Dick Cheney and the Dark Side

Dick Cheney, who died in November, was by far the most powerful U.S. Vice President in history, and not coincidentally, was one of the Americans who most harmed the United States (and the world) in living memory. That ignominious club includes Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, and although it's arguable who's done the most damage, Cheney's lasting legacy is overwhelming negative and dark. Although George W. Bush bears ultimate responsibility for the decisions he made and the many he abdicated to Cheney during their administration, and Cheney had many allies who also deserve blame, Cheney was the driving force behind many if not all of the Bush administration's multiple disasters, horrible policies and frankly evil actions. And although Dick Cheney criticized Trump and even voted against him in 2024, many of the Trump administration's illegal assertions of monarchial power – and certainly its contempt for due process – were proudly modeled by the Bush-Cheney regime.

Cheney pushed for a war of choice in Iraq, an inherently unconscionable action even if it hadn't turned out disastrously. He shamelessly deceived Congress, reporters and the American people to sell that war. He, his friend Donald Rumsfeld, and others allies created a torture regime, one of the darkest stains on the United States. He fought against due process, and for indefinite detention. He supported warrantless surveillance of American citizens. He pushed for not one but two budget-busting tax cuts for the rich, knowing they were fiscally irresponsible and despite the already extreme wealth inequality in the United States. He fought against disclosure, oversight and accountability. He seeded the government with his lackeys and allowed the politicization of the civil service. The Bush administration made a staggering number of decisions that were bad for America, in large part because Cheney and his team arrogantly assumed they were always correct and actively undermined the checks, balances, discussions and dissents that allow for good decision making.

It's not possible to cover every failing of Dick Cheney in detail in one post. The best book on Cheney I've found is Angler by Barton Gellman, which expanded on a Pulitzer-winning series by Jo Becker and Gellman. I also think it's one of the best books for understanding the Bush administration as a whole, along with The Dark Side by Jane Mayer, which adeptly and chillingly chronicles the Bush administration's torture program, championed by Cheney and others. Mayer's book expanded on her reporting for The New Yorker and fed into the excellent Frontline episode "The Dark Side." Another episode, "Cheney's Law," is very good at looking at Cheney specifically, and the Frontline archive on the Iraq War is both comprehensive and damning. Most of my posts involving Cheney can be found in one or more of the categories Cheney, Bush, torture, Iraq, war and the war series. My fellow bloggers have certainly penned plenty as well. In the meantime, we'll try to recount some of Dick Cheney's most despicable legacies below.

The Iraq War

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
- Dick Cheney, August 26th, 2002.

We will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.
– Dick Cheney, March 16th, 2003.

I think they're in the last throes, if you will, of the insurgency.
- Dick Cheney, June 30th, 2005.

Jim Lehrer: You drew a lot of heat and ridicule when you said eight months ago, insurgency is in its last throes. You regret having said that?

Cheney: No. I think the way I think about it, as I just described. I think about when we look back and get some historical perspective on this period, I'll believe that the period we were in through 2005 was in fact a turning point, that putting in place a democratic government in Iraq was the, sort of the cornerstone, if you will, of victory against the insurgency.
- February 7th, 2006.

I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered.
- Dick Cheney, June 20th, 2005.

"War is hell" is a cliché that happens to be true. War entails death and destruction, pain and suffering, and often involves dismemberment, disfigurement, sexual assault, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other ills. At best, war is a necessary evil, and you should be wary of anyone who wants to go to war. Starting an unnecessary war, a war of choice, is inherently immoral, and lying and misleading others to start such a war is likewise immoral. The Iraq War officially started in 2003 and ended in 2011, and was largely a disaster. I have a 20th anniversary roundup providing retrospectives and useful links, some which bear repeating directly here. As of this writing, the Cost of War project estimates that the "cost of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere totals about $8 trillion. This does not include future interest costs on borrowing for the wars." The Pew Research Center has a superb piece called "A Look Back at How Fear and False Beliefs Bolstered U.S. Public Support for War in Iraq" (3/14/23). See also the National Security Archive's pieces that the public relations push for the Iraq war preceded intelligence findings, Britain's Downing Street memo that stated that the Bush administration's "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of going to war, Mother Jones' "Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq" (September 2006), and a similar piece from The Center for Public Integrity, "False Pretenses" (1/23/08).

Dick Cheney was one of the most ardent advocates for war with Iraq and one of the most unconscionable about selling it. In one particularly infamous appearance on Meet the Press, Cheney claimed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had reconstituted Iraq's nuclear weapons program, and pointed to The New York Times as independently supporting his claims, when in fact he had fed those very claims to New York Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon. (FAIR has some excellent pieces on this and related incidents, including "Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline" [3/19/07] and the retrospective "20 Years Later, NYT Still Can’t Face Its Iraq War Shame" [3/22/23].) As the above quotations show, Cheney not only sold bullshit and delusion, but refused to acknowledge the reality of the disaster in Iraq.

Cheney also relied heavily on bigotry and American ignorance of Middle Eastern history and politics. To quote from an older post, "Giddy Minds and Foreign Quarrels" (11/11/09):

Bush officials, Cheney most of all, were going around conflating 9/11 and Al Qaeda with one of bin Laden's regional enemies, Saddam Hussein in Iraq. While many of the pre-war assertions were noteworthy for their bullshit factor, one of the most amazing came from Dick Cheney on Meet the Press in September 2003, after the Iraq War had been going roughly six months:

"If we're successful in Iraq . . . then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

Honestly, this is one of the most bigoted, fear-mongering, deceptive and unconscionable statements I've ever seen from a high-ranking official. I've covered it before, but note that not only does Cheney indirectly suggest that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, he uses “geographic base” to conflate all Middle Eastern countries (or at least our “enemies”) and all of their inhabitants. This would be like invading Australia because of David Hicks[, an Australian who joined Al Qaeda]. Presumably Cheney's "geographic base" would include the country that produced most of the 9/11 terrorists – our erstwhile ally, Saudi Arabia. But really, who can really tell all those Middle Eastern people apart? Plus, they look and talk so funny. (It's often been quipped that invading Iraq after 9/11 was like attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbor.)

We'd also be wise to remember the incompetence and corruption of the Bush-Cheney administration in Iraq. As chronicled well in the documentary No End in Sight and elsewhere, when it came to Iraq, competent, career civil servants were overridden in favor of unqualified ideologues and loyalists. Historically, the U.S. has done very well at infrastructure projects, and reconstruction in Iraq should have gone well. But the Bush administration gave huge contracts to companies that often did shoddy work. The most glaring of these was probably Halliburton, formerly led by Dick Cheney. Cheney received a $36 million severance package from Halliburton, had stock options in the company, and received almost $400,000 in deferred compensation while Vice President. Halliburton in turn received a $7 billion no-bid contract for work in Iraq. It didn't take long for Halliburton to pull shady moves, and chief contracting officer Bunny Greenhouse, a long-time civil servant with an exemplary record, blew the whistle on the company. In response, the Bush-Cheney administration demoted her. Halliburton's record in Iraq was notable for routinely overcharging the U.S. government, including a $108 million overcharge for fuel and overcharging for food at one camp alone by $16 million over a seven-month period. (See also "Dick Cheney and the Making of Halliburton," a lengthy excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair’s 2005 book on war-profiteering, Grand Theft Pentagon.) A 5/16/07 NPR piece, "What Went Wrong with the Rebuilding of Iraq?" is a useful reminder of how bad the situation was (emphasis added):

Thousands of reconstruction contracts were awarded. And there was plenty of money to go around, including an initial $18 billion appropriated by Congress. Another $20 billion was available from the so-called Development Fund for Iraq — money that was derived from, among other things, Iraqi oil sales. Federal investigations have found that the money was quickly spent, with little planning or accounting.

