow Injustice Collector and sired a couple of kids whose only distinguishing characteristic has been their relentless drive to cash in whatever crumbs of notoriety their father’s position might offer. He browned his way up the Repub’s rigid seniority system to the point where he could make the lateral move into a CEO position at a politically-dependent megacorporation, which he proceeded to mismanage so badly that it probably would have gone bankrupt if he hadn’t been “tapped” to pick the right vice-president for a more politically viable Repub figurehead.
But being put in a position where he could nominate himself as America’s shadow puppeteer seems to have been less the end of a deliberate campaign than an unprecedented stroke of blind fortune. A better man would have been ashamed to take such shameless advantage; a worse one would have been rejected by the brokers who appointed him. But Cheney’s record was “impeccable” in the generic Repub sense of being invariably evil and wrong, yet always in such dull and bureaucratic ways (protesting Martin Luther King Day, using governmental fiats to steal from poor children to further enrich powerful corporations) that no overwhelming public outcry could be raised against him.
And all the evil he’s done over the last eight years, although calamitous for America and the world, has been done for the meanest, smallest, most personal reasons. He wanted all the money he could extort, he wanted to do what he felt like when he felt like it, and he didn’t want to be pestered with a lot of stupid reporters and historians hanging around asking annoying questions and shrieking about “personal responsibility”. Cheney really is the “CEO President” that Bush was optimistically presented as — a spoiled, selfish thug whose ambitions are as mean as his expression. If he’s gutted the Constitution, destroyed America’s global standing, and done his best to ensure that the world his grandkids inherit will be a poorer and much more dangerous place, it’s not for any grand political or ideological theory. He just did what any good bureaucrat who’d laboriously networked his way from the middle-management ranks to the corner office would do: sold every available resource to the highest bidder who could come up with the quickest payoff. Because the “wisdom” of Wall Street is that it’s fatal to think past the end of the next fiscal quarter, and it’s sensible, even laudable, to make a killing when the big chance finally comes.
Maybe every society gets the monster it deserves. The Germans got Eichmann, and we get Cheney.
While the neoconservatives seem alarmingly ignorant of a lot of history, I think they have studied the fall of great empires (particularly the Roman and British) and are deathly afraid of the US growing decadent and “weak.�
This is what gets me too. I know history is a moving target (winners writing the history, etc.), but the about of absolute ignorance on right about history, particularly the British & Roman empires is shocking. Its almost as they skip over the bits that dont fit into their worldview, like as a kid, I hid behind the couch when a scary bit came on Dr Who.
As for changing society, my paramour, Meneer Steyn has been banging on recently about wanting a society armed and living in fear! Fits into the same pattern as the militilization of civil society.
I dunno… I think you may be giving Cheney too much credit.
I agree. The man’s incompetent and always was. In a shocking development he managed to convince stupid people otherwise.
I dunno… I think you may be giving Cheney too much credit.
He hired some evil people, John Yoo, David Addington, and along with Karl Rove, they were given power that no one in our Republic should have been trusted with.
So.
What are we gonna do about it?
The neocons brewed up their nasty world-view in the 1990s, when America was at the height of its power.
…
William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote a paper that dealt with finding “ways to lower the barriers between civilian and military life,� partly because they seemed to think it was desirable to permeate US society with “military virtues�
You seem to have answered your own perplexity there, Snorghagen. Prosperity, and the end of the Cold War, were precisely what caused all the concern in Kristol / Kagan / Krauthammer circles. Bad Things to the moral fibre of the nation. A rudderless nation, becalmed in prosperity… war… Iron in the Soul… the garrison mentality in danger… pagan virtues… stoicism in the face of adversity… lots of adversity. Especially for other people.
Oddly enough, the identical rhetoric was common in Europe during the 1900s. The ruling elite and their intellectual apologists were worried about the effects of peace and prosperity on the wider population. There was the same idea that people needed a bigger cause than mere material happiness. Instead of allowing the younger generation to go off in all directions pursuing fragmented, individualistic self-interest, it would be healthier to unite them with a bond of military brotherhood. Time for a short sharp war. Never mind who with, or what about.
