There's no shortage of people who'll tell you that Richard Nixon was, but there's also no shortage of people who don't know what they're talking about. For all of Nixon's malfeasance, he was continually frustrated by the bureaucracy and ultimately betrayed by his own co-conspirators.
That wasn't true of Cheney. Having learned at the feet of his mentor, the master of bureaucratic infighting, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney bent not only the bureaucracy, but even the Cabinet and the President of the United States to his will throughout the first Bush term. Anyone who's interested in seeing multiple examples of how he did this should read Barton Gellman's invaluable book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency.
It was only in Bush's second term; when the unmitigated disaster of Iraq had become clear, the Valarie Plame scandal that resulted in Scooter Libby's indictment and conviction, and the 2006 off-year elections that ended 12 years of Republican rule in Congress, that the vice president's influence waned supplanted by that of Condoleeza Rice, Josh Bolten and, finally, Bob Gates. In his recent memoir, Cheney himself tells of a National Security Council meeting regarding the possibility of a preventative strike on Iran. The vice president was the only official present in favour of one.
That hasn't stopped Dick from being an all-around asshole, though. If he reminds me of anyone, it's former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau in his retirement. Like Trudeau, Cheney believes that there's really one guy qualified to hold and exercise power, which would be him. And like Trudeau, Cheney won't shut the fuck up about it.
However, for the last four years, Cheney focused himself on undermining the Democrats generally and the Obama Administration, in particular.
That's changing. Now he's focusing his fire on the 2008 ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Now, it's an open secret that Cheney and McCain have a longstanding hatred for each other. And, to be fair, Cheney's remarks are much more of a shot against McCain's judgement than they are against Palin. But most folks aren't going to see it that way, and the last few days have shown that they haven't.
Cheney's attempt to sew himself to President Ford's legacy is also worthy of comment. Firstly, as then-White House Chief of Staff, Cheney wasn't principally responsible for the 1976 campaign, James Baker was. The selection of Bob Dole after Nelson Rockefeller was dumped from ticket was a campaign decision, not a White House one. And that's especially true given the very real possibility of a brokered convention resulting from Reagan's challenge for the nomination. We also now know that Ford told both Bob Woodward and Tom DeFrank that he thought that Cheney and Don Rumsfeld had lost their fucking minds in the Bush Administration.
His criticism of Palin is odd, as well. If he had said that Governor Palin was a whiny retard, consumed with identity politics and who shouldn't even be allowed in the White House as a goddamned tourist, most reasonable people would have agreed with him. Instead, he focused on her readiness to be president.
I'll grant you that anyone who got higher than a C in high school civics was more prepared for tthe presidency than Sarah Palin. As a matter of fact, Lisa Ann is more ready to be president than Palin was or is.
But the Republican litmus test is usually "executive experience," and that's something that Dick Cheney himself was profoundly lacking in. He went into government almost immediately after college. His positions as White House Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense were administrative, policy was decided at a higher pay grade than his, especially in the Ford and first Bush Administrations. He was the first and only member of the congressional leadership that I'm aware of who held Congress in open contempt. Cheney didn't actually run anything until he went to Halliburton when he was 54 years old.
The second I saw Cheney's remarks on Sunday morning, I know the real fun was going to start. McCain blew Cheney off rather gracefully and with no shortage of humour on Monday morning. But Palin is famous for her inability to keep her mouth shut, and for the rather unorthodox things that come out of it when open.
On Monday night, she unloaded.
That interview is nothing short of hilarious. Neither of those broads could have been more delusional if they were stuffed full of magic mushrooms and horse tranquilizer.
Let's get one thing straight right off the top. Sarah Palin came by her "86-87% approval rating" as governor the old-fashioned way - she fucking bought it. In her first year in office, she jacked up the royalty the state takes from the oil companies and gave every man woman and child in the state $1,300. A family of four got $5,200 in free money from Sarah Palin's "spreading the wealth around." Given that, it's sort of an indictment that her approval wasn't at 115%.
Moreover, after the 2008 campaign, she couldn't quit as governor - for reasons that no one fluent in the English language can understand to this day - fast enough. Actually, that's not true. She wanted the fast, easy money that only the freakshows of reality TV and Fox News can bring.
The Van Sustern interview reinforced the single most prominent quality of Palin: her utter denial of personal responsibility for anything. That was something I first noticed in her mostly unreadable book It's All Nicole Wallace's Fucking Fault, but it's a theme that she hasn't let up on and one that her Fox cohorts continually enable. Remember, this a woman who characterized a query about what newspapers she read as "gotcha question" and therefore Katie Couric's fault. And I actually dare you to find someone more inoffensive in journalism today than Katie fucking Couric.
