The Idiot

OK, let's discuss Dick Cheney.

Why?

He's been in the news lately what with his Chief of Stafff getting indicted on five counts of perjury, stories out of class about a rift with the Dubya - kind of like one of those movies where the ventriloquist's dummy turns on its master I guess - and his rather unseemly determination to have torture ratified by Congress.

But here's another thing you may not know about Cheney: he's a fucking idiot.

I mean literally, a fucking idiot. As in, he fucks - has two daughters - and he is an idiot. A five alarm shitstorm of a human being. A walking disaster engine who's never made a good call in his entire life. A fool. A putz. A dumkopft. A clown. In my country we say... Stupid twat.

You're surprised. I know you are. You see, like everyone else you thought that Dick Cheney, though evil, was a smart guy. Competent. Controlled. On it. The wise man in the WH. That way he speaks low, reeling off facts and figures, that kind of low-key corporate mandarin schtick he has down to a tee just reeks of mastery and knowledge. And also the fact that so many of the cyborg race we call news presenters go around saying how damn smart the guy is.

OK.

The moment when I first realized Cheney was a power tool was when I watched last year's vice Presidential debate. During that hour of fascinating TV - like a late Beckett play in which both participants were seated behind a table as if on a date, only visible Davros-style from the waist up they never once looked each other in the eye - Cheney did his schtick. He talked low, reeling off facts and figures, the odd dispassionate nugget of - utterly crazed - analysis like he was chairing a board to evaluate Halliburton's quarterly profits. Very impressive. You could see why he did so well on the corporate circuit. You could also see why he lost those corporations so much money. Because everything Cheney said was nonsense. Not the kind of you have to go look it up and check it nonsense but instantly demonstrable nonsense. The kind of stuff you wouldn't take into a high school debate because the smart, worthy class snot across the podium from you would have you sliced-and-diced in half a minute of rebuttals.

Cheney reminded me of that kid - we all know him - you were at school with. The one who ostentatiously read the Financial times in break, he had a portfolio of phantom stocks he was following, a row of fountain pens and ballpoints clipped into his shirt pocket and he was the kind of creepy unctious one who tried to strike up conversation with the parents - I mean, fathers - about City deregualtion while the rest of you were divebombing into the wave machine at 12th birthday parties.

Precocious, creepy, entirely full of shit: that was what the adult Dick Cheney made me think of.

But see, here's the thing: the way someone wishes to be seen - lowkey, hardnosed corporate hand - is just that. The way they want things to be. What matters is the demonstrable truth. And that can be measured very clearly and effectively by a man's actions and the consequences.

So let's measure Dick:

In 1959, Tom Stroock, a Republican politician-businessman in Casper, Wyoming, got Cheney, then a senior at Natrona County High School, a scholarship to Yale. "He spent his time partying with guys who loved football," recalls one college friend. "His idea was, you didn't need to master the material," says another. "He passed one psych course without attending class or studying, and he was proud of that. But there are some things you can't bluff." Cheney flunked Yale after one year.

Then Vietnam came and the draft. Although he would later show great willingness to send other people into combat, Cheney himself was not so keen. He enrolled in Casper
Community College; then he went to the University of Wyoming. That kept
him out of the draft until August 7th, 1964, when Congress initiated conscription in the armed forces. Three weeks later, Cheney married Lynne Vincent, his high school girlfriend, earning him another deferment. On October 26th, 1965, the Selective Service announced
that childless married men no longer would be exempted from having to
fight for their country. : so nine months and two days later, the first of
Cheney's two daughters, Elizabeth, was born. Between 1963 and 1966, Cheney received five deferments by which point he was 26 and no longer eligible for the draft. Nice.

In 1974, Cheney was an assistant to the then White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld. They pushed President Ford to fire Defense Secretary James Schlesinger, ditch Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger too. Rumsfeld got secretary of defense, Cheney became chief of staff to the president. As the 1976 election approached, Rumsfeld and Cheney used the influence they'd wrested for themselves to persuade Ford to scuttle the Salt II treaty on nuclear-arms control. The move helped Ford stave off Reagan's challenge for the party's nomination -- but it delivered the GOP to the New Right. In the presidential election, Jimmy Carter defeated Ford by 2 million votes. In the aftermath of the defeat, Robert Novack wrote [see how these names keep recurring? It's like a Groundhog Day of sleaze & treachery] - "White House Chief of Staff Richard Cheney . . . is blamed by Ford insiders for a succession of campaign blunders." Ford said that listening to Cheney's advice was "the biggest political mistake of my life."