My intensive, in-depth research on this issue consists of reading a couple of essays by Thomas Mann…
I think His Grace and Anne Laurie have Cheney down pat. The man has not a single shred of compassion for anyone other than his immediate circle (perhaps not even them), and simply wants to turn America (and eventually the world) into his own (or their own) private fiefdom.
I think he feels very much like King Arthur (as portrayed so winningly by Graham Chapman), confronted by “Bloody peasants” who inconvenience him and splash muck on his glorious image of America As It Should Be. He doesn’t care about freedom, or democracy, or even most Americans, and would probably prefer that all Iraqis, Iranians, and other inconvenient peoples were simply (a) wiped from the face of the earth, or (b) shackled up and forced to labour down t’pit.
In short, I really don’t believe he thinks we’re human. Not like CEOs and Republicans (the important ones, not the voters). And he’ll do whatever he wants to do to get his own way.
Sociopathy is not that common in the general populace, but it seems a fair number of pollies suffer from it. They all want to make people fit into their idealised world, rather than construct a better world to suit real people. And they don’t care what bits they have to chop off to do that.
He’s incompetent at fighting wars and implementing policy. Formulating policy (no matter how deranged) and manipulating others to get his own way? That he’s good at. Otherwise he would have been used as a sacrificial lamb long ago.
And I don’t think he’s a crazy ideologue. More of a daddy knows best sort of person.
Formulating policy (no matter how deranged) and manipulating others to get his own way? That he’s good at.
That’s where the stupid people come in.
Why are we always overlooking the word “evil”?
It’s a perfectly serviceable word. Just call them “evil”.
Why are we always overlooking the word “evil�?
It’s up-thread a bunch of times and is okay by me.
ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said,
June 4, 2007 at 2:18
Not to mention torture people, mikey. These people are truly evil.
I’d like a chance to win a vacation to Florida or the Carribean as my prize.
It’s ‘Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.’
WOW. Thanks, I think. Jesus Christ.
AL: I think you’re right about how Dick got where he is, but maybe underestimate his legitimate zeal for war and aggression. It’s more than just a means to a financial ends to him, I think, and maybe even more than just about serving the needs of political power.
Rise of the Vulcans IIRC sort of painted Cheney as an accidental neocon — an average Republican who was waylaid by 9/11 into adopting the whole Norman Podhoretz weltanshauung. I think that’s wrong. Now it’s true that you describe some of his tendencies perfectly — and some is even inspired, bravo, Annie Laurie, I mean it, he is the crassest of all of them — but I think he actually believes all the hype.
Part of what neocons want to change about American character by making in more militaristic is that, in mistaking ruthlessness for rugged self-reliance, it wants it to be more ‘masculine’ and less ‘feminine’, more social darwinist and less egalitarian and cooperative. Cheney really believes in that stuff; like all Delta male rejects who are connected enough to find money and power, he thinks he’s lived a meritocratic life, is an alpha male, is cream risen to the top. Hence his geopolitical ruthlessness, his perpetual snarl, his ‘CEO Presidency’ (perfect, that, thanks) style is part and parcel of this primary psychological setting.
It’s odd, but reading through Frum has convinced me that Rethugs, and neocons specifically, reason (if you can call it that) backwards to what we on the Left suppose. Their primary concern is with character. As I mentioned on another post, they want Americans to be like the Donner Party (no, really). So, how do you manufacture the conditions which would facilitate that social goal? Destroy the welfare state as much as possible, first, but since Reagan was meant to do that and failed, take the long route — manufacture or exaggerate foriegn policy crises so that society will be militarized. Reward the ruthless tendencies among the ‘Jacksonian base’ that war excites. Play to this strength. Make Americans distrust everyone but those who inflame the crises. Make them armed to the teeth and resentful of everything. At the same time, make them financially desperate — no safety net. Blame Islamists, minorities, immigrants, big government, pointy headed liberals for all problems. Stir.
