Cheney: evil power behind the throne

“As chief of the black branch, I am not answerable to either the executive or legislative branch!”

Dick Cheney “speaking” in “Doonesbury” by Garry Trudeau

Even the most dim-witted Republican must realize by now that America is ruled today by the evil duopoly of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. They have been an unmitigated disaster.

As for Cheney, he is the éminence grise, the power behind the throne, the dangerous Svengali of the seven-year executive office nightmare.

The Cheney indictment contains includes:

• He engineered the unilateral, unnecessary and endless war in Iraq, what Bush now calls a “war on terror.” (The president no longer has credibility about anything.)

• Cheney pushed torture against all decent and humane instincts of the American people. Water-boarding? Cheney: a “dunk in the water” is a “no-brainer.”

• He declares that prisoners have no Geneva Convention rights.

• He has pushed government secrecy to paranoid lengths, rejecting oversight by Congress and the press.

• He expanded presidential and vice-presidential power to unconstitutional lengths.

• He urged his former aide, Scooter Libby, to break the law by outing a CIA agent whose husband had exposed one pretext for the war.

• Cheney proclaims himself above the law.

Unindictable Cheney offenses are also numerous. He has a hubris beyond stunning. He is a Mafia don. A Machiavellian. Schemer. Sinister. A dark influence on administration policies. He dominates a weak president. Even White House staffers call him Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist for the dummy Charlie McCarthy.

Cheney is a belligerent ideologue. He sneers. He scowls. He snarls from the top of the greasy pole, a pole he ascended when he nominated himself as vice president in 2000. He speaks of opponents with venom. He runs roughshod over personnel.

Cheney is behind some of the many environmental crimes of the administration. He undermined Christine Whitman, Bush’s first head of the Environmenal Protection Agency, and drove her to resign. He was behind the lifting of restrictions on snowmobiles in national parks in his zeal to emphasize recreational use over conservation. He intervened to reverse a government policy of saving a fish species in Oregon’s Klamath River Basin.

In a devastating four-part series on Cheney in the Washington Post, reporters Jo Becker and Barton Gellman wrote: “The Klamath case is one of many in which the vice president took a decisive role to undercut long-standing environmental regulations for the benefit of business.”

He pushed tax cuts for the wealthy beyond the wishes of the plutocratic Bush. Cheney muscled Cabinet rivals and even Alan Greenspan, then Fed chairman. Cheney shapes energy policies--in secret. He installed himself as “president of Corporate America,” as Eleanor Clift of Newsweek phrased it.

Cheney issues threats to Iran while urging Bush to take military action. In effect, Cheney says to Iran: “You’re next.”

Bush appoints reactionaries to the Supreme Court and other federal judges but behind those choices is often a list drawn up by Cheney. He refuses to allow Guantánamo to be closed. He played a dominant role in the administration’s campaign to deny global warming.

Halliburton, military contractor and war profiteer, a firm which Cheney once headed, got millions in no-bid contracts in Iraq because of Cheney’s baleful influence.

Hendrix Hertzberg recently wrote in New Yorker about Cheney: “treacherous toward colleagues, coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy and ignorant president he serves, contemptuous of public opinion and dismissive, not only of international law, but of the very Constitution.”

As a member of a joint congressional committee investigating the Iran-Contra scandal 20 years ago, Cheney praised the reprehensible Oliver North as “the most effective and impressive witness this committee has heard.”

William R. Pitt, columnist for the online Truthout, writes of Cheney: he “had the fire-eating gall, the awe-inspiring temerity, the light-bending arrogance, to put forth the argument…that the office of the vice president is not actually part of the executive branch of the federal government and is therefore not required to give any papers to anyone.”

A Supreme Court ruling in the Nixon tapes case of 1974 made it clear that even the president is not above the law. But Cheney blithely ignores such trivial matters. No surprise. Cheney is the guy who got five deferments during the Vietnam War and explained that he had other priorities.

Cheney and Bush have destroyed the essence of what it means to be an American. No wonder much of the world hates America.