Jackson Hole News

Cheney Watch

Shame of Wyoming

By Gil Brady, 6-26-07

Vice-President Dick Cheney, courtesy of the O.V.P

A freely available OPINION
Via The Cowboy Picayune Sunny-Times Editorial Board

“Great liars are also great magicians,” Hitler once boasted in cold blood while making Jews vanish by the millions.

“Liars are always most disposed to swear,” the Italian dramatist Vittorio Alfieri swore between acts.

“Liars share with those they deceive the desire not to be deceived,” the Swedish philosopher Sissela Bok proffered before fading into obscurity.

“Go f*ck yourself,” Vice-President Dick Cheney, Wyoming’s infamous son, told Patrick Leahy, the distinguished senator from Vermont, after getting the third-degree over Halliburton’s magical sole-source contracts in Iraq during a Congressional photo-op in 2004.

In true form, the exchange occurred on the same day the Senate passed legislation described as the “Defense of Decency Act” by 99 to 1.

Last week, our famously potty-mouthed Veep, a self-described disestablishmentarian and un-checkable 4th branch of government, who is himself a heartbeat away from resigning on principal, threatened to close down an office of the National Archives rather than comply with an executive order.

An executive order from his boss in the Oval Office, mind you, to provide data on those documents his office declassifies or classifies.

Maybe, I haven’t lived in Wyoming long enough to have accrued the nativist cred to say this? But then again, maybe I have lived long enough to know when to call BS on someone who is flat out full of baloney.

You see, I think I’ve figured Cheney out.

Why else would someone as smart as the Veep persist in ruining the nation and losing his big gamble in Iraq, not to mention leaving his Republican party in shambles, unless the whole messy grift was about money—lots and lots of money?

Now, if you’re Richard Cohen, The Washington Post’s most creative thinker when it comes to future alternative histories on the electorate, you don’t discuss such ungentlemanly possibilities.

Cohen this week laid out a road map for GOP presidential hopefuls in 2008 based on painting anti-war Democrats as pussies. Gee, where have we seen this kind of tar and feather the doves as sissies before? 

Oh yeah, right, in 2004. The election where the White House deployed surrogate Swifties to smear a man with more military honors than W.’s or Cheney’s combined showboating as a make-believe flyboy or too great a marksman to hit ducks while hunting.

By single-handedly pushing the nation into its current perilous divide, the proud Vietnam slacker and five-time draft dodger, according to The Washington Post again, have assured a near universal mistrust in government and cynicism across the political spectrum.

More importantly, if you haven’t noticed, this twice winning ticket, worshipped now by 30% of Americans and falling, still have very neatly avoided, through stonewalling and indifference, any congressional prying into what the hell it is they are doing, exactly, in this suicide mission of their choosing for others.

To date, neither the president nor vice-president could be objectively accused of managing, much less serving their fellow fighting countrymen very well in their wars and deployments and crappy hospitals without end.

So why not keep their oily hustles and creepy skullduggeries under lock and key?

Cheney himself has such obvious low regard for the office he occupies—other than using it as a beard and foil to advance his own sketchy personal ambitions—that he has now re-defined the Office of the Vice-President of the United States of America as above the checks and balances of the U.S. Constitution and federal statutes.

Interestingly, this same office was once viewed as so sacrosanct that Spiro Agnew, a wartime vice-president under Nixon, had the decency to resign from it after serving 4 years rather than blacken it any further with his corrupt conduct for taking bribes while in office.

Are we to believe Cheney is cleaner than Agnew?

That wasn’t a fair question. That was a rhetorical indictment, but not one without precedent.

Two years ago, on the eve of Scooter Libby’s indictment, I posed to the vice-president what I thought was a very fair question.

In those days, I was reporting for that great intellectual periodical Planet Jackson Hole and decided to play maverick ombudsman by calling up the O.V.P in Washington, D.C.

Little did I know, my efforts would take almost three weeks for an official reply. Apparently, faster than a Sen. Leahy-issued, “No, ahmmm! Go efff yourself, Mr. Vice-President” subpoena. 

Finally, during “Leak Week,” I got to pop my big question to one of Cheney’s pr flacks: “Can the vice-president say with confidence to his constituents back in Jackson that the Valerie Plame leak ends with Scooter Libby?”