Hopefully the product is a society which accepts ‘living on the edge’ (‘dynamism’ is the happy euphemism) economically, which will turn to family in times of crisis or perish without protest (finding some solace in religion, naturally). OTOH, this same society will need to serve the state which is in constant ‘existential peril’ from enemies abroad and enemies within.
Of course neocons view this as the near-perfection of the American polity. We of course see it for what it really is, a Hofferian mass movement and the Friekorpsization of the USA.
THAT’s what we’re up against. Anyway, I think Cheney’s a True Believer in it and just because he’s also cynical enough to get his own in the process is not a repudiation of his sincereity — it’s simply a part of being a true Believer in this particularly noxious ideology.
Sorry to ramble; tired. Night, all.
Cheney loves war…as long as he’s not personally doing the fighting. But he really, really loves reading his monthly stock portfolio net balance. War has been very good to Dick Cheney and those 400,000 Halliburton options he holds are going to be worth lots of money by the time he finishes his term. In fact, he’s probably trying to lock in these returns for the next decade or so.
Anyone else think it might not be a good idea to have our Executive Branch office holders heavily invested in military stocks?
You’d be hard pressed to find another world-class war profiteer/war monger quite so brazen as Dick Cheney………..
#
All this liberal slander and bile will not change America’s march to freedom, but it will serve as evidence of your dysloyalty to the USA when you are put in camps. Bill O’Reilly is right — you so-called progressives think you are better than everyone else. Here in the heartland, we are taking you down a peg.
Comment by Gary Ruppert — June 3, 2007 @ 10:03 am
P.S. Who’s peg?
The neocon movement goes back way before the nineties—way back to the 50’s and a man named Albert Wohlstetter, according to this month’s TAP. He believed that any country possessing nuclear weapons would use them at any time, so we should destroy them before they destroyed us, ergo: pre-emptive war. He was the inspiration for Wolfowitz, Feith, Libby, et al, and I’m sure that Cheney buys into this same philosophy. That’s why Cheney’s so intent on bombing Iran: kill the enemy in case he might just by some small chance decide to kill me. One problem is, it’s an insane philosophy. It’s like saying, “One of my neighbors might break into my house and kill me, so I’m going to kill all of them first.” It’s mass murderer talk.
As an aside, Juan Cole reports that the percentage of people who view Iran as a threat has risen from 20% to 27% in the last few months. Oh, the value of propaganda! Don’t discount Cheney’s clout just yet.
“March to freedom”… check.
Creative spelling… check.
It certainly sounds like our Ruppert. Gary come home, try the Preview!
Gary come home for the Preview, stay for the pie!
Anyway, I think Cheney’s a True Believer in it and just because he’s also cynical enough to get his own in the process is not a repudiation of his sincereity — it’s simply a part of being a true Believer in this particularly noxious ideology.
You could be right; I’ve read way more articles than books, especially books by the neocons themselves, because I’m old enough that looking at that crap unmediated is bad for my blood pressure (not to mention it scares the dogs when I fling fat books across the room). It’s possible that Cheney has become a convert to the “America is surrounded by enemies and needs its manlihood purified in the fire of war” bilge that so excites the genuinely political malificents who surround him. Recent personal reminders of his own mortality, combined with the knowledge that this is truly his Last Hurrah professionally, might have moved him from user to believer. But he’s still a drab grey monster, albeit a monster in his every clotted corpuscule. If there are historians around in a hundred years’ time, he may get some attention as the first Vice President to run the country *without* the aid of an assassin. But when they rank his “achievements”, I suspect he’ll be listed with Buchanan rather than, say, Polk — as a bad choice whose failures were passive rather than active.
The neocon movement goes back way before the nineties…
True, but it was in the 1990s – after the collapse of their traditional boogeyman, the Soviet Union – that they began focusing their beady little eyes largely on the Middle East, which has led to the well-known results.
