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 Nixon’s HeirPosted on Mar 26, 2008By Marie Cocco WASHINGTON—Some days, there’s just no forgetting that Dick Cheney is still the vice president of the United States. We’ve had a few of these recently, with Cheney traveling to Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East on what might be called a goodwill mission, if the person making the trip were not Dick Cheney. Many startling comments tumbled from the vice president’s lips. His verbal jousting with ABC’s Martha Raddatz over the recent National Intelligence Estimate conclusion that Iran had stopped trying to build a nuclear weapon around 2003 is one scary discussion. Examining this back-and-forth, you cannot help but conclude that Cheney does not put much stock in the NIE, and considers there to be little, if any, difference between the ongoing Iranian uranium enrichment program and a weapons program. It is all eerily reminiscent of the lack of distinction Cheney made between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the band of Afghanistan-based terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Of course, Cheney uses the interview to deliver the obligatory shake of his saber in Iran’s direction: “The president has made it clear that our objective is to make certain they do not acquire the capacity to produce nuclear weapons.” Cheney also declared that it didn’t really matter that two-thirds of Americans think the Iraq war wasn’t worth fighting—“So?” the vice president responded. After all, real leaders in a democracy don’t give a hoot about what the people think and don’t follow those cursed opinion polls. Given a second chance a few days later to elaborate on his point, Cheney likened President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. It takes one to know one, sort of. Cheney is the most Nixonian figure in American politics since—well, since Nixon. You could say that he speaks with some authority about that era, marked as it was by abuse of presidential power, an obsession with secrecy and the continuation of a disastrous war in Vietnam that cost thousands of American lives and cleaved the nation into political factions that have never fully reconciled. But it is not the discredited Nixon administration to which Cheney compares the current Bush tenure. He compares it to the brief presidency of the decent Ford. Cheney, who served as Ford’s White House chief of staff, correctly points out that Ford paid a political price for ignoring public opinion and granting Nixon a pardon for his Watergate crimes in the aftermath of Nixon’s resignation. “The country was better off for what Gerry Ford did that day. And 30 years later, everybody recognized it,” Cheney told Raddatz. “I have the same strong conviction” that history will assess the Bush decision to invade and occupy Iraq in a similarly favorable light. In 30 years, Cheney said of Bush, “it will be clear that he made the right decisions.” Some foreign policy scholars already view the Iraq misadventure as the single most costly foreign policy blunder in contemporary American history. Perhaps three decades from now the consensus will be different. But that is not what strikes hard and deep in the jarring, even contemptible analogy that Cheney makes. The Nixon pardon was an entirely political decision, made for purely political reasons, and which cost Ford nothing but political support. No geopolitical catastrophe was set in motion when Ford decided that in order to govern, he had to remove the stain of Watergate from the front pages and the television screens. No historical hindsight is needed to see that, unlike in Iraq, no lives were lost or bodies shattered by the Watergate pardon. No families were ruined emotionally and financially. No civilians were forced to flee their own country, or to become refugees within it. No thousands of prisoners were incarcerated without hope of charge or trial, and none were tortured. Ford unquestionably had the power, as president, to pardon Nixon. No such right exists for Bush’s unconstitutional overreaching in Iraq and in the larger war on terror. No president has the unilateral power to imprison and detain people indefinitely—the Supreme Court already has said so. No president has the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans engaged in communications with people overseas; there was a law against this very sort of thing when Bush began his surveillance program.
In fact, the only similarity between Nixon’s Watergate era and the present one—a similarity Cheney inadvertently drew too well—is the cynicism and dishonesty at the heart of each.
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By msgmi, March 30 at 7:02 pm # IT CAN’T BE ABOUT NATIONAL SECURITY. IT MUST BE ABOUT POWER AND THE NEOCON NEW WORLD ORDER. EACH AND EVERY SPECK OF DISINFORMATION IS EXAMINED FOR USE IN THE ART OF DECEPTION AND IS PRACTICED BY POLITICAL LEADERS WHO HAVE LOST TOUCH WITH THEMSELVES AND PURGED THEIR MORALITY. HISTORY BEARS THEIR NAMES AND HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF.