It was a free-for-all climate best demonstrated when Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, successfully requested that $12 billion in cash be shipped to Iraq. U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), now chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said he was astonished when he heard about it.

"It's hard even now to imagine $12 billion in hundred-dollar bills, wrapped into bricklike bundles, then put on huge pallets and brought over by troop carrier airplanes to be dispersed in a war zone," Waxman said.

"We have no idea where that money went. Of the $12 billion, $8.8 billion is unaccounted for," he said.

Bremer defended his action, suggesting it was naïve to try to impose Western-style accounting practices in Iraq during a war. Several investigations led by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction, have found that the reconstruction effort was riddled with waste, fraud, corruption and shoddy construction. Bowen told NPR's All Things Considered about one particularly bad construction site he investigated — a $75 million police training academy built by Parsons Corp.

"Essentially, when they put in the plumbing, they had no fittings, so they just joined plumbing pipes, cemented them together," he said. "The connections burst once they started to be used, and the sewage thus leaked from the bathrooms down through the building — and into light fixtures and through the ceilings."

Urine and feces dripping into lights and from the ceiling is an apt metaphor for the Bush-Cheney administration's performance in Iraq, but unfortunately, it inflicted an even worse legacy.

Torture

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.
– Dick Cheney on Meet the Press, 9/16/01

Dick Cheney was one of the most zealous proponents for torture in the Bush administration, certainly at his level of power. Wannabe tough guys believe that torture can force someone to tell the truth, but the experts know that torture is only effective at inflicting pain, sowing fear, and eliciting false confessions. The U.S. has scholars, military personnel, and intelligence agents who are fully aware of this, and some sounded the warning about torture to the Bush administration. But torture is about getting the answer the torturer wants to hear versus the truth, and similarly, the Bush-Cheney administration didn't want to acknowledge the truth about torture.

Most of the U.S. media and Congress was and remains reluctant to confront how monstrous the torture regime was, and also how it was used politically. A short piece by Paul Krugman on 4/22/09 summed up a key aspect:

From Jonathan Landay at McClatchy, one of the few reporters to get the story right during the march to war:

The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would’ve provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush’s main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush’s quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.

There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

To recap and rebut the apologia for torture we heard from the Bush-Cheney administration and their allies at the time, I'll quote at some length from one of my more comprehensive posts on the subject, "Torture Versus Freedom" (5/15/09):

Defending torture insistently means one's moral compass is pointing straight down to hell. I continue to believe it's essential to confront the dangerous and evil lie that torture "works" and that we're all going to die if we respect human rights, follow the law, or dare to investigate - let alone prosecute - the people responsible for these horribly shameful and criminal policies. However, as many have noted, that we are "debating" torture's usefulness at all means we've failed somehow as a society. As Scott Horton quipped in December 2008, "Perhaps for Christmas proper we’ll be treated to arguments for and against genocide, and on the fourth day of Christmas we’ll read the arguments for and against the practice of infanticide."

While specific false claims about torture and the Bush administration's conduct should be challenged, it's especially important to emphasize torture's immorality and its clear illegality. Torture is the very antithesis of freedom. The key dynamics are not truth, security or patriotism. They are power, dehumanization and sadism. As Rear Admiral John Hutson observed, "torture is the method of choice of the lazy, the stupid and the pseudo-tough." When someone is tortured, it means that someone else in a position of power over the victim has deliberately chosen to inflict significant pain and suffering on a fellow human being. Torture spreads and corrupts in a democracy. Not only do torturers often not recognize the truth even when it's told to them, sometimes the torturers get so carried away they don't "even bother to ask questions" and "torture becomes an end unto itself." As Soviet-era torture victim Vladimir Bukovsky put it, "Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling?" He also explains how, after several days of torture, "neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again." (See also The Lucifer Effect.)

These abuses have often resulted in permanent or serious physical and psychological damage (although torturers often prefer methods that hide the abuse they've inflicted). Torture is assault of the most cruel variety, robbing the victim of the sanctity of his or her own body, but also his or her very mind and soul. These are not actions to weigh lightly, tactics to endorse or excuse cavalierly, nor damages to forgive quickly before we even know precisely what was done. It's hard to imagine a more clear moral line.

Torture is (1) immoral, (2) illegal, (3) endangers us (especially American troops in the Middle East), and (4) doesn't "work" – unless one wants to inflict pain, terrorize the populace, produce bogus intelligence or elicit false confessions. It's not that torture never produces a true statement, but at best, torture "works" much the same way amputation "cures" all hand ailments. (That's still probably far too generous.) Experienced interrogators know that torture is unreliable and counterproductive in addition to being cruel and illegal. For obtaining reliable information, more humane, rapport-building techniques are far more effective. Furthermore, as John Sifton has pointed out, intel from prisoners typically grows "stale" quickly, and "if you’re relying on interrogations for intelligence, you’re already on the back foot. You’ve already lost the war, so to speak." Regardless, a skilled, experienced interrogator pursuing accurate information would not be approaching a prisoner asking, "How much pain can I legally inflict?" That is a self-defeating, dangerous path that leads all too easily to becoming "the enemies of all humankind."

Almost every excuse from Bush officials and their allies fits somewhere in the following pattern of descending denials: We did not torture; waterboarding is not torture; even if it is torture, it was legal; even if it was illegal, it was necessary; even if it was unnecessary, it was not our fault. Almost every new document and piece of information has exposed lies, deception and crippling inconsistencies in their self-ennobling but accountability-denying tale. The existing evidence does not support a "good faith" defense, but even if it did, an investigation would still be required by law. Anti-torture laws exist in large part to protect all of us from men and women so certain of their own righteousness or need that they torture others (normally until the tortured person says exactly what they want to hear - apparently, precisely what happened here). The "debate" on torture and specific abusive techniques are stalling tactics by torture proponents and apologists, who consistently favor fantasy over reality in their arguments, and want to prevent a full investigation or trial. They will discuss Jack Bauer and hypothetical ticking time bombs endlessly, but not Maher Arar or Binyam Mohamed (among many others). They typically ignore altogether such damning, central evidence as the Red Cross report, which stated authoritatively and unequivocally that prisoners in U.S. custody were tortured. Their specific denials shift depending on their audience, but they almost always ignore that for years we have tortured, abused and imprisoned innocent people. It's much easier to abuse people or justify their abuse, of course, if they're all viewed as guilty, dangerous, alien or subhuman. These practices have often resulted in significant, lasting physical and psychological damage - and even death. (That's not to mention their central role in selling the war in Iraq and the consequences of that.) Ignoring or outright lying about this level of cruelty and abuse embodies the banality and audacity of evil.

