Besides which, Burr was totally awesome.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wait a sec, he’s human? This changes everything!

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”.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Comment by Gary Ruppert — June 3, 2007 @ 10:03 am

P.S. Who’s peg?

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………..

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.