DICK CHENEY….T.D. Allman has a piece in the current Rolling Stone that gives Dick Cheney the old school pounding he so richly deserves. A few excerpts:
Both [Bruce] Bradley and Cheney were Republicans, but they differed on Watergate. Bradley recognized that Nixon had violated fundamental American values; Cheney saw Watergate as a power struggle. They even debated each other, in a forum arranged for Bradley’s clients.
“He claimed it was just a political ploy by the president’s enemies,” says Bradley. “Cheney saw politics as a game where you never stop pushing. He said the presidency was like one of those giant medicine balls. If you get ahold of it, what you do is, you keep pushing that ball and you never let the other team push back.”
….”I don’t believe he is an ideologue,” says former Sen. Tim Wirth of Colorado. “But he is the most partisan politician I’ve ever met.”
….By the end of the first Bush administration, others had come to the conclusion that Cheney and his followers were dangerous. “They were referred to collectively as the crazies,” recalls Ray McGovern, a CIA professional who interpreted intelligence for presidents going back to Kennedy. Around the same time, McGovern remembers, Secretary of State James Baker and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft counseled the elder President Bush, “Keep these guys at arm’s length.”
After you’ve read Allman’s piece, be sure to follow it up by reading Josh Marshall’s 2003 evisceration of Cheney in the Washington Monthly. The two of them together tell you everything you need to know about him.
POSTSCRIPT: Oh hell, as long as I’m at it I’ll also plug (again) John Perry Barlow’s look at his old friend Cheney. I think his analysis is pretty insightful.