(The end of the post links multiple resources on torture.)

After Barack Obama was elected, Dick Cheney still continued to lie about torture, claiming it saved lives but also that he and other members of the Bush administration weren't responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere (which included over one hundred deaths). Although his daughter Liz Cheney joined him in opposing Donald Trump's reelection and did conduct herself admirably during investigative hearings into the January 6th, 2020 insurrection, it's important to remember how awful Liz Cheney has been otherwise, including a utterly despicable 2009 campaign by her and Bill Kristol attacking due process itself and accusing people trying to bring prisoners to trial after years of confinement of being terrorist sympathizers. (For years, the Cheney family essentially argued that if you tried to hold Dick Cheney and his associates responsible for their actions, terrorists would kill you in your beds.)

Due Process

The Bush-Cheney administration repeatedly ignored due process – a cornerstone of civilization – and it and its allies often attacked the people fighting for the basic rule of law as terrorist sympathizers or terrorists. The Bush-Cheney administration asserted that it could simply accuse someone of being a terrorist, not provide any proof, and could imprison or "detain" that person indefinitely. (Oh, and confessions obtained through torture were admissible evidence.) The authoritarianism of all that should be glaring and troubling. It also bears mentioning that the Bush-Cheney administration was incompetent, and seemingly didn't care if innocents were imprisoned, tortured, or killed. McClatchy did a series called Guantanamo: Beyond the Law that found, of the more than 770 terrorist suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay prison, dozens and perhaps hundreds of them were innocent. Nonetheless, innocent Mohammed Akhtiar was held for three years, a nightmare situation. The Bush-Cheney administration also kidnapped and tortured Maher Arar, an innocent Canadian-Syrian citizen (the torture was outsourced to Syria in his case). Innocent Dilawar Dilawar was captured and beaten to death at the U.S.'s Bagram air base in Afghanistan, as chronicled in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. Besides common sense and a moral compass, there were plenty of reasons not to defer to the assertions of the Bush-Cheney administration that it was both infallible and should not be challenged.

A 2008 piece, "Using Justice Against Us," looked at the hack arguments of John Yoo against due process, most of all his attempt to get his audience to ignore that he hadn't proven that the Guantanamo prisoners actually were terrorists, and that giving them the trials Yoo opposed would be the normal way to establish any actual guilt. Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, and many of their colleagues and allies often made similar arguments. You can read the piece for more detail, but it includes a relevant passage from lawyer Scott Horton about the 2008 court decision about Salim Hamdan, a prisoner at Guantanamo. Horton contrasts the Bush-Cheney approach with an American tradition of due process and justice:

The Bush Administration could have handled this matter in the tradition that the nation’s greatest modern attorney general, Robert Jackson, set out at Nuremberg. Jackson personally took charge of the first prosecutions, delivering mesmerizing opening and closing statements and a dramatic cascade of evidence that targeted some of the most heinous criminals from the Second World War. Jackson had two important objectives before he reached the question of the guilt or innocence of the individual defendants: he needed to validate the fairness of the process, and he needed to demonstrate, clearly and convincingly in the eyes of the world, that heinous crimes had been committed which justified this extraordinary tribunal process. Jackson accomplished both goals. He also secured the conviction of key kingpins in the Nazi terror state. He did it all within the first year of the Allied occupation of Germany, through a process that helped transform the German people from enemies to friends. In the end, Jackson and his team demonstrated that the American tradition of justice was a potent tool to be wielded against the nation’s enemies.

By contrast, America has now endured seven years of an administration which fears the rule of law, which operates in the shadows as it contravenes criminal statutes and long-cherished traditions and retaliates mercilessly against civil servants who stand for law and principle. George Bush and his political advisors openly castigate law and justice as weaknesses or vulnerabilities–as public suspicions grow that they have darker reasons to be concerned about the law. Instead of following the historic route and using military commissions that follow the nation’s long-standing traditions, they have crafted embarrassing kangaroo courts. When the Supreme Court brought its gavel down on one of their shameful contraptions, they simply concocted another, equally shameful one, openly proclaiming an inferior brand of justice for those who were "not citizens," exalting in the right to use torture-extracted evidence and to transact the proceedings in secret.

The Bush-Cheney administration's contempt for due process can also be seen in its warrantless surveillance program, which completely ignored the Fourth Amendment, among other protections. Dick Cheney and his aide David Addington were some of the most strident proponents of the program, and in 2007, former Deputy Attorney General James Comey gave vivid testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Bush-Cheney officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card being sent to bully Attorney General John Ashcroft in his hospital bed to renew the program. (Ashcroft, despite being extremely conservative, admirably stuck to principles and refused to do so, and pointed to Comey as the acting attorney general.)

An added tidbit: Angler author Barton Gellman read Cheney's memoir, and makes a convincing case that Cheney's account of the incident, that Ashcroft said he would renew the program before Gonzales and Card came over, is a lie. Also, "the relationship between Cheney and Bush, who was unaware of the Justice Department’s objections to the program until the last minute, was never the same . . . [Gellman says it was] 'the day the president of the United States discovered that the vice president’s zeal could lead him off a cliff.' "

Plutocracy

Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.
– Dick Cheney to Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill in 2002, as recounted in The Price of Loyalty by Ron Suskind.

The U.S. conservative playbook since at least Reagan has been to increase military spending and funnel money to the rich, increasing both the national deficit and the national debt, and then claim that it's necessary to cut the social safety net to balance the budget. This strategy even has a name: "starving the beast." As we've covered in other posts, Reagan did it, and the Trump tax bill was likewise an abomination meant mainly to benefit those who were already wealthy. George W. Bush had two rounds of tax cuts, in 2001 and 2003, which mostly benefitted the rich. Even Bush didn't see the reason for the 2003 cuts and his Secretary of the Treasury at the time, Paul O'Neill, also opposed them. But Cheney (and Karl Rove, among others) pushed for them, and ultimately they got their way. Cheney was smart enough to know that the 2003 cuts (and the 2001 cuts) were fiscally irresponsible and bad for Americans as a whole, but still chose to funnel more money to the wealthy (including himself) in a country with already awful wealth inequality. He chose ideology and class warfare (by the rich) over good policy.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is one of the better sites for budget analysis, and wrote many posts about the Bush budgets and tax cuts. "Critics Still Wrong on What’s Driving Deficits in Coming Years" (6/28/10) provided an analysis of the deficit causes (mostly the Bush tax cuts) and rebutted false claims from the conservative Heritage Foundation that the causes were Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. "Economic Downturn and Legacy of Bush Policies Continue to Drive Large Deficits" (2/28/13) updated some data and provided an updated chart of the drivers of public debt:

"The Legacy of the 2001 and 2003 "Bush” Tax Cuts" (10/23/17) noted that the cuts did not boost economic growth as conservatives claimed would happen, and the post also provided a handy chart of who the tax cuts benefited:

Virtually every Republican, nominally "conservative" national political figure of the past 30 years has likewise championed policies to make the United States into even more of a plutocracy. That certainly applies to both Dick and Liz Cheney. They're not unique in that respect, but it bears pointing out that rather than serving the public, they have served Mammon, their rich donors, and themselves.