For a century the GOP portrayed itself as the party of rugged individualism, but they just can't stop embracing self-declared victims of everyone as their standard-bearers. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan never pissed and moaned in public about the "lamestream media." But the overwhelming majority of modern conservatives actually want to present themselves as a put-upon underclass while at the same time saying that they're the only ones capable of leadership. While she didn't invent it, Palin embodies that.
Far be it from Greta to break the former governor of her delusions. She cites polling from before the collapse of Lehman Brothers that's supposed to show how entirely made of awesome Sarah is. But those numbers are misleading.
First, the "Celebrity" ad - released just before the Democratic convention - softened Obama's numbers, as even the Obama campaign admitted after the election. It was the only thing that McCain did to panic them throughout the entire campaign, and it denied them a convention bounce. It was even worse because Obama's "Greek pillars in a fucking football stadium" played directly into the narrative of "Celebrity."
Second, Palin energized the Democrats every bit as much as she did the Republicans. Campaign manager David Plouffe details that in his book The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory. Much was made of the fact that the McCain campaign raised some $3 million within 24 hours of Palin's convention speech. Plouffe revealed that Obama raised just as much from liberals that hated her, especially liberal women. No one healed the hurt liberal chicks suffered from Hillary Clinton's loss quite like Sarah Palin.
Third, she committed the cardinal sin or any vice presidential candidate: she made herself the story. Palin can bitch all she wants about the "lamestream media," but it was her singular determination to be unprepared for the Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric interviews that changed the narrative from her being an "exciting Maverick" to someone that might actually be a moron.
Van Sustren makes the snide and incredibly counter-productive assertion that Cheney "isn't afraid to say things about the women," citing his "little slap at Condolezza Rice." Instead of hitting back on that, Palin lets it reinforce her "Poor, poor Sarah: Victim of sexism" narrative.
Look, if women want to play the "defenseless little girl" who can't take a "little slap" victim role, maybe it's better that they stay out of politics entirely. You don't achieve equality by changing the rules of the game to better suit your strengths. You change your strengths to better suit the rules of the fucking game. I'm annoyed beyond words when liberal women take that manipulative route, but I actually despise it when conservatives do it. To quote Palin herself, she should "man up" or shut the the fuck up. Nothing is more disgusting than conservative victimology.
And you know what? If you want to play the victim yourself while preaching rugged individualism for everyone else, you're a hypocritical cunt, regardless of your gender. For the last four years, I've listened to Republican assholes decrying "sexism," even though they were often the same people who made sixteen years worth of jokes about Hillary Clinton, and sometimes even Chelsea.
The "poor, put-upon Sarah" act is further undermined by her twice mentioning Cheney's "misfires," a half-clever reference to his blowing giant holes into Harry Whittington. To my mind, that almost equalled Palin's deeply offensive and wildly stupid "blood libel" spectacle after the Gabby Giffords shooting in it's sleaziness. You either get to play the victim or go for the easy shot to the balls, but you don't get to do both.
Everybody who knows anything about Dick Cheney knows that he isn't a sexist, he's a misanthropist. To know love requires having a heart, and spent the better part of a year being plugged into a wall like a friggin' smart car precisely because he didn't have one. After leaving office, Cheney wouldn't keep quiet about his disagreements with the president he was supposed to loyally serve. Why in the fuck does anyone think he wouldn't give a half-wit like Sarah Palin "a little slap?"
Palin failed miserably at re-branding herself as the face of the movement when she had a very clear shot at doing so. She could've taken a year or two to have learned something about the issues and become a serious spokesperson for the cause. Instead, she went for the easy money and became a more fuckable Snooki instead. And even that glory is fleeting. She's increasingly marginalized in the Tea Party and you don't even see her on Fox News as much as you used to.
Cheney's got bigger plans. He was around for the fall and resurrection of Richard Nixon, and I think he has something similar in mind. He knows that after pulling off the almost impossible task of being less popular than George W. Bush, he won't make many gains in popular esteem. But he very much can re-invent himself as a power within the party.He's working with the Romney's vice-presidential selection team for that very reason. If Romney wins, the reasoning goes, Cheney might find himself a consigliere of sorts in a Romney White House.
But even there, Cheney will fail in the eyes of history. Nixon thought much bigger than that. After his resignation, he picked a very few issues - all related to foreign policy - that he chose to care about and work with any president that would listen on them, regardless of party. It's only in the last few months that we've learned just how close Nixon had become to Bill Clinton.
Nixon lived for just shy of twenty years after resigning. There's little chance that Cheney will. It's actually a shame that Cheney is devoting the time left to him to public partisan politics instead of doing what Nixon did, furthering issues that he cares about. Very few people know more about the mechanical operation of the executive branch than Dick Cheney does. He could be an invaluable resource to future presidents of both parties, but he's almost adamantly insisting on being a failed political hack.
In that, he and Sarah Palin aren't all that different.
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