By joan, March 29 at 11:08 am # Maryyooch had it right: When Ford pardoned Nixon the seeds were laid for corruption by the usual suspects in Watergate who made their way in the current administration to commit crimes with impunity in the 21th Century. The press particularly, The New York Times who laid the ground for the Iraq invasion became part of the administration. The death of the Fourth Estate deserves a funeral.
By mickey, March 28 at 8:20 pm # Expert PuppetryMy intuition continues to tell me that Dick Cheney is the major power in Bush’s entire presidency. Cheney pulls all the strings (hidden behind the curtain of the “vice presidency") and George dances accordingly. The elaborate moves that George has made over the years could not possibly have been devised by him.
By chuck randall, March 28 at 5:29 pm # One should ponder Dick Chaney as the most powerful V.P. in history. One can visual he is the real power behind the throne. While it is not polite to assume the President is really just a stooge for Cheney and others,one wonders WHY Cheney makes energy policy to benefit the OIL industry. His PR trip to Iraq is probably a prelude to an invasion of Iran. He and his buddy Bush still have thier hands on the trigger.
By MARYYOOCH, March 27 at 12:18 pm # MAYBE IF FORD HAD NOT PARDONED NIXON, THIS ADMINISTRATION WOULD NOT HAVE LIED, STOLEN AND DECIEVED SO, SO MUCH. MAYBE KNOWING THAT THEY WOULD DEFINETLY THAT THEY COULD SPEND YEARS IN FEDERAL PRISON, IT MAY HAVE REIGNED THEM IN A BIT MORE. I THINK FORD MADE A HUGE MISTAKE. IT’S JUST GIVING FUTURE ADMINISTRATIONS A BLANK CHECK.
By msgmi, March 27 at 10:06 am # Dick Cheney is unique...and Wall Street with the 30 percenters adore this man whose secretiveness in public office mirrors that of comrade Vladimir Putin. His judgments are not clouded, they are based on thoughtful, clear cut, and incisive reasoning that ‘power’ is king and nothing else matters. So why are people complaining about dick? They voted GW and him back into office after experiencing his ‘power’ for 4 years.
By don knutsen, March 27 at 7:05 am # When interviewed recently and asked what his response was to 75% of the american people being against his policies in the middle east he said “So?”. If our so-called leaders couldn’t care less what the citizens of our nation wants, then how can anyone call that a democracy ? He has wasted tens of billions enriching his cronies and himself starting a war based on blatant lies that has further destabilized a region of the world that hardly needed another push towards chaos. Thumbed his nose at the congress on every occasion and gotten away with it, done away with Habeous Corpus imprisoning hundreds, including american citizens without any chance of their case being heard, advocated torture in our name, on and on. His total desdain for our democracy defines him as the traitor he is to America and yet he is still calling the shots and hasn’t skipped a beat, not caring what anyone else thinks. At what point would such a dangerous individual finally arouse some last vestiges of patriotism in the republican party, to finally see this for what it is, to finally care about america enough to stop this insanity. Apparently that point is never going to come to the modern republican criminal organization.
By bozhidar bob balkas, March 27 at 6:18 am # cheney's commentsit doesn’t surprise me that cheney said, So? to the statemnet that two thirds of amers think the war on iraq was not worth it. but what did he mean when posed feigned quest’n, So? radatz let the oportunity slip by w.o. asking cheney what he meant. it’s not surprising that even experienced media people fall into the trap: a short word does not hide meanings and that a short question may be actually a statement and only h. a semblance of a quest’n. this ruse of ‘asking’ while in fact condemning/intimidating is widespread. perhaps, radatz h. been intimidated and let it go.
By Jim Yell, March 27 at 5:57 am # gangsterismConstructive words from a man who didn’t serve in the military in Vietnam, “because he had better things to do” and a vice president whose contempt for the law and his oath to uphold the law has been made over and over. I doubt it. If Nixon had been made to pay the true cost of his lies to the American people and the laws he broke we would not have had the Bush/Cheney presidency. The gutting of the national treasury, the loss of protection against the most high handed piracy of the business and investment community. If giving Nixon pardon only resulted in loss of Ford’s political support it would not have been much, but by not giving him his due punishment the road lead to Bush/Cheney murder and theft. Add Your Comment |
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Newsroom Carnage Continues at The Washington Post
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