(Some of my more thorough posts on wealth inequality and conservative tax policies [and their extremity] are "Attack of the Plutocrats" (7/18/10), "Tax Cuts to the Rich Don't Raise Revenues" (10/26/10) and "Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice" (7/28/11).

Monarchial Powers for the President

Americans who graduated from elementary school might remember that the United States of America was founded due to a revolution against the abuses of a monarch. College-level courses will go into much more depth and nuance (and the hypocrisies of America's founding), but nonetheless, the idea that "all men are created equal" is a powerful, stirring one, and in direct opposition to the notion of aristocratic or dictatorial rule.

The more zealous proponents of the "unitary executive theory" lack the understanding of an attentive elementary school student, preferring instead the batshit theory that America's founding fathers wanted the U.S. president to have unchecked, monarchial powers, or as Donald Trump put it, "I have the right to do whatever I want as president."

Angler has the best account I've found on Cheney's views on presidential power. Reagan and many of his top officials should have gone to jail for the Iran-Contra Affair, but in Congress' report on the affair, Cheney and his aide David Addington wrote the dissenting opinion, and asserted that Reagan and his team had unchecked power, as the founding fathers intended. To support this argument, they cherry-picked passages from The Federalist, demonstrating scholarship so grotesquely crappy and nakedly self-serving that it'd receive a failing grade from any competent professor and uproarious laughter from any non-authoritarians if the consequences weren't so dire.

If you can't get your hands on a copy of Angler, the Frontline episode "Cheney's Law" is a good resource, as is a supplemental page of interviews. (Historian Rick Perlstein is also planning to cover the Cheney-Addington Iran-Contra arguments in a future book.)

Cheney's cherry-picking wasn't limited to the office of the U.S. President; he also practiced it for his own job. Cheney claimed he didn't have to comply with National Archive requests for materials because the Vice President has duties in both the executive and legislative branches, and therefore, somehow, rather than having obligations to both branches and their rules, he was subject to neither. (Obviously, the founding fathers intended that the VP should be an unaccountable political figure.)

A Negative, Dark Legacy

I suspect that Dick Cheney convinced himself that every questionable or flatly illegal action he took was for the good of the country, even those that personally benefitted him. But for all its flaws, the U.S. government was set up in the Constitution to have a set of checks and balances. And on a good team, good ideas can survive scrutiny and discussion. They don't require lies, misrepresentation, or hiding. The torture program was evil. Starting an unnecessary war, a war of choice, was evil. Using deception to sell the war was evil. Ignoring due process was evil. Attacking the patriotism of war skeptics and the stewards of due process was despicable. Making wealth inequality in the U.S. worse is unconscionable. Asserting that the U.S. President should have monarchial powers is anti-historical and dangerous. Dick Cheney's legacy is overwhelmingly a negative, dark, evil one. (If the word "evil" makes you uncomfortable, substitute "extremely harmful" or another term.) Cheney is not someone to be lauded and not a model to follow; he is a cautionary tale. He was convinced he was correct and had atrocious judgment. He fought, often viciously, to have his way, and we Americans and the world are the worse for it.

The Tyranny of the Minority and The Extremism of the Republican Party

Part One: The Tyranny of the Minority

Two government professors at Harvard have a new book out called The Tyranny of the Minority, which accurately warns that the Republican Party has been increasingly anti-democratic and right-wing, despite or because of losing the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections. The book, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, is a follow-up to their 2018 book, How Democracies Die. The PBS NewsHour broadcast a decent interview with the authors on 9/14/23. You can view or listen to the 7:25 video or audio at the link above, or read a full transcript, or play the YouTube version below:



Some key excerpts, starting with Ziblatt:

To be a party committed to democracy, you have to do three very simple things. Number one, you have to accept election losses, win or lose. Number two, you have to not use violence to gain or to hold onto power. And then, number three, most critically, in some sense, for mainstream political parties, is you have to distance yourself and be explicit and open about condemning anybody who's an ally of your party that commits any of those first two types of acts.

To be a party committed to democracy, in order for democracy to survive, the political parties in a political system have to ascribe to all three of those principles. This applies to parties of the right and of the left.

And I think what is so concerning, as Steve described, is that over the last four years, we have seen a process of decay within the Republican Party where all three of those principles are violated, but, in particular, most recently among mainstream members of the Senate.

Levitsky:

So, semi-loyal democrats are tricky, because they look like regular politicians. They look like mainstream politicians. They are, in fact, mainstream politicians.

They are in the halls of Congress. They are wearing suits. They look and talk and act like regular small-D democrats. But the key difference is their willingness to tolerate, to condone, to justify, sometimes to protect antidemocratic extremists.

And we have seen throughout history that when mainstream politicians of the left or the right tolerate, condone, protect extremists on the right or the left, democracies get into trouble. And so who are we talking about in the Republican Party today? Mainstream Republican Party leaders, Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell, leading senators, leading governors.

Both this book and their previous one offer some welcome international context on democracies in other countries and compare them to the United States – challenges, failures and better systems. Ziblatt touches on this briefly in the interview:

One big difference between the United States and a country like Hungary or other countries where democratic backsliding has really established single-party rule, we have constraints and there's a strong opposition to these forces.

That's certainly the case at the national level. What's so striking, though, because we have a federal system, that there are states in the United States where there are assaults on voting rights taking place, where there's extreme levels of gerrymandering, so that it makes it possible for a party that doesn't win the most votes to actually win control of state legislatures, where courts are then packed at the local — at the state level as well.

So what we see across the United States is increasingly a divide between states where you continue to have voting rights and democracy and states where democracy is really under assault.

Ziblatt closes by listing some concrete steps and perhaps some hopeful notes:

Some of the things that we discussed in the book and we propose, we have a 15-point set of suggestions in our last chapter, including things such as eliminating the Electoral College — we're the only democracy in the world with an Electoral College — introducing term limits and retirement ages for the Supreme Court.

We're the only democracy in the world that doesn't have retirement ages or term limits for national judges. We also propose some reforms that don't require constitutional reforms, such as eliminating or at least weakening the filibuster, the filibuster in the United States, since we're the only democracy in the world that has such a strong tool of obstruction in one of our chambers of Congress.

This tool of obstruction blocks very often majority-supported policies, gun control, efforts to address climate change, the minimum wage. Things get held up in the national Congress, which frustrates citizens. So we think there needs to be a kind of a sweeping reform agenda.

And one of the things we have discovered looking at other democracies, I should add, is that, when constitutional reforms come, they tend to cluster together. Momentum is gained. People get – regain faith in their political system. And we think this is very much part of the American tradition.