In 1978, Cheney became a Congressman. Over the next decade, his voting record would suck big ones. Noted, even in the Reagan era, for being especially unpleasant - Cheney gave the kind of votes you just don't have to do unless you're a real jerk: In 1986, he was one of only twenty-one members of the House to oppose the Safe Drinking Water Act. He fought
efforts to clean up hazardous waste and backed tax breaks for energy corporations. He repeatedly voted against funding for the Veterans Administration. He opposed extending the Civil Rights Act. He opposed the release of Nelson Mandela from jail in South Africa. And he voted for cop-killer bullets.

Sweet.

In 1988 Cheney became Secretary of Defence. He pushed to turn many military duties over to private companies and began moving "defense intellectuals" with no military
experience into key posts at the Pentagon.

Convinced that the fall of the Berlin Wall was a complex ruse on behalf of the Soviets, he urged the 1st President Bush not to believe it.

Turning his attention to combat issues in the 1st Gulf War, he made tactical suggestions: "Having figured out that General Schwarkopf was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being "as bad as it could possibly be... But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn't die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney's staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait." In 1992, Cheney's undersecreatry, Paul Wolfowitz turned out a forty-page report titled "Defense Planning Guidance," arguing that historic allies should be demoted to the status of U.S. satellites, and that the modernization of India and China should be treated as a threat, as should the democratization of Russia. It was nothing less than a blueprint for worldwide
domination, and Cheney loved it. He maneuvered to have the president adopt it as doctrine, but the elder Bush, recognizing that the proposals were not only foolish but dangerous, rejected them.

After Bill Clinton became President, Cheney was made CEO of Halliburton where his principal action was his acquisition of a subsidiary called Dresser Industries. Dresser struck lucrative deals with Saddam Hussein; Halliburton did business with Muammar el-Qaddafi
and the ayatollahs of Iran. By the time Cheney left in 2000,
Halliburton's stock was near an all-time high of fifty-four dollars a
share. Then it turned out that Dresser had saddled Halliburton with
asbestos lawsuits that could cost the company millions, and the stock
plummeted to barely ten dollars a share. Even with the bounce
Halliburton stock has received from the war, an investor who put
$100,000 into the company just before Cheney became vice president would
have less than $60,000 today. Cheney continues to receive $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton.

In 2000, Cheney became Vice President. In Spring 2001 he was especially appointed by the President to lead the Federal anti-Terrorism iniative: on September 11th America endured the worst terrorist attack in its history.

Cheney then became the driving force for war with Iraq. In March 2002, he visited nine Arab and Muslim countries six months after the 9/11 attacks to triumphantly enlist them in the cause of "taking out" Saddam Hussein. Not a single country Cheney visited provided troops -- including staunch American allies in Jordan and Turkey -- and almost all refused to let their territory be used for the attack.

Cheney's office became the powerhouse for the White House Iraq Group, constructing and shaping the case for war. It's now under Federal Investigation. Decisions emanating from Cheney's office have damaged the President so badly, they've placed his entire political programme in mortal danger. Which maybe why the rumours they're no longer speaking to each other are true.

So - Dick Cheney, helluva guy.

As this man pointed out in a wonderful article that I've unapologetically pillaged for the above - "The ever-canny Ronald Reagan was the only Republican president since Eisenhower who managed to serve two full terms. He is also the only one not to have appointed Dick Cheney to office." That was written before the election but I have to say it's by no means clear to me that Dubya's got the spleen to make it through the wheels-popping-off-in-a-shitstorm-of-your-own-making that the next three years will unquestionably be - so the record's still out there.

Dick Cheney may well prove to be the guy who deep-sixed every single Republican administration he was part of.

So please, as time moves on and more news comes out, re-evaluate Vice President Cheney. No decision he made that's turned out well. No financial deal he assisted that hasn't turned to shit. No administration he's been part of that has not capsized. The guy's walking bad news. A mobile error factory. A corpulent waddling fool, so corrupt even his own body is rebelling against him (something like 9 heart attacks and an aneurysm on each knee - something of a medical rarity: but rumour has it, he bears a large penis). He has hideous decision-making capabilities and an instinct that reeks. A smarmy, blundering clod turned into a world powerhouse clusterfuck.

Like I said:

Guy's a fucking idiot.