You seem to have answered your own perplexity there, Snorghagen.
Yeah, you’re right. The 1990s was not a frightening time internationally for most people, but the neo-cons are a self-enclosed group, almost a cult. The end of the Cold War seems to have been traumatic for them. The experience pushed them even further into the outer limits of militant paranoia, where they still reside.
I know this is a side issue, but do you think his dodgy health is also part of what is driving this urgency with Cheney? I mean it’s possible he’s sharpened his lazer-like focus ’cause, you know, the Grim Reaper has been breathing down his neck for while?
Also, wouldn’t it be interesting if at the next commencement speech Cheney gives everybody showed up with an I-Pod under their gown? LIke 1000 I-Pods in the same room with Cheney?
…what?
A long quote, but the ideas illuminated here capture the essence of the Wingnut mindset and deserve to be repeated and repeated:
It’s odd, but reading through Frum has convinced me that Rethugs, and neocons specifically, reason (if you can call it that) backwards to what we on the Left suppose. Their primary concern is with character. As I mentioned on another post, they want Americans to be like the Donner Party (no, really). So, how do you manufacture the conditions which would facilitate that social goal? Destroy the welfare state as much as possible, first, but since Reagan was meant to do that and failed, take the long route — manufacture or exaggerate foriegn policy crises so that society will be militarized. Reward the ruthless tendencies among the ‘Jacksonian base’ that war excites. Play to this strength. Make Americans distrust everyone but those who inflame the crises. Make them armed to the teeth and resentful of everything. At the same time, make them financially desperate — no safety net. Blame Islamists, minorities, immigrants, big government, pointy headed liberals for all problems. Stir
Yup. The recurring Western myth of the human soul made pure and strong in the crucible of adversity. Cooperation, diplomacy, empathy, inalienable human rights, egalitarianism, broad freedom from fear and want– to the Wingnut mind these are not virtues but self-destructive weaknesses and their advocates are the Enemy of the Good.
It begins with the revisionist retelling of the fall of Rome. Blind to the fact that the (realatively) cheap short-term wealth gained by conquest inevitably leaves an imperial power with a far-flung and expensive empire to maintain (as well as little or no economic infrastructure at home, apart from the the training of more and more soldiers) they instead try to pin it all on “moral decay”.
“What an awful excuse for a human being he is.”
Wait a sec, he’s human? This changes everything!
Cheney’s original motivations are pretty well documented. But his motivation was changed by the dismissal of his longtime fuckbuddy, Rummy. Now it’s about revenge.
If the Democrats or the US majority want something, by God he’ll never allow it.
Cheney is Libby’s bear that’s been prodded with a stick. He’s aroused and we’re all gonna get regularly fupped.
So, how do you manufacture the conditions which would facilitate that social goal? Destroy the welfare state as much as possible, first, but since Reagan was meant to do that and failed, take the long route — manufacture or exaggerate foriegn policy crises so that society will be militarized. Reward the ruthless tendencies among the ‘Jacksonian base’ that war excites. Play to this strength. Make Americans distrust everyone but those who inflame the crises. Make them armed to the teeth and resentful of everything. At the same time, make them financially desperate — no safety net. Blame Islamists, minorities, immigrants, big government, pointy headed liberals for all problems. Stir.
Aren’t they aware of what happened to Imperial Japan?
During the Great Depression, Japanese peasant farmers were on the verge of starvation, and most Japanese soldiers were terrified of losing their jobs. Their solution was to start a war without the government’s permission (in Manchuria) as war would require a big army and thus give them job security. Any politician in Tokyo who tried to stop them was simply assassinated.
Ever wonder why a maritime power like Japan did something as stupid as start a massive land war in Asia? It was because the war was launched not in the national interest of Japan but in the careerist interests of the Imperial Japanese Army itself. Unfortunately for Japan, the Chinese tar-baby could cry for help, leading to economic embargoes which ultimately left Pearl Harbor as seemingly the only way out for the Japanese military.