Where we are operating today without this is outside of the American tradition. And this is something we need to get back to.

This is all on point, and it's heartening to see more people considered mainstream and respectable sound the alarm about U.S. conservatism and the Republican Party. The phrase "tyranny of the minority" is nothing new; Rebecca Solnit and Michelle Goldberg both wrote good pieces with that title in 2017, and similar critiques go back further. Liberals and progressives have been accurately pointing out these dangers for over two decades now at least, but we're often not heeded, which remains a big problem, but nonetheless any truth that breaks through is welcome.

For more on the book, The Harvard Gazette did an interview, Steven Levitsky gave a lectue at Brown University, and the New York Journal of Books and Vox both have reviews.

Part Two: The Extremism of the Republican Party

Most mainstream media outlets remain reluctant to call out the extremism of U.S. conservatives and the Republican Party, and by their reticence help normalize that extremism, however inadvertently. Politeness takes precedence over accuracy. The Republican Party has become increasingly conservative and increasingly right-wing, and as a result, in mainstream media labeling, the actual political positions held by political figures called "centrists" or "moderates" have moved further to the right as well. (Classic Overton window dynamics.)

The PBS NewsHour is a good program overall, but its team seems to have made an editorial decision that any conservative or Republican who isn't far right should be called a "moderate." I've noticed it for several years, and PBS is hardly alone in this approach. Although PBS' Laura Barrón-López is a pretty good reporter and interviewer, she did exactly this early in the interview featured above:

Do you see Senator Romney's retirement as a sign that, rather than weed out the extremists in their party, Republicans are weeding out moderate Republicans like Romney and Liz Cheney?

I'd let this go if other reporters didn't use similar, misleading terminology so consistently. This approach is an ongoing problem in U.S. political coverage – normalizing conservative and Republican extremism, and not just by hacks, but even by people who presumably are trying to provide good reporting. It would be accurate to call Romney more moderate than other members of his party on at least some issues, and Liz Cheney did comport herself well during the January 6th committee hearings. It is fair to say they're being weeded out. But both Romney and Cheney are conservative, in many ways extremely so, with some horrible positions, which not incidentally are common in the Republican Party. As of a 2021 analysis by FiveThirtyEight, Romney voted with the Donald Trump agenda 75.0% of the time (which was less than many of his Republican colleagues) and Cheney voted with the Trump agenda 92.9% of the time.

Romney does deserve some credit for voting to convict Trump in both his impeachment trials (even if his vote "no" that Trump didn't obstruct Congress remains ridiculous), and Romney did put common sense and by his own account conscience above significant political and social pressure. It's technically true but a bit misleading, however, to say that Romney is "the first senator who has ever voted to remove a president of his own party"; Richard Nixon would have been both impeached and convicted by members of his party as well, but he resigned before it could happen. (The House impeaches, and the Senate convicts.) Liz Cheney, meanwhile, voted to impeach Trump in 2021 for the January 6th insurrection, but voted against impeaching him in 2020 for "withholding military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to extract dirt on rivals including Joe Biden," and said in 2022 she does not regret that vote. Her defense that the "evidence that was put on didn’t make the case" strains credulity, given the evidence presented. The Republican votes in favor of Trump in both cases were pure political loyalty and sheer political corruption.

It's worth considering Cheney and Romney's histories in a little more depth. It is nice that Liz Cheney respects election results, low bar though that may be, but she's always been pretty authoritarian herself. Liz Cheney has supported torture, opposed due process, and opposed investigating and holding accountable the Bush administration torture team, notably including her own father, Dick Cheney. This 2010 post covers some of that territory and includes a roundup of links on a disgusting attack ad run by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol's Orwellian-named group, "Keep America Safe." This 2009 post focuses more on Dick Cheney trying to whitewash his torture record, but also touches on Liz Cheney's efforts to cover for him and the corporate media enabling it. There's also Liz Cheney in 2009 echoing her father's attacks on then-President Barack Obama for proposing to shut down Guantanamo, and arguing for torture to Anderson Cooper, including brazenly lying to his face about the key findings of the Schlesinger report on torture, and shamelessly accusing Obama of covering up the truth of the torture program (she and her cohorts prefer the Orwellian term "enhanced interrogation techniques"). In no world are supporting torture and defending torturers "moderate" positions.

Liz Cheney also can be fairly called a plutocrat, like most of her Republican colleagues, having voted for the Trump tax cuts in 2017, which like the Reagan and George W. Bush tax cuts, were (to quote a 2022 post):

. . . plutocratic, funneling even more money to the wealthiest Americans to please rich donors. Contrary to Republican claims, the corporate tax cuts did not trickle down and the tax plan did not pay for itself; they just gave rich people more money.

As the Council on Foreign Relations summarized in 2022, "income and wealth inequality is higher in the United States than in almost any other developed country, and it is rising." That post, and the website Inequality.org, have some helpful charts. (My most in-depth post on income and wealth inequality was this 2010 one, with several other posts in the category.) Given how extreme income and wealth inequality already is in the United States, especially compared to other developed countries, and the increasing economic pressures on the majority of Americans, I consider it unconscionable (or just evil) to actively work to support more inequality, favoring the rich and powerful. That unconscionable mindset is unfortunately a common one among conservative politicians, but I don't think it can fairly be called "moderate." (I'll add that many political figures labeled "centrist" by the mainstream media are really conservatives in their actual positions, or at the very least establishmentarians.)

Romney was not in the Senate for the Trump tax cut vote, but states on his Senate website that he would have supported it – while simultaneously claiming he "fought against both tax cuts for the wealthy and tax hikes on the middle class"! Romney is counting on readers not knowing his record or details of the law, and not spotting the direct contradiction (or simply believes in his powers of bullshitting). Romney, like many conservatives, isn't merely plutocratic but downright neofeudalistic – when he ran for president in the 2012 election, he adopted his running mate Paul Ryan's extreme policies to give a massive tax cut to the rich but also to gut the social safety net, including ending Medicare as it existed. Romney didn't get the flack an honest assessment of his policies should have received, because voters "simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing." (Much more analysis and links in the stealthy extremist section of this 2012 post.) The same dynamics often play out for conservative political positions – mainstream media outlets seem reluctant to describe them accurately in terms of their likely effects or their extremism, which gives cover for their mostly Republican proponents.

As with almost every Republican presidential nominee since Nixon, Romney used racist dogwhistles. In August 2012, he boasted that "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate," feeding into the racist, bullshit "birther" conspiracies about Barack Obama. He also ran a number of ads with racist dogwhistles about welfare and Medicare, continuing, as Chauncey DeVega pointed out, "the Southern Strategy, and the politics of white racial resentment." Similar dynamics were at play with Romney's infamous remarks in 2012 that 47 percent of Americans would back Obama "no matter what" because they "believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them," and who "pay no income tax." Romney's claims were at best grossly misleading, and taken in larger context were outright false (as I covered in more depth in one section of a broader 2014 post, which did also cover Romney's multiple, contradictory revisions about his remarks).

