Cheney Unhinged

Self-righteousness is necessarily facilitated in intelligent people by a lack of self-awareness: The person who proudly and dogmatically claims he is right about a matter that otherwise rouses a respectable debate is usually a person who doesn't notice his own pride and dogmatism. So it was with former Vice President Dick Cheney's speech today, exonerating himself and his late administration (which in George W. Bush's present silence seems as if it belonged chiefly to Cheney) of any misdeeds in prosecuting their war on terrorists. He maligned the motives and mischaracterized the statements of Democrats, damned President Obama with faint praise when he wasn't implying that Obama is naive, ridiculed the president (without naming him) for using "euphemisms" in referring to the war on terror -- moments after the president said that it was indeed a war -- and then turned around and kept using the Republicans' insistent euphemism about torture: "enhanced interrogation techniques" (which congressional Republicans are now shortening to "EIT's", not even wanting to use that phrase).

While in the middle of a speech half-devoted to unctuous and sarcastic dismissal of those who disagree with him, and while denouncing unnamed individuals for "phony moralizing" about torture, Cheney's seeming inability to notice the ironies in his own language led him to say this: President Obama's decision "to completely rule out enhanced interrogation techniques...is recklessness cloaked in righteousness." To paraphrase one of the wisest people who ever lived, he who cannot see the stick in his own eye tends to complain loudly about the mote in someone else's.

Apart from condemning the new Administration's refusal to use "enhanced interrogation techniques", the other half of Cheney's speech dredged up the dread of further terrorist catastrophe that was widespread after 9/11 and warned of even worse future attacks which he implied were more likely because of President Obama's policies. This was the strategy of his speech: Recreate fear of an external enemy which he accused the present administration of taking lightly, in part to distract his listeners from the self-inflicted and widely acknowledged disasters of his own administration. Cheney even had the temerity to suggest that having a public debate about torture would exhibit "weakness and opportunity" to terrorists thinking of attacking again. In other words, free democratic discussion must be stopped, because it might get us killed. This is a man whose sensibility seems so drenched in fear of our enemies that he believes it justifies every bloody method wreaked upon them. It is a philosophy that sacrifices the principles he professes to defend in order, supposedly, to protect them. As one American military officer famously said in Vietnam, "We destroyed the village in order to save it."

But the macabre heart of Cheney's speech was this: "You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States...When just a single clue that goes unlearned…one lead that goes unpursued…can bring on catastrophe -- it's no time for splitting differences. " In other words: Obama won't torture, so he will cause a nuclear attack on an American city. This speech must therefore be recognized for what it is: the single most demagogic political attack on an American president, by another American political leader, in living memory. That its central charge was insinuated and not directly stated does not dilute its malice. Cheney did not have the courage frontally to accuse the president of what he argued would be the consequences of the president's actions. But cowardice is often found in those who predicate their arguments on fear and loathing.

The mainstream news media seem oblivious to these back alley methods of Dick Cheney's political rhetoric, so mesmerized do they appear to be by his buttoned-down corporate style. But make no mistake about it: The former vice president realizes that the new president is well along in forging an entirely different public consensus about how the United States should conduct itself in the world. It isn't clear if the fear-ridden, hostility-feeding language which Cheney deploys arises from his own need for self-justification, or whether it may be part of a deliberate strategy by him and his acolytes in the conservative movement to try to reignite the recriminations and hostilities that surged back and forth through our political debates when he was in office. But whatever the reason, Cheney's belligerent speech today raises the stakes for those who would prefer to have America steered by the rationality and composure of President Obama's approach to the risks and threats facing the United States. The bile aimed at Barack Obama by Dick Cheney, and the rancor against him that it may further stir on the right, should make clear to all those who prefer a stable new course for our country that the president deserves our support as never before. We have to make the choice we made last November again, and again -- because those who lost have not conceded.