By way of e-mail, a former spokeswoman for the Veep sent the following answer:

“Mr. Libby has informed me that he is resigning to fight the charges brought against him,” Cheney allegedly wrote. “I have accepted his decision with deep regret. Scooter Libby is one of the most capable and talented individuals I have ever known. He has given many years of his life to public service and has served our nation tirelessly and with great distinction…Because this is a pending legal proceeding, in fairness to all those involved, it would be inappropriate for me to comment on the charges or on any facts relating to the proceeding.”

Apparently, with his recent blowing off of an on-site National Archives’ inspection on how well-fed Cheney keeps his cloistered demons, I’m not the only one the Veep feels he can tell to go “bleep” themselves.

But can the Bleep, er...the Veep, be now even more rightly asked: By not explaining your now proven involvement in the outing of former CIA officer Valerie Plame is your silence, Mr. Vice-President, tantamount to avoiding having to lie or implicate yourself in a crime?

Maybe, Cheney thinks with his Bushwhacked packed “see no evil, hear no evil” Supreme Court, it’s Hammer time and we “can’t touch this!”

But let’s not let the tap dancing, silver-tongued Galahad of Machiavellian unholies off that easy. Not this time while both history and the future hang in the balance.

What I am beginning to understand is something that the Beltway pundits have long misunderstood: Cheney’s pathological need for secrecy and disdain for the meddling press has its roots right here in the inequitable, mind your own business, business as usual “Equality state”.

Wyoming’s political class, despite their lame protests to the contrary, have since as far back as the great cattle baron scandals and Chinese labor massacres long disdained transparency and openness in government. And they have fought accountability and equality under the law, tooth and nail, while bypassing open meeting laws, legislative transparency over communications with lobbyists and the timely release of public records as recently as last year.

Because of that innate and long-held cultural disrespect for the public’s constitutional right to know, Wyoming is among the worst offenders of open government and accountability in the nation—breeding politicians who are among the worst offenders of open government and accountability in all the land.

In a recent letter to the New York Times, Marc Joseph, a professor of American philosophy and political theory at Mills College, wrote, “(I)n a democracy power is held by and exercised on behalf of the people, but ironically, it is for precisely this reason that in a democratic society there is rule by law,...(D)espite all those nice things (the White House) has said about fostering democracy abroad, the administration’s real position is that Caesar’s word is law.”

So, should we cut the cowboy Veep of Bleep some slack for his down home, Nixonian fetish to hide from public view what it is he’s doing while he’s apparently flushing democracy and the country down the tubes?

No. Not before breaking his chops with one more undignified but very fair question.

If I understand Cheney’s legal argument correctly, he claims to be a creature of neither the executive or legislative branches of government. His rationale, if that word can cover so elastic of an obfuscation, is based on President Bush’s executive order, granting co-equal powers to Cheney to do with intelligence matters what Cheney sees fit, and the Veep’s status as prez of the Senate.

As we’ve long-suspected, Cheney’s bi-polar, quasi-constitutional hallucination now officially puts him where he properly belongs: in deep, outer space as an orbiting moonbat of the federal government.

Nevertheless, if the Office of the Vice-President is the great sunless repository of highly classified material, because the president couldn’t be bothered with digesting or filing it all, then is the vice-president or the president to blame for ignoring the repeated warnings of their subordinates, such as Richard Clarke, to harden the homeland as an imminent attack loomed in the months preceding 9/11?

Those in high-office who compulsively seek to play hide the ball always run the risk of a bigger and more uncontrollable headache: The public’s boundless imagination, which is always greater than the secrets bureaucrats tally in vein to hide.

Secrecy points to Cheney as being the big 9/11 ball dropper.

Full disclosure…well? Who even knows what that is anymore? That’s up to the historians, whether Cheney gives them a peek at whatever nasties he’s hiding or not.

Uncle Dick probably has less reason than “the Company” to give up his aching, big blue family jewels, which if you think about it are really all our family jewels, no matter how ugly they are. Never mind what the jewel-hoarders think.

If there’s any nobility of spirit left in Uncle Dick, the vice-president will fall on his sword, resign and take the rap for his own health and the health of the country. Less people blame his current undemocratic bad manners on his upbringing.

For a different point-of-view on the Cowboy state’s “favorite son”, click here to read this week’s editorial in Wyoming’s only statewide newspaper.

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