Donald Trump lies almost constantly, and may be unbeatable in that category. But during his presidential campaign in 2011–2012, Mitt Romney told at least 917 falsehoods that Steve Benen diligently chronicled and fact-checked, and many were substantial lies at that. This wasn't a new trait, either; Romney was lying and bullshitting at least as far back as his 2007–2008 presidential run. (I have posts from 2007 on some Romney "hogwash" and the sophistry of his anti-JFK speech.)

Mitt Romney has often acted as other people are beneath him and lack the capacity to see through obvious bullshit, as when he argued opposite positions to different audiences in subsequent weeks. (The same trend comes up in Steve Benen's exhaustive series.) The most infamous example is probably from 2011, when at the Iowa State Fair Romney argued against increasing taxes on corporations by condescendingly telling a man that "Corporations are people, my friend." When the crowd responded by yelling out the obvious point, "No, they're not!" Romney replied with a straw man, "Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?" Besides these arguments being ridiculous on the merits, it's interesting that Romney believed they would be effective politically. Faced with a crowd who wanted to protect the social safety net, raise taxes on the rich and corporations, and presumably overturn the Citizens United decision – all for the benefit of the vast majority of Americans – Romney essentially argued that corporate profits benefit stockholders (who are, technically, "people") and thus critiques of economic inequality and unequal power were invalid. Romney did express (smugly) what and who he actually values in society, as he did with his 47 percent remarks, and also betrayed an entitled, privileged narcissism that seems extremely prone to bullshitting audiences he holds in slight to significant contempt. Although Trump remains much worse in this arena, Romney shares some of Trump's worst traits.

For much more on Romney, see Jon Perr's comprehensive 7/4/22 post, "Mitt Romney Is in Denial," which superbly shows how Romney is no elder statesman, and is in fact a raging hypocrite who shares much of the blame for the current problems in American politics, which Romney instead tries to blame on 'both sides.'

So it's fine to give Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney credit for their pro-democracy moments. And it's sadly probably accurate that Romney's replacement will be worse, and his departure means that congressional Republicans as a whole will become more extreme. But let's not ignore Romney and Cheney's records and other positions. Every time conservatives and Republicans get worse, there's a tendency to look back at some earlier time with rose-colored glasses and laud an earlier generation of conservatives and Republicans, who might have a bit better in some respects, but were honestly still pretty awful. It's both possible and necessary to acknowledge both realities.

And how awful are their fellow conservatives and Republicans? The vast majority of congressional Republicans voted to defend Trump's attempted coup on January 6th, 2021 and have fought against any accountability for Trump and his cohorts. Most of the Republican presidential candidates (or vice-presidential candidates) would support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he were a convicted felon. Republican legislators in at least 11 states have been working to make it harder to vote. Conservatism has always had an antidemocratic strain, but the Republican Party has become increasingly, overtly anti-democratic and extreme.

Conservatives and Republicans are fighting hard against LGBT rights. They're also fighting against accurate discussions of racial issues and history, with a particularly egregious Florida teaching standard claiming that slavery benefited some black people (a view that Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has promoted several times). Republicans are still both trying to gut the social safety net and lying about it. And as has been observed before, the Republican Party is really the only major political party in a developed nation that both denies climate change and opposes universal health care. Unfortunately, conservatives and Republicans have chosen to be bad on almost every issue. (A 2018 post surveys their policies in the most depth.)

As of the writing of this post, Congress has narrowly averted yet another Republican-led attempt to shut down the government. As the BBC points out, this doesn't happen in other developed countries. And as many folks have pointed out, the shutdowns are Republican attempts to enforce agendas that they cannot achieve democratically. (Conservative and Republican policies tend to be both bad on the merits and unpopular.)

Media coverage has occasionally correctly blamed the Republican Party for this latest shutdown attempt, but as Dan Froomkin, Ian Milhiser and James Fallows via driftglass have pointed out, there's still a strong media tendency to blame 'both sides.' This is inaccurate, irresponsible and dangerous. (It's also nothing new. I haven't covered every shutdown attempt in depth, but covered the same dynamics in 2011's "Extremism in Defense of Nihilism Is a Vice" and " 'Serious' Culpability on the Debt Ceiling Hostage Situation" and 2012's "Why We Can't Have Nice Things." See also the more general false equivalencies category.)

Defeating the tyranny of the minority depends on conscientious lawmakers, civil servants, activists and citizens. But it also depends on more accurate and honest reporting. Extremism should not be normalized, blame and credit should be justly and proportionally assigned, and anti-democratic rhetoric and actions must be called out.

OMG Liz Cheney was RIGHT!

Following up on this recent post, here's a nice piece of satire from Air Force Reserve Lt. Col. David Frakt, "who served as a defense lawyer for Guantánamo detainees in 2008 and 2009." It's called "Confessions of a terrorist sympathizer," and recounts an interview with Rachel Maddow too dangerous to air:

Maddow: Lt. Col. David Frakt is a JAG officer in the U.S. Air Force Reserve and a law professor in California. Professor Frakt, welcome back to the program.

Frakt: Happy to be here, Rachel.

Maddow: Is it true that you’re a terrorist sympathizer?

Frakt: Yes, Rachel. That’s why, in 2008, I volunteered to represent detainees at Guantánamo. The chance to actually be a U.S. government-paid spokesperson for al-Qaida under the guise of "promoting fairness, justice and the rule of law" was just too delicious an opportunity to pass up. I figured the military commissions at Guantánamo would be the perfect soapbox for me to espouse my terrorist ideology.

Maddow: And did your position as a defense counsel give you the opportunities that you were seeking?

Frakt: Not exactly, Rachel. The whole experience was a bit disappointing. Initially, things looked very positive. The first detainee I was assigned to represent, Ali Hamza al Bahlul, was a member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle and a very committed al-Qaida member. In fact, he has been frequently referred to as the al-Qaida minister of propaganda. So, I thought I’d hit the jackpot.

Maddow: So why didn’t it work out?

Read the rest at the link.

Why Does Liz Cheney Hate Civilization?

If you follow politics, chances are you've seen the latest attack ad from the Orwellian-named organization Keep America Safe, run by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol (and featuring the neocon stylings of Michael Goldfarb):



When I first saw this last week, my first reaction was a steady stream of profanity. It may be the most repulsive political ad I've ever seen. Cheney, Kristol and the gang aren't attacking specific people or policies per se. They are attacking the very notions of justice, of due process, of a fair legal system, and the rule of law. Everyone is entitled to a fair trial. (Actual terrorists tend to get convicted in fair trials.) A fair judicial system is one of the defining features of civilization.

This isn't some closely-held secret. It's basic civics.

Liz Cheney, Kristol and the rest are instead pushing a radical, bullying authoritarianism identical to that of any dictator. They are calling these lawyers the "Al Qaeda Seven," implying that they are in league with terrorists if not terrorists themselves. And put this ad in the context of their many other statements. Instead of a fair justice system, they insist that the government can merely accuse someone of being a terrorist, never provide proof, hold that person indefinitely, and never put him or her on trial. That person cannot see all of the charges against him or her. Nor should s/he have a lawyer, and any lawyer who provides the required representation is a traitor. Oh, and the government can torture and abuse prisoners as well – and false confessions obtained through torture can be used as proof against a prisoner.