At least Japan was (initially at least) an innocent victim of the Great Depression. The neocons though plan to engineer desperate economic conditions for Americans in order to create similar militarism in the US.
I think the vice-president most comparable to Cheney in terms of amorality and ambition is Nixon himself. But rather than a president who had hidden in the Texas Air National Guard, and then deserted that when he got bored, Nixon had a boss who had led the Allied forces in WW2. Thus Nixon didn’t get his way as VP, while Cheney has trampled all over people’s lives and the US Constitution.
Luckily for us, Cheney’s heart isn’t likely to last long enough for a PR makeover sufficient for him to stand in 4 or 8 years time as a credible candidate. Plus Cheney may shoot himself when he goes hunting, being the most obvious old coot close to hand.
Anyone interested in ideas that Cheney may have true neoconservative ‘principles’, rather than pure greed and bloody-mindedness, should catch ‘The Power of Nightmares’ if they can – a 3 part, 3 hour documentary from the BBC, available on YouTube and via BitTorrent. It’s all about Team B, Leo Strauss, the neoconservatives, and their mirror image – the Islamists who ended up sending airliners into buildings, and thus shored up the neoconservative regime no end. Both sets of ideologies see the modern West as decadent, and in need of some moral fibre – with the end justifying the means.
“I don’t get the impression he has much of a grand ideological theory or plan of action that goes beyond “I got mine, and screw the rest of the worldâ€?.”
While it’s certainly accurate to say that Cheney wants to screw the rest of the world, he actually does have a long record of devotion to one particular ideology: the unitary executive theory. Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe did some great investigative work back in 2006 focusing on Cheney’s obsession with increasing Presidential power, which seems to have gotten kick-started with Watergate. When in 1987 Congress issued a report on the Iran-Contra scandal, Cheney authored a dissenting section rejecting the conclusions of the Democratic majority, instead asserting that Congress has no power over the President when it comes to national security matters. For over three decades, Cheney has been seething with indignation over the injustices done to his beloved Imperial Presidency, and has used his time as Veep to implement his perverted view of the Constitution, with the help of such loons as Yoo and Addington.
What’s very telling is that all of these demented advocates of a thoroughly militarized American society—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington, the Kagans, and Kristol principal among them— share one important characteristic: not one of them ever spent one minute in uniform. However romantic their notions of military life and warfare are, they had no intentions of submitting themselves to the discipline and risk inherent in the military life they glorify. Certainly their children will not serve, either; that would get in the way of business school. For me, that’s what makes these men so spectacularly pathetic. They are all quivering hypocrites who would foul their pants if they had to face live ammunition.
One minor point: the article sparking this discussion mentioned “forgettable losers as Vice-Presidents of the United States” and included Teddy Roosevelt. Lumping him in with the likes of Agnew and Van Buren doesn’t do justice to TR’s achievements in such areas as the creation of the National Parks and fighting the trusts—imagine a Republican President advocating forcefully for the environment and against unwarranted concentrations of economic power today! Forgettable he was not, nor a loser.
He’s a Vogon.
It’s not exactly fair to dismiss Burr as a “killer.” For one thing, he wasn’t a killer when he was elected to the Vice Presidency and for another he killed Hamilton in a duel. It was, I believe, Hamilton’s THIRTIETH duel, by the way. It’s not as if Burr ambushed him on his way home from the public house.
Besides which, Burr was totally awesome.
Teddy Roosevelt was a very odd inclusion there. Whether or not you think he was a good President, a good American, a good General, or whatever — he hardly was a “loser” by any definition of which I am aware and certainly not at all comparable to the others you included. Very bizarre inclusion, frankly.
No dissin’ Aaron Burr. You do realize he didn’ t run on a ticket with the authoritarian Jefferson, and actually tied him in 1800? That election wasn’t resolved until the House had voted several times. Plus Hamilton was a tool who had it coming.
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