I love this take on Dick Cheney by Josh Marshall:
This [Cheney] is someone who not only organized and seemingly directed a policy of state-sponsored torture. He did it in large part to get people to admit to crankish conspiracy theories he got taken in by by a crew of think-tank jockeys in DC whose theories most even half way sensible people treated as punch lines of jokes. So it’s Torquemada or 1984 but only after getting rescripted by Mel Brooks.
This is an extremely gullible man who has just come off being the driving ideological force in an administration that most people can already see produced more fiascos and titanic, self-inflicted goofs than possibly any in our entire history. By any standard the guy is a monumental failure — and not one whose mistakes stem in some Lyndon Johnson fashion from tragic overreach, but just a fool who damaged his country through his own gullibility, paranoia and bad judgment. Whatever else you can say about the Cheney story it ain’t Shakespearean.
Investigative reports have shown that Dick Cheney was obsessed with Iraq. It was reported in Ron Suskind’s One Percent Doctrine that Cheney had CIA resources chasing down some crackpot link between Saddam Hussein and the 1993 WTC bombing, while ignoring real human intelligence that showed there was no WMD program in Iraq. Cheney’s obsession led him to trust the wrong people, like Ahmad Chalabi and his dishonest, alcoholic cousin Curveball. We went to war based on these bogus allegations and many people have died as a result.
One reason that Josh’s take resonated so strongly with me is the psychological aspect of the observation. I was taught that what you say and do is a reflection of what you’re thinking, and if you say something a lot it’s because you’re unsure about it. In other words, you don’t have to tell everyone you are something, you just are. Only insecure people talk about how smart they are, how rich they are or how good-looking they are. For example, you’ll never see this in an interview with Bill Gates:
Gates: I’m very rich. Have you noticed how rich I am? I’m super-duper rich.
Cheney was telling us in his dishonest speech, that he’s uncertain about the course of action he took. He knows he did things wrong, and he’s using a lot of bluster to cover it. In fact, he was still pushing the Iraq-al Qaida link, years after it’s been debunked. His dishonest rhetoric like “we only waterboarded 3 detainees” is some pretty clever parsing, but we know a whole range of torture techniques were used on prisoners, some of whom were victims of mistaken identity.
Cheney is a private citizen now, and he has every right to criticize the current government. I don’t buy into this B.S. that ex-politicians have to put up and shut up. Cheney needs to be judged not only by what he’s saying, but what he’s not saying.