Their attack ad is absolutely reprehensible, and should be widely and loudly condemned. But in a sense, this assault is nothing new. Cheney is really only articulating the core dogma of the Bush administration. Far right zealots have expressed the same basic views since 9/11, if not before. This is merely one of the most blatant, hostile, high-profile expressions of their doctrine of absolute, dictatorial, unaccountable power. And as many people have noted, these attacks are pure McCarthyism.

Many people have also noted that John Adams defended the British soldiers put on trial for the Boston Massacre (its anniversary was last week), and was proud to have done so. Upholding the rule of law and giving fair trials is the very essence of patriotism.

I was disgusted but unsurprised to see that CNN ran with Liz Cheney's "Department of Jihad" characterization and treated it seriously (CNN did offer an apology later, if a weak one). I was glad to see some conservative lawyers not only speak out, but draft a formal condemnation. Even David Rivkin and Lee Casey signed it, and they've zealously defended nearly every abuse of the Bush administration. (I've got a long, older post on Rivkin here.) When even leading torture apologists like Rivkin break with you, you know you've gone way too far.

Keep America Safe's key goals seem to have been "Keep Dick Cheney out of jail," "Start more wars," and "Fear-monger to raise cash." It looks like they've decided to add "Finish the destruction of the Constitution started under Bush/Cheney." You'd think that Liz Cheney would be ecstatic that to date, her dad Dick has dodged going on trial for war crimes. Why push their luck? And what would be worse, that Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol actually believe this vile bullshit they're shilling - or that they're cynically fear-mongering? I think they're simultaneously hacks and zealots, happy to lie but also true believers in some truly radical views. Regardless, they're claiming a fair judicial system is dangerous, and thus attacking the very foundations of civilization.

I've seen many good pieces on this despicable ad, so here's a round-up:

Spencer Ackerman: "Latest Conservative Smear Calls Justice Dept. Lawyers Terror-Sympathizers" (2/26/10)

Glenn Greenwald: "Salon Radio: The lawyers smeared by Liz Cheney" (3/3/10)

Digby: "Tearing Off Pieces" (3/4/10)

Dahlia Lithwick: "More Than Words: Liz Cheney says terrorists have no rights. Also, you're a terrorist." (3/5/10)

Greenwald: "The WP's employment of a fear-mongering smear artist" (3/5/10)

Crooks and Liars: "CNN Only Too Happy To Parrot Liz Cheney's Scare Tactics and Fear Mongering" (3/5/10)

Greenwald: "The full-scale collapse: From Murrow to Blitzer" (3/4/10)

C&L: "Blitzer Apologizes for "Any Confusion Caused" by "Department of Jihad?" Chryon" (3/5/10)

C&L: Rachel Maddow follow-up (3/6/10)

C&L: "Countdown: Conservatives Outraged With Liz Cheney's Fear Mongering" (3/6/10)

Balkinization: "John Adams Meets Joe McCarthy" (3/6/10)

Balkinization: "Have You No Sense of Decency?" (3/6/10)

Scott Horton: "Incompetent McCarthyism and Shared Belief" (3/8/10)

"Countdown: Ken Starr decries CheneyCo's shameless attacks on detainee defense attorneys" (3/8/10)

Digby: "Stale Cupcakes" (3/9/10)

C&L: "And You Thought We Left The Monarchy In England? Liz Cheney's Thinking of Running for Office" (3/9/10)

If, like me, you could use a laugh after all of Cheney's McCarthyism, here ya go. Of all the responses to the attack ad, so far Rachel Maddow's is the funniest:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Maddow's done other pieces since (one's linked in the roundup above). And of course all this all continues. Predictably, torture apologist Marc Thiessen wrote an op-ed defending Cheney's McCarthyism. I'd like to delve into it in greater detail, but Steve Benen links some of the better debunks, and Scott Horton and David Luban also have good pieces on it.

 

No Way to Run an Empire

"Caligula had to appoint that horse. Here they are nominated by acclamation." - Roy Edroso

(This post was originally part of "American Political Insanity Explained," but I thought it might be better as a separate piece. So. Ahem.)

While it's not a surprise that there are evil bastards in the world, and that plenty of people in power are selfish and/or flat-out idiotic, I'll admit to being surprised at the ruling class' almost total lack of concern for basic competence. Is this any way for the business class to run a business? Don't the neocons have any interest in being competent imperialists? Where's the basic self-respect from our would-be Machiavellis and Neros?

While "enlightened self-interest," which generally points toward more liberal policies, might be too much to expect from an entrenched establishment, I at least thought that "savvy, evil self-interest" might win the day. When you're in the top 10%, or especially the top 1% (or 0.1%) of the population in the richest country on Earth – and you will remain so, even under extremely progressive policies – giving a slightly larger sliver of that wealth back to the country is smarter than becoming more greedy. One, it's revolution insurance (as Digby's called it), and two, as Paul Krugman and others have shown, the economy as a whole will do better, and this could easily make you, an evil rich bastard, even more money, which is in your view the goal - nay - the very pinnacle of human achievement. Alas, our evil rich bastards are letting their country down. They would rather fight for the best staterooms on the Titanic (and burn all the lifeboats reserved for the unwashed lower orders).

While the Democratic Party certainly has its problems (especially the Blue Dogs and the Larry Summers crowd), the current Republican dogma is incoherent and completely unworkable for actually running a country. The Bush years showed this, painfully. It's one thing to be a ruthless scumbag, but to be so reckless about everything is stunning. Over the past few decades, several conservatives have proudly adopted the nickname "the Prince of Darkness," (or something similar) yet none has been an evil genius – just evil. (Bush was more the Inspector Clouseau of evil.) No one's ever really doubted that Dick Cheney is a nasty asshole, but his fans mistakenly thought that he'd be their asshole, and that his nastiness would translate into tough, effective foreign policy and basic competence. Instead, even the would-be emperors seem more driven by psychological need than any steely-eyed realism.

The Emperor has no clothes, but in the Beltway, saying so means one isn't "serious." The Mayberry Machiavellis of the Bush White House thought policy was irrelevant and only public relations mattered, but driving all of this was the staggering hubris that they could not be wrong, could not fail, and could re-shape existence itself, unlike the reality-based community. They have plenty of company today in both politics and the press. Call this approach what you will: the fantasy-based community, inept McCarthyism, Tinkerbell thinking, the Green Lantern Theory, or perhaps the foam finger brigade. What's essential to them is to yell that America is the bestest country ever – and shout down anyone treasonous enough to actually work to make it so. It's hard to deal with a crowd that puts almost all their energy into tribal rituals affirming their inherent superiority and attacking those too "uncivil" to play along. Granted, not everyone actually bought into that revolution against the British Empire, or the whole principles of American democracy. Still - this is no way to run an empire.

The Failures of Movement Conservatism

Politically, movement conservatism did well for quite a while, from Reagan to Gingrich to Bush the Younger, but the majority of American voters rejected it in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Discontent may help it rebound in 2010 and 2012, which is troubling, because movement conservative policies have been absolutely horrendous for America.

Back on 1/3/10, Digby linked "Remembering Naught" by Devilstower over at Daily Kos. Here's the key section:

As tempting as it is to forget the bad times, the reason there's a whole friggin' biological system built around the idea of burning these events irrevocably into your cerebellum in 18pt type is so you don't do it again...

Don't forget the naughts, because this decade, no matter what anyone on the right might say, was conservatism on trial. You want less taxes? You got less taxes. You want less regulation? You got less regulation. Open markets? Wide open. An illusuion of security in place of rights? Hey, presto. You want unlimited power given to military contractors so they can kick butt and take names? Man, we handed out boots and pencils by the thousands. Everything, everything, that ever showed up on a drooled-over right wing wish list got implemented -- with a side order of Freedom Fries.

They will try to disown it, and God knows if I was responsible for this mess I'd be disowning it, too. But the truth is that the conservatives got everything they wanted in the decade just past, everything that they've claimed for forty years would make America "great again". They didn't fart around with any "red dog Republicans." They rolled over their moderates and implemented a conservative dream.

What did we get for it? We got an economy in ruins, a government in massive debt, unending war, and the repudiation of the world. There's no doubt that Republicans want you to forget the last decade, because if you remember... if you remember when you went down to the water hole and were jumped by every lunacy that ever emerged from the wet dreams of Grover Norquist and Dick Cheney, well, it's not likely that you'd give them a chance to do it again.

Because they will. Given half a chance -- less than half -- they'll do it again, only worse. Because that's the way conservatism works. Remember when the only answer to every economic problem was "cut taxes?" We have a surplus. Good, let's cut taxes. We have a deficit. Hey, cut taxes even more! That little motto was unchanging even when was clear that the tax cuts were increasing the burden on everyone but a wealthy few. That's just a subset of the great conservative battle whine which is now and forever "we didn't go far enough." If deregulation led to a crash, it's because we didn't deregulate enough. If the wars aren't won, it's because we haven't started enough wars. If there are people still clinging to their rights, it's because we haven't done enough to make them afraid.

Forget the naughts, and you'll forget that conservatives had another chance to prove all their ideas, and that their ideas utterly and completely failed. Again.

Digby added:

I don't deny that the corporate Democrats are screwed up too. But they didn't invent this political world. As I quipped before, they just learned to stop worrying and love the money. This world of graft and corruption and unfettered greed was the conservative movement's idea of utopia. And they got it.

I tried to make the same basic points in "The Persistence of Ideology" (which also covers the current conservative zeal for torture). Movement conservative ideology, or dogma, has been exposed as completely disastrous, except for perhaps a select few. Yet conservatives are still shilling it. And the media mostly do not call them on it. Of all the chronic and horrible flaws of our mainstream media, the biggest is probably ignoring how horrible the Bush years were on almost every conceivable front. Neil's Irwin's good WaPo articleon the "lost decade" economically has gotten a fair amount of attention. It's not as if America's economic woes are some big secret, though, even though the details are important. But despite the demonstrated failures of conservative economic policies (and throw in some blame for Bill Clinton, Summers, Rubin and the gang), it's hard to go more than a week without reading about some conservative (or purported "moderate") touting tax cuts for the wealthy and powerful, and slashing social spending such as education, hospitals, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (Steve Benen and Balloon Juice track these claims pretty diligently). Libertarian John Stossel attacks regulation and extols Ayn Rand (more on his cherry-picking in another post, perhaps, although I think it's fairly obvious). Schwarzenegger and California deserve their own post, but he continues to refuse to raise taxes on the rich (if anything, he'll cut them) and has threatened deep cuts to social services.

Back on 11/10/09, Paul Krugman noted the latest bile from Dick Armey, and wrote:

There’s a persistent delusion, on the part of many pundits, to the effect that we’re actually having a rational political discussion in this country. But we aren’t. The proposition that the Community Reinvestment Act caused all the bad stuff, because government forced helpless bankers into lending to Those People, has been refuted up, down, and sideways. The vast bulk of subprime lending came from institutions not subject to the CRA. Commercial real estate lending, which was mainly lending to rich white developers, not you-know-who, is in much worse shape than subprime home lending. Etc., etc.

But in Dick Armey’s world, in fact on the right as a whole, the affirmative-action-made-them-do-it doctrine isn’t even seen as a hypothesis. It’s just a fact, something everyone knows.

Truly, sometimes I despair.

Conservative partisans don't seem to get that acknowledging the failure of Bush policies is not itself partisan. Media figures are afraid to state the obvious for fear of being called partisan. Reasonable people, pretty much by definition, are interested in what works, regardless of political labels, and seek to avoid what doesn't. The old line is that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. I'll explore this more in later posts, but: Opposing Reagonomics, and really all of the Bush administration's policies, is not (necessarily) a partisan matter at all – it's basic sanity.

Day of Shame 2010

Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy reminds me the February 5th is the Day of Shame, the anniversary of Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations. Full of falsehoods, and not very convincing for all that, the presentation played a crucial role in selling the Iraq War to the American people. Most Americans didn't listen too carefully to what was said, but they trusted Powell. While Powell has since tried to portray himself as a dupe, he knew that specific charges were dubious or outright bullshit, and certainly knew that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were exploiting his credibility.

It's important not to let this go down the Memory Hole, especially when so many people in politics and the media are trying to pretend the Bush years never happened and/or no one's to blame. This was not an innocent mistake. It was deliberate deception. For the most part, those in power and influence who bought the case for war haven't truly acknowledged their error. Richard Cohen is a blithering idiot, but he's not alone in insisting that he was wrong for the right reasons, while those who saw through the bullshit were somehow right for the wrong reasons. Cohen is dead wrong as usual, and couldn't accurately describe the anti-war objections if his life depended on it. It's one thing to have been wrong, though, but it's quite another never to learn anything from such mistakes. Too many people with power and influence haven't, and that's what's dangerous.

I'd recommend, as always, the books Angler by Barton Gellman and The Dark Side by Jane Meyer for a good overview of the staggering abuses of power and horrendous mismanagement of the Bush administration. The Frontline specials on the Bush years, particularly "The Dark Side," "Cheney's Law," "The Lost Year in Iraq" or the compilation "Bush's War," are also excellent.

There's plenty more that needs to come out, though, and among other things, the Justice Department should be doing a full investigation of the torture regime. The Obama administration has in some cases borrowed from the Bush playbook. Granting prisoners due process is a strength, not a weakness. Meanwhile, the number of people running around casually or emphatically endorsing torture – despite its immorality, illegality, ineffectiveness and endangerment of Americans – is truly disturbing.

The Day of Shame website has more, and links to other posts. My most extensive post on the subject is this one from 2008. Peace.